Oracle Kills Virtual Iron

rhathar writes in with news that Oracle is killing off the products of Virtual Iron, a month after purchasing the company. Reports say that all but 10 to 15 staff were let go. The Reg article speculates that Oracle bought VI for its technology and considers its customers and partners expendable. When the Sun purchase finalizes, Oracle will be in possession of three separate virtualization technologies all based on Xen. "In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it 'will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.' One partner said, 'So basically, anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI... is now totally in the s–.'"

Comments

So..

[SchizoStatic]

Oracle is the new Google/M$

Re:So..

[assert(0)]

The new google? Anachronicity alert!

Oracle:

Type Public (NASDAQ: ORCL)
Founded California, USA (1977)

Google:

Type Public (NASDAQ: GOOG)
Founded Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)

Re:So..

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as you would like it to, anachronic does not mean what you hope it means. It would mean non-chronic, and that would mean, something that isn't habitual. Perhaps you were looking for antichronological (reverse order), or unchronological (not in order).

Re:So..

[SecondaryOak]

According to Babylon,

Anachronicity No matches found. Anachronic adj. not according to chronology, anachronistic, obsolete, out of date; not properly dated, not assigned to the correct time period (of a person, object or event)

Re:So..

[wealthychef]

He meant "anachronism."

Re:So..

[ReedYoung]

No, actually he meant "anachronicity," similar in construction to the word "synchronicity" but denoting events mistimed rather than synchronized. Given the meaning of the noun "anachronism" he replaced the suffix correctly to turn it into an adjective meaning, basically, exhibiting the attribute of similarity to an anachronism. Just because it hasn't been used yet ... well, good dictionaries list the origins of words, and each had to be used for the first time somewhere, by somebody. A linguist would really appreciate the moment of this event, a word being used for the first time.

On the other hand, it probably is already listed in more thorough dictionaries and there's really nothing to see here, move along.

Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[tjstork]

I would so love to be Virtual Iron, or anyone who got bought out like that. Geez, they buy me out, then tell me, that, I really am not allowed to work on it any more and can just take off for a few years, here's your millions of dollars.

Yeah... SWEET!

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah yeah. Great for the 2 or 3 guys on the top. Everyone else gets fucked though.

Even if you have a small equity stake in a company that gets bought, the guys at the top will always cheat you out your share. Saw it happen many times during the first dot com bubble.

What usually happens is the original owners have a handful of class A shares, and everyone else has class B shares. When the buyout comes around, the owners create and issue a billion (or so) class B shares, and dilute everyone else's interest. OR they simply vote with their (super voting power) class A shares and force everyone to sell the class B shares back at a reduced rate. Or they just sell the assets of the company, and not the company itself... then give themselves huge "bonuses" for making the sale.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

The deal was probably a windfall for the founders, the VCs and angel investors, and the CEO installed by the board.

For the average employee there, probably not so much. They can sell their Oracle stock to hopefully pay their living expenses until they find a new job.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[tjstork]

That sucks. I would like to think that if I made a millions selling a company with 50 people in it, the I would hook up the guys that got whacked who helped make it possible.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[mzito]

Heh. Well, so, that's not exactly how it works. They had raised something around $60-70m in three or four rounds, including one round that involved firing/departures of most of the original founders, a new management team, and a totally new business focus.

So first of all, every time you do a round of fundraising, you create new shares of stock. Let's say my company has 100 shares of stock, and you're a 10% owner of stock - that means you own 10 shares of stock. When we want to raise money, we go convince an investor that our company is worth $100,000, or $1000 per share, making your shares worth $10k. We then have the investor give us $100,000, we create 100 new shares of stock, making the company worth $200k "post-money" - but now you only own 5%, and your investors own 50%. On top of that, the investors might say, "hey, we want liquidation preference, or participating preferred" - complex subjects that can't be delved into here, but suffice it to say that gives them more power.

Ok, time goes by - you spend that $100k you've raised, and while business is not terrible, it's not as good as your investors had hoped. You go back to get more money, and they say, "Sure, we'll give you another $100k, but we really don't think the company has progressed like we'd hoped, so the total company is worth $150k pre-money" - whoops, now your shares are worth $7,500. And after another 133 shares are created, you now own around 3% of the company.

See how fast individual ownership can drop? Now, let's extend this factor to someone like VirtualIron who was raising $10-25m *every time* they raised money, and changed business models once. You can bet that by the time they went through four rounds of funding, the VCs owned almost all of that company. (By the way, I realize that this is only the most simplistic model of how companies fund operations through VCs, so don't yell at me - I don't have the space to talk about every option).

According to some papers that had been leaked to the nytimes, in 2008 they did $3.4m in revenue and lost something like $17m on that $3.4m. How much can that company be worth? Typical rule of thumb in tech stock transactions is 5x-12x revenue, depending on a variety of factors. Given that it cost them $17m to make $3.4m - one could see how the multiplier is not gonna be so favorable. Let's make it 6x - that's $20m.

So, you have a company where investors have sunk and lost $60m, fired management at least once, changed business models once, changed products at least once, and in the end, they're getting bought for between $16-32m. Do you think that anyone got more than a "thanks for selling this dog of a company" bonus?

It's a shame, and I feel bad for the employees, but this is not a tech success story.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone accept an agreement that does not have instant option vesting on a change in control of the company???

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[dissy]

That sucks. I would like to think that if I made a millions selling a company with 50 people in it, the I would hook up the guys that got whacked who helped make it possible.

If slashdot has learned anything from copyright law, it's that a) the people that make it possible aren't important, and b) not only do you not owe the people that made it possible anything, but they owe you!

/bitter

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to think that if I made a millions selling a company with 50 people in it, the I would hook up the guys that got whacked who helped make it possible.

How much are you going to share with them? 50 people at $100,000 each is 5 of your millions gone already. $100,000 would be nice to tide someone through the recession but they'd hardly be retiring rich.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[tjstork]

How much are you going to share with them? 50 people at $100,000 each is 5 of your millions gone already. $100,000 would be nice to tide someone through the recession but they'd hardly be retiring rich

I would think that splitting it 50/50 between me and my people would be what I would do. So, if I made 10 million yeah, each gets 100k. I would be be grateful if I got let go with 100k, as that gives me a year to get my own business off the ground. And, if I made 100 million, than those 50 could take a bit more time looking for work, for sure.

Telling you, if I ever do come up with that big idea, it would pay to work with me.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Jurily]

I would so love to be Virtual Iron, or anyone who got bought out like that. Geez, they buy me out, then tell me, that, I really am not allowed to work on it any more and can just take off for a few years, here's your millions of dollars.

Here's your millions of dollars, we'll keep the hundreds of millions you could've made in the next years if you weren't so damn short-sighted. Now go home.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[tftp]

Here's your millions of dollars, we'll keep the hundreds of millions you could've made in the next years if you weren't so damn short-sighted.

The seller knows about this. You don't get to sell a company for $Nm by being stupid. However there are many reasons why people sell stuff and why other people buy stuff. For example:

• The owners want to retire.
• The owners burned out.
• The owners need money, now.
• The company has problems and unless sold it will close its doors soon
• The owners foresee difficulties ahead (financial crisis, for example)
• The owners know that they reached the end of their road, technologically speaking
• The owners know that they are no good as marketeers and will never be able to increase revenue
• The owners know that without a big cash infusion they can't develop new product, and they can't get that financing on any reasonable terms
• The owners know that once smoke clears their company won't be worth as much (or anything)

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone accept an agreement that does not have instant option vesting on a change in control of the company???

Because they arent smart enough to insist on it. Even if they do, they find themselves laid off right before the change of ownership, or as the GP stated, they find their shares diluted by the buyout agreement.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[witherstaff]

It'd be great if by the time you were able to sell out you weren't in bed with the devil already. It's hard to grow any company without bringing in some sort of wealthy partner or group of investors. The reason why most new businesses fail within 5 years, even those that have a good product or service, is undercapitalization. Once you bring in the money the rules change drastically.

The fortunate entrepreneurs that are successful the first go around and have it in them to self fund another company are very rare. Being altruistic and very successful in business don't often seem to go hand in hand. Although from my experience the honest geeks actually make decent deals like you say, often times screwed up by the rest of the corporate world.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[fishbowl]

>How much are you going to share with them?

Proportional amounts according to the individual cash investment each of them has made into the company. For most rank-and-file employees, that amount is zero. For shareholders, an equitable distribution would be made. Whose fault is it if you aren't rewarded in that scheme?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

>For the average employee there, probably not so much.

For career-level employees, Oracle provides a pretty good severance package.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Oracle paid VI's investors less than they originally put into the company, so nobody made any money.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[mzito]

tftp is totally correct, and if I had to guess, in this case it was:

- no more water to draw from the well - i.e. with $70m raised and $3.5m in revenue, who's gonna put in more money?

- they knew that there was still a little mojo left in the virtualization market - but the reality is that once the dust settles, you're gonna have a small number of players - VMWare for sure, maybe MSFT, maybe citrix, maybe Oracle - anyone else who's making a virtualization platform has already been bought or isn't going to be, so this was their chance to get out.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Allicorn]

You're already at +5 Insightful so: fascinating insight, thanks!

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[e9th]

Such people do exist. Like this bank president. Yes, bank president.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Thing 1]

This is OT, but needs to be said. My workaround for getting rid of that fucking annoying vertical and horizontal gray bars, and friend/foe circle icons, has now stopped working. It used to be that I could click any post in the story (i.e., "#28404197"), and then click the story link at the top of that page (i.e., "Oracle Kills Virtual Iron") to get back to the story with no disgusting graphics interrupting the flow of the beautiful words.

