In my recent endeavors upgrading to OVM 3 I am questioning the decision to make everything dependent on the VM Manager - and the fact that it's not recommended or easily virtualized (at least on Oracle VM itself) has made things a PITA. I can somewhat see the reasoning behind having it on a separate physical server, but the VM manager becomes the downfall of the whole thing if there's a disaster. If you can't start or stop VM's except from the manager, you are totally helpless until you get a manager up and running again (in the case it goes down), at least with OVM 2 you could do things from the CLI on the server itself. If this is how Oracle wants to do things they could at least create a real client software like Vsphere that could be installed on any machine in a quick scenario.
HA can somewhat alleviate this problem but for those of us running in non-SAN/shared storage environments this is not ideal. The same fundamental benefits of virtualizing should be able to apply to the VM Manager as well.
So, how does everyone else have their VM Manager setup? Has anyone found a good work around or successfully virtualized?