Oracle enters the virtual appliance world with its VM Template Builder

Oracle still seems to be trying to get both feet into the virtualization game. On the positive side, it just announced a few new pieces to its virtualization puzzle. On the negative side, the puzzle didn’t come with a box, so we still have no clue as to what this thing is supposed to ultimately look like. And that makes it a bit more difficult to put the pieces together.

Still fresh off the heels of its acquisition of Virtual Iron (and then Virtual Iron’s subsequent “death”), Oracle still seems to be hammering out the details of its converged road map. Part of that road map seems to include three new offerings: a free graphical tool for building custom templates, Oracle Siebel CRM packaged as an Oracle VM template, and new Oracle Validated Configurations for Oracle VM.

[ Also this week in InfoWorld’s Virtualization Report: Virtualization giant VMware moved into the clouds by purchasing SpringSource | And is VMware making a mistake by moving VMworld Europe to October 2010? ]

First is an offering from Oracle called the Oracle VM Template Builder. The company described it as an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux “Just enough OS” (JeOS)-based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM. Basically, it’s Oracle’s answer to VMware’s virtual appliances and the Virtual Appliance Marketplace. Oracle’s VM Template Builder allows independent software vendors, software developers, or end-users to easily create their own virtual appliances using JeOS, a trimmed-down version of Oracle Enterprise Linux within a VM image. And while Oracle is mostly touting this new offering as a graphical utility, users familiar with JeOS scripts will be happy to know that they can also work with it from the command line as well.

Second, while the template builder brings a direct benefit to software developers by helping to extend the reach of their applications via these easily distributed appliances, Oracle also plans to make use of the utility in-house by rolling out its own VM templates. The company already offers a total of 10 templates, including Oracle Database, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. And now it is adding to that list a new VM template, Siebel CRM 8.1.1. The new template delivers a quick start for a virtualized Siebel CRM, Oracle Database, and Oracle Enterprise Linux environment. Using the Siebel CRM template, a customer could have a fully installed software environment for Siebel CRM up and running in less than three hours by eliminating the need to separately install and set up the operating system, database, and Siebel CRM applications, according to Oracle. This is the same deployment ease and speed that VMware has been touting with its virtual appliances for years now.

Anthony Lye, SVP of CRM at Oracle, said, “Oracle VM Templates for Siebel CRM 8.1.1 enables customers to not only reduce costs through the use of server virtualization, but also deploy and operate confidently their Siebel CRM applications on a platform backed worldwide by affordable support.”

And third, Oracle announced the extension of the Oracle Validated Configurations program to include Oracle VM server virtualization software. The program offers pre-tested, validated architectures with documented best practices for software, hardware, storage, and network components. These help improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of solutions, with faster, lower-cost implementations. Now, virtualization is added to that list. Some 145 different combinations of Oracle software are already available from the Oracle Technology Network. Oracle Validated Configurations provide details on what to deploy, how to deploy, and recommendations on hardware and software combinations that have proven to be the most effective. The idea here is to make it an easy process for customers to put together a solution and know that it will work for them.

“With Oracle’s pre-tested Validated Configurations, customers can significantly reduce testing and the time-consuming efforts of determining a stable configuration, enabling them to rapidly deploy new applications,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux and virtualization dngineering at Oracle. “Oracle is dedicated to helping customers mitigate risk by providing these best practices at no cost. With the addition of Oracle VM, users can deploy their virtual infrastructure software and applications faster and more cost-efficiently.”

Oracle is definitely headed in the right direction with these announcements. However, at this time these things are still only relevant to a rather small audience or segment of the market. With an unclear road map, support issues, and licensing concerns still looming, Oracle currently controls a small single-digit marketshare in the virtualization space, and this news won’t be enough to make a change in that number.

In a conference call last month with Virtual Iron partners and customers, Oracle said the company’s goal was to combine the best of Oracle VM and Virtual Iron into a 3.0 version of Oracle VM. And this new version would be out sometime before May 2010. Perhaps the combination of today’s news with whatever goes into the 3.0 platform will be enough to bring Oracle further into the race with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft.