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.