Oracle Is Latest To Take On VMware

BobB writes "Oracle is going after its piece of the hot virtualization market by introducing an open source Xen-based hypervisor to compete against those from Novell, Red Hat, and VMware. Oracle VM, unveiled Monday at the Oracle OpenWorld convention in San Francisco, enables virtualization on Oracle and non-Oracle software applications and on the Linux and Windows OSs. It also operates on industry-standard x86- and x86-64-based servers. Oracle claims it offers virtualization at a lower cost than competitors can." VMware stock dropped over 10% on the news; Oracle's stock rose. The market was not punishing Oracle for the unpatched zero-day vulnerability (public exploit available) that the company won't patch until Jan. 15.

Comments

Sun also releasing Xen-based virtualization

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oracle is going after its piece of the hot virtualization market by introducing an open source Xen-based hypervisor to compete against those from Novell, Red Hat, and VMware.

Sun is also rolling out a Xen-based virtualization solution called Sun xVM.

More info at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen/

This is a feature separate from Solaris Zones (OS virtualization) or
Brands (run Linux or Solaris 8 zones on Solaris 10) or hardware domains.

Now fix the licensing

[MartijnL]

Yadda yadda, if Oracle doesn't fix it's own licensing policy than they still will be looking to take you hard for database licenses. They don't recognize software partitioning as a valid means of buying less licenses than there are CPU's in the physical box and when you run VMware in a cluster they want you to license your whole cluster.

Re:Any word on if it works

[cerberusss]

At work we looked into virtualizing our development/testing environments the only thing we couldn't virtualize was the databases - too much of a performance hit.

Where did you put your storage then? I've seen a 5-10% performance hit with a Xen LVM'ed RAID-1 backend. When using a SAN of some sort (even cheap ass ones) this disappears.

Re:Unbreakable Xen

[passthecrackpipe]

are you pulling that number right out of your ass? This survey from feb 2007, begs to differ. It puts Oracle on 0.8% contributions. That means Oracle comes after(Unknown), RedHat, (None) IBM, QLogic, Novell, Intel, MIPS Technologies, Nokia, SANPeople, SteelEye, Freescale, Linux Foundation, MontaVista, Simtec, Atmel, HP, and SGI (in order of contributions) in terms of contributions.