Good day, everyone, and thanks first off for reading my question.

So, I have been Googling and reading oracle documentation for the past couple weeks, and I am just getting more and more confused as to what I need to do, and I would really appreciate some guidance or at least pointing me to what specifically I should be reading.

Situation: We have several 10+ year old Solaris systems, running either Solaris 8 or 10, that hold several mission-critical systems for business operation. These systems are rapidly dying and need to be migrated to a newer system. They are old systems that require very few resources to run, but are critical nonetheless.

So far: We have purchased four T5220 SPARC servers, with 8 cores and 64GB of RAM each. They have arrived, and I am ready to start building the "solution".

The intent: To be able to take system images of these old systems, virtualize them, and have them run on some type of high-availability cluster solution that will keep them operational, even if one (or possibly two) of the four physical T5220 servers failed.

Question: How should I do this? It seemed like a simple idea to start out with. My initial thoughts were to install Solaris 11 on each of the four servers, cluster them together with Oracle cluster, run a Hypervisor of some type as a cluster application (Oracle VM?) on top of the physical cluster, and then drop all of the virtual machines on top of that hypervisor. That way, the virtual machines should run uninterrupted if a cluster node fails.

Is this feasible? Possible? What is the right terminology here so I know what to be researching? I didn't think this would be so hard, but I can't even find a good white paper/document to read - they all seem to be focused to something other than what I'm looking for.

Any suggestions for how I should accomplish this or where I can go to find the information I'm looking for?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

-Lyxix