Who this book is for

This book is meant for all virtualization fans, not just the ones who have been playing with Oracle databases or other Oracle applications but just about anyone who wishes to test and create sandboxes, and test their applications and eventually deploy them in production. Oracle has recently won some new customers, so Oracle VM platform is also being deployed in production environments.

But like I said, VM is also meant for the regular virtualization enthusiast who wishes to run and deploy multiple flavors of Operating Systems. You can also create Windows VMs! In the later chapters we will look into the supported OSes and it will surprise you that you can do a lot with Oracle VM platform. Don't expect this book to answer all your problems, it should be treated more as an introductory book where we will test the waters and get you up and running. If you do happen to like this book then I will be tempted to write a more advanced book that will take a deep dive into advanced concepts, but for now let's get you up and running with the basics.

It is also very handy to be a little inclined towards Oracle applications such as databases. I myself have been an Oracle DBA, and knowing a little bit about SQL might help as we might test Oracle jeOS + 11g DB VMs, but it is not a must by any means.

On the whole you will definitely benefit a lot more if you are aware of Linux commands, Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, and so on. To get that information please feel free to dig into Oracle's rich documentation manuals, both in PDF as well as downloadable media sets to run locally at your end.