Oracle VM Server on Lenovo W520 with i7-2860QM and 32GB RAM, 1.5TB RAID

I've been curious about Oracle VM Server and wanted to try it for my own home lab. I've had the VMWare ESXi 5, OpenVZ, as well as Xen but not the Xen-based Oracle VM Server.

So I downloaded Oracle VM Server 3.0.3 (and a few weeks later upgraded to v3.1.1) and the initial experience was quite pleasant and the whole thing was easy to install. I've also installed the Oracle VM Manager 3.1.1 and the v3.1.1 in general is night and day compared to 3.0.3 (no silly "refresh" thingy).
You'll have to use Oracle 11g database and also if you use the Express version you can't convert it to the full version.

A couple of high-level observations:

• I'm using Lenovo W520 with i7-2860QM and 32GB RAM as well as Seagate XT Momentus 750GB x 2 (Intel soft-Raid). Everything went smoothly, unlike the newest Ubuntu 12.04 distribution who failed at everything and was just in general buggy.
• I could not find an option to do a snapshot from the GUI like I did in VSphere. There is a "Clone" option though. I haven't tested this on a live Oracle database
• If I want to export the virtual machine .img files is done with qemu. Nothing in the GUI.

So, what's the benefit of using Oracle VM Server compared to VMWare?

• Well, it's XEN-based and it's free
• There's a bunch pre-built Oracle templates such as Oracle Enterprise Linux, PeopleSoft, 11g, etc. With VMWare
• The overall licensing is cheaper for Oracle Database. There is a price difference if you use Oracle database server and your virtual machine uses VMWare.

A few screenshots for your viewing pleasure: