Oracle unleashed a mass of tech gobbeldygook today with the release of its WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option. If you wanted to write a sensationalist headline, you could go the route of CTOEdge and claim that at its root this means that “Oracle Moves to Eliminate Operating Systems.” This does not in fact seem to me to be what’s going on; what WSVO (that’s not an official abbreviation, but I refuse to keep typing that out over and over again) actually does is integrate a specially tuned JRockit JVM and WebLogic server into an Oracle VM; an Oracle VM is in turn a virtualization environment that runs on top of an actual operating system. Still, Oracle is claiming that the aforementioned special tuning gets results that are “about 33 percent faster in terms of transaction performance” than JRockit running on a standard operating system without a virtualization environment. It seems weird to me that you’d get better performance by adding a layer of virtualization, but Oracle claims that the speed boost comes because the “underlying operating system code has been eliminated,” which may be a quick summary of genuine programming magic or just marketing BS, who knows. (Those last two quotes come from the CTOEdge blog item, which in turn links to an Oracle press release that’s seems to no longer be online.)Rather than some grandiose scheme to eliminate operating systems altogether and get hypervisors running directly on raw hardware like back in the mainframe days, this strikes me as something along the lines of the promises from the combined VMware-SpringSource: A blob of virtualized functionality, including a JVM an app server infrastructure, that you can deploy onto one server, or across several, or into the cloud, as the whim strikes you. It sounds interesting (so long as nothing goes wring that you have to untangle in all that virtualization), but it also sounds like a software strategy rather than a hardware one. Will we ever see those SPARC/Solaris-based Oracle/Sun superappliances? Oracle VMs run on Windows and Linux only. Software DevelopmentTechnology Industry