Release: Oracle VM 3.4.2

During Oracle OpenWorld 2016 the company released version 3.4.2 of its enterprise virtualization solution.

Oracle VM is available for both x86 and SPARC based processor architectures and uses the Xen hypervisor technology, supporting Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris guests.

Some of the changes and new features introduced with version 3.4.2:

  • Support for NVM Express (NVMe) devices:
    • Discover NVMe devices and present them to Oracle VM Manager
    • NVMe devices can be used to store virtual machine disks or create storage repositories
  • Extended SCSI functionality available for virtual machines
    • Linux guests can now retrieve vital product data (VPD) page 0x84 information from physical disks if the device itself makes it available.
  • The management domain (dom0) kernel upgraded to Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4 Update 2 (4.1.12-61.1.9)
  • The Xen hypervisor performance and scalability updates:
    • Improved memory allocation
    • Improved aggregate performance
    • Improved performance for Windows, Solaris and Linux guests
    • Improved workload performance
    • Guest disk I/O performance improvements
  • Oracle VM Manager performance enhancements – improved performance under heavy event load
  • Oracle VM Manager Rule for Live Migration – blocks unsupported Live Migration paths
  • Hot memory modification for HVM guests with para-virtualized I/O drivers (PVHVM) – modify the memory allocated to running PVM guests as well as PVHVM guests without a reboot.
  • Package additions and updates
  • Security updates for the embedded components of Oracle VM Server and Oracle VM Manager.