Oracle VM Management

We'll begin this chapter by looking at the meaty aspects of the Oracle VM Manager and will explore it's management aspects.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Getting started with the Oracle VM Manager
• Managing Servers and Server Pools
• Managing Oracle VM Server repository
• Users and Groups management
• Backing up or Restoring Oracle VM Manager
• Enabling security

Before we get to manage the VMs in the Oracle VM Manager, let's take a quick look at the Oracle VM Manager by logging into it.

Getting started with Oracle VM Manager

In this chapter, we will perform the following actions while exploring the Oracle VM Manager:

• Registering an account
• Logging in to Oracle VM Manager
• Create a Server Pool

After we are done with the Oracle VM Manager installation, we will use one of the following links to log on to the Oracle VM Manager:

• Within the local machine: http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVS
• Logging in remotely: http://vmmgr:8888/OVS

Here, vmmgr refers to the host name or IP address of your Oracle VM Manager host.

How to register an account

Registering of an account can be done in several ways. If, during the installation of Oracle VM Manager, we have chosen to configure the default admin account "admin", then we can use this account directly to log on to Oracle's IntraCloud portal we call Oracle VM Manager. We will explain later in detail about the user accounts and why we would need separate accounts for separate roles for fine-grained access control; something that is crucial for security purposes. So let's have a quick look at the three available options:

• Default installation: This option applies if we have performed the default installation ourselves and have gone ahead to create the account ourselves. Here we have the default administrator role.
• Request for account creation: Contacting the administrator of Oracle VM Manager is another way to attain an account with the privileges, such as
  administrator, manager, and user.
• Create yourself: If we need to conduct basic functions of a common user with operator's role such as creating and using virtual machines, or importing resources, we can create a new account ourselves. However, we will need the administrator to assign us the server pools and groups to our account before we can get started. Here by default we are granted a user role. We will talk more about roles later in this chapter.

Now let's go about registering a new account with Oracle VM Manager.

1. Once on the Oracle VM Manager Login page click on the Register link.

2. We are presented with the following screen. We must enter a Username of our choice and a hard-to-crack password twice. Also, we have to fill in our  First Name and Last Name and complete the registration with a valid email address.  Click Next:

3. Next, we need to confirm our account details by clicking on the Confirm button. Now our account will be created and a confirmation message is displayed on the Oracle VM Manager Login screen.

It should be noted that we will need some Server Pools and groups before we can get started. We will have to ask the administrator to assign us access to those pools and groups.

It's time now to login to our newly created account.