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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.
I can't see the link between a Xen-based hypervisor and and a company being punished for a "unpatched zero-day vulnerability" that doesn't look like it is part of the hypervisor. Also, I can't see why the stock price would drop based on critical bugs. Stock prices should reflect number of people buying the software anyway. Hence Microsoft stock have value.
Please try to keep stupid statements like "The market was not punishing Oracle for the unpatched zero-day vulnerability (public exploit available) that the company won't patch until Jan. 15." out of the summaries. the market is NOT a technical forum, so unless this exploit can demonstrate some kind of loss for oracle, they have no reason to "punish"
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Seems a bit strange how RHEL 5.1 offers Windows virtualisation with Xen 3.1 and just days later Oracle does the same.
And how can this make VMWare stock drop by 10%? Xen ain't new (or great).
#include <sig.h>
I don't see how it could ever be conceived as anything bad for us consumers. Too many thumbs in the pie is what drives competition for a bigger slice. They will compete on price, features, stability, etc.
Never question the stupidity of a corporation when it's only ever going to improve the products you actually buy (or buy into).
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Of course they cant. They can't compete with serious distro's and they wont be able to compete with serious Xen players. Thats not the point. wearing my tin foil hat, I'd say that their point is to fragment, or at least give the illusion to fragment, open source work. Oracle has lost a hell of a lot of real money to open source, and have been been brought to the enterprise open source table kicking and screaming. There is no money to be made here for them, they will gain little to no credibility in this space (not core business, blah blah) and they have never been known to have a warm spot in their hearts for open source in general.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
for Oracle to get into the VM business.
Then they can ship pre-built VM images with oracle already installed and configured. Thus, the database server becomes a VM appliance (not quite a dishwasher yet...)
Easier to support (ie lower costs) especially if the VM runs Linux. As much as I hate Oracle, this following their 'legal theft' of RHEL it all starts to hang together.
However, it remains to be seen if they can build up their support side so that is basically 'sucks less' than it does now. There is a danger that they are spreading themselves too thin.
I don't think VMWare should get too worried by this. The overall market for VM's is huge. As long as the quality of their product stays high then their market will grow along with the overall market for VM Systems.
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.
I think this quote from their Oracle VM FAQ is more telling:
In other words: they recognize that customers want virtualization. But, they don't want to support running on just any hypervisor. Doing so places them in the position of having to rely on another company's software product to run well, which is just not a good idea from Oracle's point of view. The solution? Take an open-source solution and tweak it to their own specifications. Since they have control, they're not dependent on anyone else for good performance.
They claim to do Windows virtualizaiton, but the fact is that without paravirtualied Windows drivers, any performance is going to royally stink. I'd be surprised if they invest the time to actually make those work.
What would be a good idea for them in the long run, I think, is to allow their management tool to integrate with some others -- RedHat's or XenSource's, for example -- so that customers can manage all their servers from one console, while taking advantage of Oracle's specialized distro.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
It's been my experience that the one thing Virtual Servers aren't good at it's io intensive applications like I don't know.... DATABASE SERVERS? 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. This seems interesting to me - why would oracle do this when they have fought the logical conclusion for so long - pre-packaged linux distro with their Oracle stuff built right in - deploy and go. Seems like one would be easier than the other.
Also - really can we get more retarded biased comments about stock prices in the summaries. It's good for a WTF chuckle.
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.
http://virtualize.wordpress.com/
That's because CentOS isn't competing with Red Hat. Red Hat's market is the enterprise customers that *will* pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for support, and this is exactly the same market Oracle is catering too with Unbreakable Linux. CentOS is for users that can fix problems on their own and/or cannot afford an RHEL license. This is not the market Red Hat is aiming for.
I'd be surprised if they invest the time to actually make those work.
Yeah, me too. I spent some time at Oracle and while marketing paid lip service to the Microsoft stack, the division that did projects couldn't be less interesting. In a big department meeting, I asked the department head whether we will do something with C# besides Java. The room actually laughed. The department head didn't know what C# was.
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Oracle aren't competing with Redhat either. Someone would actually have to be running Unbreakable Linux for them to be competing, and I haven't seen anyone doing it yet: if anything, the market seems to have treated Oracle as a slightly embarrassing uncle who wants to convince you that he's still "hip and cool" and can do Linux just as well as that upstart Redhat can. They just sort of wish they'd be quiet, go home & stick to what they know.
The idea of Oracle supplanting VMWare in the enterprise virtualisation market is even more laughable. No one is rushing to replace VMWare with Xen, and if they were, they wouldn't do it through Oracle. Oracle make databases (Oh and they do middle wear now too. Buying WebLogic was a rare smart move, provided they can stop JBoss commoditizing their market) Honestly though, Oracle should leave the rest of the software stack to the rest of the industry.
Oracle Is Latest To Take On VMware
Please - Xen does not a vmware copy make - vmware is so much more than a virtualization product, VMware are trying to make it THE datacenter management tool.
Alex
Do you work in the real world? Who the hell have you met with a *right* mind? Everything I see is backwards and upside down...and people seem happy to have it that way. Plenty of places run mission critical systems on Windows. Nobody said it's smart or recommended. When I see something done smart around the businesses I work with, I do a handstand. Its an amazing moment indeed. Its half baked because they are coming after VMWare. Not supporting the most used Operating System at a reasonable speed yet is just half baked. Many tech centers we install at are just windows only. I can't dictate anything different to them.
Testing, testing & testing ?
You only need to set up a specific environment once. Then, in order to do any testing, take a copy of the environment, run whatever is needed and when happy about it, simply revert back to the original 'image' again. Do next test etc... rinse & repeat.
It also makes it easier to spread the exact identical environment to different machines/people in order to do tests in parallel and still be 'certain' that they all will be done identically. If needed you can even (temporarily or not) archive test results in order to work on them later again... eg, when someone needs to find out why things went wrong...
Personally, I like it a lot, it saves me heaps of time and while the test team can happily continue testing on their testing machine(s), they sent me the *entire* environment to delve into... filters out a lot of : "but it works on my machine" frustrations.
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
That's a pretty good point, but I think we can take it further.
If you're an investor, you have two ways to diversify your investments:
The former will always be easier to do--you just buy more stocks (or just go ahead and buy everything--and everything else, too.
The latter is the only option available to people who are hyper-concentrated in one company's stock and can't trade out--i.e., people who control companies that are really big.
This is not to say that diversifying a company's business makes no sense--there's no reason in principle why it can't work, and in fact, bringing many things under one roof can achieve efficiencies that separate companies can't. But the point is that there is a definite potential for a conflict of interest between majority and minority shareholders.
And here, as you can guess, I think you're wrong. If you control a company, and that company forms the bulk of your net worth, there is nothing sentimental behind your desire to diversify your business. The only way you can retain all that wealth is by holding on to your stock, and diversifying the business can protect its value.
Are you adequate?