Oracle is the latest player to toss its hat into the virtualization ring with the company's latest announcement of Oracle VM, a virtualization platform based on the open source Xen hypervisor. At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, the company announced its own server virtualization platform which supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. The platform also supports both Linux and Windows guest operating s Oracle is the latest player to toss its hat into the virtualization ring with the company’s latest announcement of Oracle VM, a virtualization platform based on the open source Xen hypervisor.At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, the company announced its own server virtualization platform which supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. The platform also supports both Linux and Windows guest operating systems, although it sounds like Windows guests may operate slowly until Oracle finishes developing needed paravirtualized Windows drivers. Oracle applications supported on the new Oracle VM platform include: Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Oracle Application Server 10gR2 and 10gR3 Oracle Enterprise Manager 10.2.0.4 Oracle Berkeley DB 4.6 Oracle TimesTen 7.0.3.1 Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 and 12 Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.4.x and 9.0 PeopleTools 8.49.07 and above Oracle Siebel CRM 8.0 Oracle Hyperion 9.3.1“Customers can now optimize resource consolidation by deploying Oracle VM with Oracle Unbreakable Linux, and run the full Oracle software stack — Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Applications — all with one worldwide support call,” said Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, Edward Screven. He added, “With Oracle VM, customers can respond more rapidly to business changes, increase ROI and reduce lifetime total cost of ownership. Oracle VM brings enterprise-class support and backing to server virtualization, giving customers the confidence to deploy virtualized solutions.” Until now, Oracle hasn’t really been considered “virtualization friendly” in my book. So, what’s changed? Well, support for running Oracle applications in a virtual machine for one thing. However, I use the term “support” loosely. Evidently, Oracle has only lightened its support policy when it comes to Oracle VM virtualization – the other players aren’t so lucky. I firmly believe that this policy will ultimately have to change, and Oracle will have to support their applications running on other virtualization platforms. But the company seems to be sticking to its virtualization unfriendly licensing policy, even when it comes to its own platform. Oracle insists on continuing its licensing policy based on the number of physical processors found in the bare-metal server rather than moving to a virtualization friendly, per instance licensing policy. Perhaps this too will change with time. In the press release announcing Oracle VM, I also found it curious that Oracle claimed its platform was three times more efficient than current x86 based server virtualization products. The company claims that it ran many performance benchmarks comparing Oracle products running with Oracle VM against the existing leading server virtualization product to come up with that determination. No further data was provided regarding the tests that were run, nor any data on exactly which existing leading platform it was compared against, although we can assume it was VMware ESX Server – but which version? What configuration? The lack of product names and data could be because of VMware’s strict benchmark comparison policy.VMware did not hesitate to respond to Oracle’s platform announcement or its performance claims. “Oracle’s introduction of yet another variant of Xen is clearly a response to the significant virtualization industry that VMware has established,” said Parag Patel, VMware’s vice president of alliances. Patel went on to say, “The offering does not address the capabilities required to achieve the cost savings and IT simplification that customers are realizing everyday from VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure. It is also an unproven offering and lacks features that VMware customers value and view as key to a virtualization deployment, including high availability, integration with third-party backup software and extensive hardware certifications.”I’m sure there is going to be more information to come. Stay tuned!Oracle VM is going to be available as a free download, here. Pricing for enterprise-class support is priced on a per-system basis, with 24×7 support for a system with up to two CPUs priced at $499 per year per system and a system with unlimited CPUs priced at $999 per year per system. Software Development