Now, that has stopped working as of this morning. So: fuck you, Slashdot. Burn in hell for all I care. I'll read you a lot less now than I used to. No, I'm not saying I'll stay away forever, but as soon as your continued idiotic refusal to fix basic layout bugs annoys me, I will stop reading. And that's about 5 or 6 posts into most stories.

If this is supposed to be an incentive to get me to try some other layout, FUCKING TELL ME! Don't just break shit and hope that I know how to "upgrade" to fix it.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[MichaelSmith]

Yeah yeah. Great for the 2 or 3 guys on the top. Everyone else gets fucked though.

Since VI customers are being screwed too, maybe the sacked staff can work for their ex customers?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[selven]

create and issue a billion (or so) class B shares, and dilute everyone else's interest

How is this even legal? If you own 5% of the company, you own 5% of the company, and "diluting" that would be theft.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[dookiesan]

Thank you for saying what so many are afraid to (for fear of offtopic mod)

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are my work-a-rounds for Slashdot in the order I use them.

1. Use Firefox and install Greasemonkey and Greasefire addons. 2. With the addons installed, go to slashdot and right click the little Greasefire monkey head in your taskbar. 3. In the right click menu, you'll see some shit that says something like "48 scripts available." Click that. 4. On the thing that pops up, install "Slashdot - Remove Title Prefix", Slashdot - Expandable Comment Tree", "Only Slashdot News/Comments", "Slashdot Facelift", and "Slashdot - Single Page View" 5. After you do that, making sure you are using the old comment mode, go to the story you want to read and just click the "Change" button for the comment threshold, even if you are happy the current threshold. Any story you read from now on, just get into the habit of clicking that Change button and all should be well. 7. ??? 8. I guess PROFIT!! or something.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Runaway1956]

Some very few people actually do show their appreciation for employees loyalty. I'm not googling for the story, sorry, but there was that bank president in Florida, I think it was. His bank was bought out, he got one HELLUVA whopping bonus as his parting gift, and he split it between his bank officers. One super great boss. So, yeah, there are a few people out there who qualify as "human". Most people are just greedy bastards.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[michaelhood]

create and issue a billion (or so) class B shares, and dilute everyone else's interest

How is this even legal? If you own 5% of the company, you own 5% of the company, and "diluting" that would be theft.

It's never, ever that simple.

There are virtually always multiple classes of shares issued. Also, they might only hold warrants or options rather than actual stock.

There could be anti-dilution or redemption rights attached, but if they (the employees) don't know to look for these things, there won't be.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[dimeglio]

Wish it was all so. Unfortunately, it's often not the case. Having been laid off before, it's has usually been as a result of a merger or being bought off. Not that the company did badly where we were, the entire operation shut down (us included), about a year after the purchase.

Loyalty to the company hasn't helped anyone I know. If share holders are near sighted idiots and management unable to lead, it's game over.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Nursie]

The bit I don't get is how it's legal for me, the 10% owner, to suddenly find myself only a 5% owner. Do I have to give my consent for this to go ahead?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Nursie]

You're forgetting the people who've been doing virtualisation for 30 years - IBM.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you have a choice, you can choose not to take the money. Unfortunately today if you want to bring something new or different to the market you're probably going to need investment money to do it, so your real choice is more like "how badly do you want it?"

If you're hot enough to get investors competing over you, you may be able to get a non-dilution clause into whatever constitutes your agreements. Otherwise, you're kind of at the mercy of the VC on terms - you're the one that needs the money, right? - and they tend to want to maximize their interests.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Guido von Guido]

You're forgetting the people who've been doing virtualisation for 30 years - IBM.

Well, the OP is presumably talking about the x86 market. IBM's virtualization offerings for non-x86 platforms are inseparable from their hardware. For the x86 market, they're reselling VMware.

Sun and HP still have virtualization offerings of various sorts for Solaris and HP-UX (also tied to the hardware, but frankly not as good as what IBM has).

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[uncqual]

That's difficult for most employees to get. Usually the options vest immediately only if the employee is not offered a job of similar responsibility with the new company. There are of course any number of variations on this - it's not unusual for the options to fully vest after working for the new employer for one year (or if they are let go without cause during that year). In this case, it is likely that many who were let go vested immediately because they were not offered similar jobs w/Oracle - the options available to all but the founders (who mostly actually still own a percentage of the company), the CEO, and maybe VP Sales/Eng/Marketing are usually chump change anyway.

Key employees will almost never get an "instant vest on change of control" because if your key employees are able to bail upon acquisition with vested options, it's very hard to find someone who wants to buy the company as an ongoing concern (vs. just for its IP). Indeed, most deals don't get announced until the most key employees already have signed employment contracts with the acquiring company (assuming the company wants to keep the people - which, in this case, it seems Oracle didn't have a lot of interest in this) and deals are sometimes contingent on some percentage of a list of other personnel accepting their offers with the acquiring company (these are employees who are not sufficiently high to be told about the pending deal, so the deal gets announced without these employees having been approached about an offer with the acquiring company).

It may be possible to get this arrangement if one is not an important player and who would almost certainly become redundant in the event of a takeover (perhaps a receptionist or a facilities manager or something like that), but those individuals have options on such a small percentage of the company, they don't matter much.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[cshay]

My workaround was to direct Adblock to simply block the grey bars. As an intelligent Slashdotter, you DO use adblock, don't you?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize how crazy it is that you should have to jump through so many hoops just to get a discussion site to display comments right?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[open4energy]

This is OT, but needs to be said. My workaround for getting rid of that fucking annoying vertical and horizontal gray bars, and friend/foe circle icons, has now stopped working. And that's about 5 or 6 posts into most stories.

I guess no one explained that poor language is simply the lack of intelligence to think of meaningful words to express yourself. But to the adblocks, why does the person suggest we not watch the ads? We are getting all this for FREE - is it too much to give a little of our precious moments to read an ad. No wonder the head guys are so mean to the lower ranks, look at how we are behaving down here! A respectful but ashamed open source evangelist

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

You vote along with the other shareholders, just like in any other corporation.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Ex-MislTech]

I guess you were not around for the DOT COM daze, it was all the craze.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[ZosX]

Why is slashdot so broken lately? I just upgraded to Firefox 3.5 a while ago and assumed I was just seeing rendering errors. I browse the conversations in the old style nested mode and the graphics float all over the text in bad, bad ways. Naturally I assumed that it was Firefox and I've been too lazy to notice if it does it on version 3,0x, but I guess I am now not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. I'd send someone at slashdot an e-mail, but I have a feeling that it would just end up on the damned idle page as a joke. I'm out of mod points, or I would have just modded the GP up, but hey, lets at least try to keep this up for a while... :)

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[ZosX]

Gee. I just went back to the newer d2 system and it won't even display any comments at all in FF 3.5. It just says "79 hidden" or whatever and clicking on the "show more" does fucking dick. That's pretty lame. It does at least show my comments though. :)

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Antique Geekmeister]

The owners know that the buyers can put them out of business through changing policies, now that they're interested in the market, by expanding their existing product line slightly, for only slightly more than the cost of buying them out. This has happened repeatedly.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I agree. Of course, once you set all of that mess up the first time, you don't have to do it again. I just wish the Slashdot devs would quit monkeying with the site's layout. It was perfectly fine before they had that design competition a few years ago and it's been nothing but downhill since.

Oh, and if I'd known my post was going to get modded up like that, I'd have made it prettier, a little less typo and mistake ridden and I probably would have logged in too. Cest la vie.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is OT, but needs to be said. My workaround for getting rid of that fucking annoying vertical and horizontal gray bars, and friend/foe circle icons, has now stopped working. It used to be that I could click any post in the story (i.e., "#28404197"), and then click the story link at the top of that page (i.e., "Oracle Kills Virtual Iron") to get back to the story with no disgusting graphics interrupting the flow of the beautiful words.

Now, that has stopped working as of this morning. So: fuck you, Slashdot. Burn in hell for all I care. I'll read you a lot less now than I used to. No, I'm not saying I'll stay away forever, but as soon as your continued idiotic refusal to fix basic layout bugs annoys me, I will stop reading. And that's about 5 or 6 posts into most stories.

If this is supposed to be an incentive to get me to try some other layout, FUCKING TELL ME! Don't just break shit and hope that I know how to "upgrade" to fix it.

FFS, y'all are supposed to be geeks here... it's really simple:

1) Get the Stylish extension for Firefox (or your custom CSS method of choice)

2) Add the rule .contain { border-style:none !important; } to .slashdot.org

3) ???

4) PROFIT!

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Tubal-Cain]

I zoom out. Once removes most of them. A second zoom-out removes the rest completely. That being said, I haven't been getting the problem any more.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I have to give my consent for this to go ahead?

        Your 10% potentially gets you 10% percent of the vote. Usually in these start ups 40-51% (or more ) of the stock (and another block of the options) is in the hands of a very small group of people. If they all vote 'yes' and you vote 'no', the deal goes through (because usually it is "simple majority rules" by-laws) . That's the best case. In many cases it, as the poster outlined, you'll have Class B shares and the other folks will have Class A (with super voting powers) where you don't even have a 1:1 ratio of stock and votes. Plantation time and you're 3/5th of a person and your vote weighting might be 3-6%. Or even more
likely these are just options and you don't have shares (so you can't vote). There are lots of good reasons not to sink the money into actual shares. This devaluation process is only one of them.

        In short, if you are in a start up company you are given "stock options that are going to be worth megabucks". Not. It is
monopoly money as long as an option. Or a lotto ticket. It may pay off big but it isn't real money and it can be devalued faster than a Zimbabwe dollar.
If were just paper options it is just the case of the monopoly money just turning from green to blue in color; wasn't real money anyway. If buy shares have sunk money with only limited ways of getting back out. It can only sell them to a limited set of folks (most of whom maybe the folks rejiggerig the price. ) These aren't publicly traded so whoever has the authority to reset the prices can usually do so within reason with these events. (so if exercise to get the "voting" power but you are not very liquid. )

        In most places in the US your company should give you access to a prospectus kind of document that outlines all of the Class A, B, ....etc.
shares and other details. It is usually pretty dense (and gets longer with each round) and most folks skip over it . Most folks just sign the options cover document and don't take (or ask for) the doc that outlines what the real deal is.

        It is legal in that in the process of getting another round of funding part of the company is being sold off. Each round dilutes the company more.
The VCs don't really loan money as much as buy up large stakes of companies. That way they get to put their own folks on the board and for the most part control the process of selling off and taking profits from the sell off. They have no interest in the rank and file of the company rising up and blocking what they want to do. The rank and file are usually there to rank in the "trickle down" of the profits of a large liquidity event.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[haruchai]

Or, you could decide that the gray bars are not worth getting all worked up over and chill the fuck out.
Try it - works for me; no code required.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[CBravo]

You have a contract, called a share. In this contract, you have certain agreements. One of the agreements is that you agree to not have any influence over the amount of shares (basically: you have little or no say in operational decisions). People with other shares decide that.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[edittard]

Typical rule of thumb in tech stock transactions is 5x-12x revenue, depending on a variety of factors.

Revenue or profit?

Given that it cost them $17m to make $3.4m - one could see how the multiplier is not gonna be so favorable. Let's make it 6x - that's $20m.

That's a loss of 13.6 million. Surely they'd have to pay someone around 80 million to take it?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how this works in the US of A, but over here in old Europe, as a share-holder, you have the right to buy those new shares before others do. Plus, you get them at a lower price, so that value of you shares is not diluted. You can even trade that right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-emption_right

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[gmrath]

Sad part is: there's no grey bars or idiotic "friend/foe" buttons when viewing with IE 7 (not my browser of choice); say, Slashdot's rulers are not trying to tell us something, are they? Or, perhaps SUBSCRIBING to Slashdot will make this crap go away? Hm?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[durdur]

I don't recall ever seeing a site where a layout "feature" was introduced that wasn't an ad but actually obscured the site content. And why is there not a big obvious button in preferences to turn it off?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[mzito]

Revenue! Profit is not irrelevant, of course, but if a company is profitable, it simply means the multiplier increases. And many small tech companies get acquired when they're intentionally not profitable, because they're working towards growth rather than profitability.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by your second comment, but to be clear, they *lost* $17M net of their $3.4M - so their gross expenses were $20m. As far as paying someone to take it, if there's really no takers for buying the company, and no more money, they'll close things up and try to sell the intellectual property.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

elinks

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[haruchai]

Too funny. Your rant gets modded to 5, Insightful
and mine telling you to calm down get an Offtopic!!

Guess you've got some similarly whiny friends.
Dude, people have been bitching about Slashdot layout for the 10 years I've been visiting and every year they bitch louder.

This is what Slashdot is: (mostly) intereting stories, opinionated posters and wonky web design.

Why don't you post and Ask Slashdot and maybe someone will have some useful suggestions or the site admins might take notice. I wouldn't bet on it but hey, what have you got to lose?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that the amount of tech-related articles have dropped considerably. Nowadays we get a lot more watered-down, irrelevant articles instead of hardcore nerd stuff. Guess what? If you have a "news for nerds" blog that doesn't blog about news for nerds... guess where your readership will do?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Thing 1]

Poor language does not indicate any one thing, douchebag.

And no, Mr. I'm Better Than You, this has absolutely nothing to do with the ads, which do not bother me at all. This has to do with piss-poor broken layout that we've been complaining about for months.

If you're going to get involved in an argument, it helps to have a basic understanding first. Otherwise, regardless of how clean and pleasant your language appears, you will still look like a fucking idiot.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Thing 1]

Or, perhaps SUBSCRIBING to Slashdot will make this crap go away? Hm?

Yes, that was at the end of my rant: I have no idea what has caused this, or what will make it go away, so if this was their ass-headed way of asking us for money, they've failed.

Or, perhaps I'm just not smart enough to be in their clique, or something.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Thing 1]

You're welcome. Funny that I got a +5 out of it as well. Funny, that is, as I somewhat expected the offtopic mod that you mentioned -- but apparently, this issue and the silence from the owners regarding it, appears to rankle quite a few of us. Enough, in fact, that discussions of this sort, at the present time, are completely on topic and are moderated as such.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Thing 1]

Can you share the details with me? I did try this, a week or so ago, but it ended up blocking "too much" of the site so that I could not see any images, and it was all in an ugly serif font. I had blocked the single image that contains the 3 gray bars and friend/foe icons. (Those gray bars are not in separate images, or at least they weren't when I tried it before.)

If you can share the method you used, and which specific image(s) you blocked, I think others around will would appreciate it -- I know I would.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot...

The owners is told by the shareholders.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Thing 1]

LOL yeah, I suppose I should chill the fuck out. A little pressure release at the right times though does wonders both for the internal and sometimes external reality. :)

Up until yesterday, I was fairly chill; I had a workaround that would help me to only be perturbed for a few seconds, rather than the duration that I read the story page. When that workaround stopped working, I decided to release some of that pressure. I do feel better, today.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Thing 1]

Hmm, tried that, zooming in or out does not change them (well, they get larger or smaller, but are still there). I'm on XP SP3, Firefox 3.0.10. Thanks for trying to help me, though, really.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[fhic]

I suppose it's ironic that I am currently adblocking as much of Slashdot and the associated domains as I'm blocking on Yahoo.

And the really ironic thing is that I keep seeing this stupid message that says something along the lines of "because you are such an excellent Slashdotter, you're eligible to block ads if you click here." Uhhh, what?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

That happens, just not always.Not every successfull business that gets bought out screws over it's employees.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[gumbi west]

Uh, it is not really that crazy. He has a hack that changes how the site displays and now he is pissed that some other change made in slashcode broke his hack. All of what he describes (except the hacked missing blue and grey bars) works for me with the following steps: (1) use completely vanilla FF.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like I've said, thankfully I use IE 6! (Not my choice)

*Hint: User-Agent String

Captcha: restores

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[Anonymous Coward]

GP was more a troll than parent was. Parent was a response to a wrong accusation. Parent used bad words, but parent was more right than the GP. Moderation inaccurate.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[DragonWriter]

How is this even legal? If you own 5% of the company, you own 5% of the company, and "diluting" that would be theft.

You never own x% of a corporation. You own a certain number of shares of a certain class of stock issued by the corporation. Those shares come with certain legal voting rights, and other legal rights (such as divident priorities and claims on assets in the event the corporation is dissolved), which vary by class of stock.

Anytime you see a reference to someone owning x% of a corporation, it is a simplification.

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[edittard]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by your second comment, but to be clear, they *lost* $17M net of their $3.4M - so their gross expenses were $20m.

Hi Bernie, how are you able to post from your cell?

Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!

[mzito]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by your second comment, but to be clear, they *lost* $17M net of their $3.4M - so their gross expenses were $20m.

Hi Bernie, how are you able to post from your cell?

What are you talking about? They have:
- $3.4m in revenue
- $17m net loss

That means they lost 17 million dollars after earning 3.4 million - the 3.4m made up for some of the money they lost. If they had made zero dollars in revenue, they would have lost $20.4m - instead, they only lost $17m.

But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely...

[Anonymous Coward]

But commercial software is oh so much better as it has guaranteed support and you can rely on in and they have roadmaps and shit.

3 words from Oracle to existing VI customers....

[Khan]

uNf! uNf! uNf!

But closed source is more safe and reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

Gartner said so! How can we rely on a bunch of Open Source enthusiasts (ok admittedly many of whom work for companies like Red Hat, Novell, etc.) to make a real virtualization product? Now I'm going to have to cross-discipline my internal processes to maximize the ROI alpha factor in order to deal with this situation!

Totally in the s--?

[saleenS281]

I don't understand how this is an issue for existing VI customers. In the immediate future, I can see the concern, but I'd be shocked if Oracle didn't have a transition plan for existing customers in the long term to their combined virtualization platform. Granted, that plan may be "install this new version", but there's a plan I'm sure.

Re:Totally in the s--?

[Senjutsu]

Any transition offer that involves subjecting oneself to Oracle's pricing plans can accurately be described as being up shit creek.

Re:Totally in the s--?

[Anonymous Coward]

with or without a paddle?

Re:Totally in the s--?

[saleenS281]

Right... good point right up until you look at what they charge for their linux and virtualization offerings right now. Significantly cheaper than most of the competition...

Re:Totally in the s--?

[dgatwood]

Does it matter? Either way, it stinks.

Re:Totally in the s--?

[ckaminski]

This is going to drive Oracles VI customers right into Citrix's hands, who also have a VERY compelling Xen based product, and I think the original Xen guys themselves.

Citrix should be ALL over this.

Re:Totally in the s--?

[sjames]

Well, if they need a few new licenses this month, they're SOL. Sure, in a year or so (according to TFA) they might have an offer to completely rebuild everything on Oracle's new offering, but that doesn't help now and won't likely be pretty then.

Another reason why VMWare is the...

[bagboy]

only commercial solution if you want long term support. Can't depend on MS (Virtual PC anyone? Now MS VS?), can't depend on Oracle. These and RedHat/Novell have other product lines to distract. At least VMWare continues to support their products (patches, migration paths) and is single-minded in their focus.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[saleenS281]

...VirtualPC is still around. But it was NEVER aimed as an enterprise virtualization solution, so I'm not sure why you would even bother to bring that up. I can only question your knowledge of the subject. Citrix Xenserver and Microsoft's Hyper-V are here to stay, and are VERY viable long-term solutions. In fact, more viable than VMware because they aren't a one-trick pony. Both company's can and will continue to make money if virtualization technology becomes a commodity, and with the ground MS is gaining with Hyper-V, that is a VERY real possibility.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[The Bungi]

Virtual PC was and always will be a desktop solution. It's what MS uses for XP mode in Vista. Virtual Server is the big box equivalent (although I suppose it's based off VPC).

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come talk to me in 5 years when your viable long term solution providers have decided that their product line is not profitable enough and kill it off. That is what happens when a company's products are not a one-trick pony.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[afidel]

Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V will be supported until 2018 at least, do you think VMWare will be supporting ESX3.5 then?

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Courageous]

LOL. Citrix XenServer was so not viable, they had to give it away. Sarcastic remarks aside, I run a virtual data center with over 800 virtual machines. I would not replace my VMWare with Citrix, even with Citrix being "free". The "free" Citrix would hurt my opex so much, it would cost me money. Do you know how much money it means to add a percentage to our system admin load on 800 virtual machines? The Citrix guys aren't even to the point of "getting it," yet. When they have a product with a centralized management server, get back to me.

C//

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[ckaminski]

VMware's only differentiators in the market now are X86 emulation on non-VT platforms, the ancillary products like Lab Manager/Lifecycle manager/etc. and mature tools. That's not an advantage that is going to last very long.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I feel a bit sorry for they VI guys. We bought up a hardware stack and everything to test its implementation, and their support worked pretty well (though obviously not in the long term as it turns out). We went VMWare in the end -- simply because it seemed a lot more stable (I think we were testing VI 2.5) -- but I still remember the VI rep phoning me up at 3am and giving me advice and everything, completely oblivious to the fact he'd pulled me out of bed and it was -10 outside, but he was just far too nice to yell 'get stuffed'.

They might have had a really good product at the 3.5 mark, but it was just a bit late for us. A shame.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you smoking crack?

Have you seen XenCenter?

I have a pool of 80 Xen Servers, 900 guests, using xencenter to administer the lot, from anywhere.

What happens when your single management server goes down, and you need to make urgent modifications?

In testing, We have found Xen 25% faster than Vmware. same hardware, same taskloads.

I give vmware 5 years. Max.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Courageous]

What happens when your single management server goes down,

Happens all the time. I restart it.

C//

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[mysidia]

Happens all the time. I restart it.

*cough* Since it happens all the time already, what happens when it becomes unbootable?

Or when (god help you) MS SQL crashed and needs to run data recovery for 6 hours.

But you need to perform management actions on 30 VMs (Vmotion them off a broken server) ASAP ?

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/eos_vi.html

VMware will offer nine years of phased support from the general availability of a new Major Release.

Microsoft might be selling toasters by 2018.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeebus - only 11.25 VMs per host? Are you running on a PC Jr.?

Citrix isn't making any money. They paid what, like $200 million for Xen and now they give it away? They'll get swallowed by either Oracle or Microsoft within 5 years.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[shutdown -p now]

That's kinda GP's point - Virtual Server is effectively replaced by Hyper-V now.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[mabhatter654]

virtual PC has nothing to do with "windows" it had everything to do with getting x-box (x86) ported to 360 (PowerPC) Windows-on-Windows (used by Vista) has nothing to do with hardware emulation, just apis.. like WINE (only with the actual windows code!)

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Hyper-V and XenServer aren't as mature as VMware, XenServer is quite close, but both need a couple more years of massaging and active deployments before they reach the functionality and integration of VMware's offerings. ESX3.x is well ahead, ESX4 blows them out of the water.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[The Bungi]

I have no idea what you just said.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Courageous]

*cough* Since it happens all the time already, what happens when it becomes unbootable?

This happened, once, due to some shenanigans of our own. We restored the SQL Server database on a pristine install. Didn't take very long.

But I digress. The market agrees with me. That's why Citrix has to give it away, you know. Perhaps ranting like yours is why Citrix has yet to field a centralized management system. If so, this will be to their ongoing downfall. What they offer is just not what the community wants, you know?

As for what I'd prefer, it's Virtuozzo's model, where every hypervisor host is a member of the management server cluster. But that's a story for a different day.

C//

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[mysidia]

Restoring a SQL database takes a long time, during which all management functions are unavailable.

XenServer provides all the features a centralized management system provides.

The "pool master" server handles management functions, if the pool master dies, management functions are down until you bring the master back up or emergency designate one of the slaves as new master.

The recent downfall of Citrix has been that until 5.5, there was no equivalent to VMware's "VM snapshot", or VMware Consolidated Backup (other than storagelink).

They fixed that in 5.5. I think the single biggest remaining disparity is that XenServer has no memory overcommitment capability, and VMware does.

Also, VMware can properly virtualize more OSes than Citrix's solution can. e.g. NetBSD, FreeBSD, ...

Xen performance is awesome when you are running a paravirtualized OS, and it's also excellent when you are running paravirtualized drivers for I/O

But if you are running some obscure Linux version or appliance in HVM mode without a paravirtualized kernel, and without paravirtualized drivers available, forget it, the network I/O, disk performance, and timing accuracy for such setups seems to be horrible.

Re:Another reason why VMWare is the...

[Courageous]

XenServer provides all the features a centralized management system provides.

Shrug. I tried it again about 2 months ago. Terminated the eval mid stream. To be sure, we called tech support. We were sure. What you're saying just isn't true. I suspect it's what the Xen developers tell themselves, but the problem is: they just don't get it.

Until they do, I along with the vast market, will have no interest in them.

C//

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[dunkelfalke]

Well, when Oracle buys Virtual Iron, they also buy all their commitments. That means they still have to fulfill all support contracts.

NOT totally in the s---

[Anonymous Coward]

VI customers could just switch to emacs.

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[Khan]

ROFL!! I would have modded you up if you hadn't posted as a AC.

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[Savage-Rabbit]

VI customers could just switch to emacs.

HERETIC!!

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[Anonymous Coward]

VI customers could just switch to emacs.

Now they have two problems.

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they hate VI!

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[jsiren]

VI customers could just switch to emacs.

HERETIC!!

Because ed is the standard text editor.

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[Hurricane78]

Yeah. Emacs is the oldest software-only complete virtualization system, and much more proven than VMware. Although it only runs lisp machine code.

Ok, I'll have to go, see my "M-x doctor".

P.S.: Don't make the error, thinking that this went over my head, when it went over yours. ;)

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[Hurricane78]

No, nowadays it's Nano. Which is not much better either. ;)

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[mysidia]

VI customers could just switch to emacs.

Emacs is great with its Ctrl+Alt+Meta+Escape+2 S for starting a VM and such.

The problem is it needs to get vMotion, HA cluster config, and Host Profile support, to be seriously considered by most enterprises over vi.

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[crazyvas]

And how that's not totally in the s--- ? ;)

Re:NOT totally in the s---

[crazyvas]

You just don't get it, do you? There aren't that many virtual machines like VI out there that can work with everything that a demanding OS like emacs throws at it.

Oracle is not IBM.

[reporter]

After Oracle agreed to buy Sun Microsystems, many analysts claimed that Oracle intended to become another IBM by selling all components in the typical server room and by supporting those components with the same kind of high-value customer service.

Well, the analysts were wrong. Without warning, Oracle just abruptly terminated a product line on which its customers may have built their entire information-technology infrastructure. This kind of approach to customer service is not how IBM treats its customers.

Look at how IBM handled the sunsetting of OS/2. IBM issued a warning long in advance of ceasing sales and distribution of the product. Then, after the termination date, IBM continues to sell service contracts to support the product if a customer continues to need support.

Hmmm. Maybe the time has come to short my Oracle stock.

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the time to short your Oracle stock was March 2000. It is still down 55% since then.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=ORCL&t=my

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm. Maybe the time has come to short my Oracle stock.

Short stock that you own? That's a new one.

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Short stock that you own? That's a new one.

No its not. In fact, it is common enough. It is somewhat like buying puts on shares you own.

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[(H)elix1]

This is not a fair product comparison: OS2 vs VI's end of life. Both companies buy product, in some cases to integrate, others to remove competition, and others yet again to just own the customer base. Expect the same careful moves when the database gets put down someday.

I'm willing to bet it will play out more along these lines... For existing customer who already own the product, Oracle will support them for as long as they are willing to pay for support. For those who did not buy yet - sorry, no product can be bought anymore. For previous partners, a tough break. Continue to sell services to existing customers, but don't plan for any new customers. Now would be a very good time to rethink product - any of the other VM products - and see if there might be a reasonable match to what they were doing.

 

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[jonbryce]

And you can still get OS/2 even now.
http://www.ecomstation.com/

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[Anonymous Coward]

It allows you to change the risk/profit balance, like insurance against the stock price falling.

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[davecb]

Actually they have three product lines which overlap, and this is the one that's closest to being a startup.. I assume they wanted the technology to put into one of the others, and they'll happily sell the resulting composite to the Virtual Iron customers.

This neither proves nor disproves that Oracle would like to sell all the components that you need in your server room. I suspect they do, in part because it's now to be a merger, not a buy-and-close like Virtual Iron.

I also suspect that IBM is cursing themselves for missing the chance to do a buy-and-close of Sun.

--dave

Re:Oracle is not IBM.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can still get OS/2 even now.
http://www.ecomstation.com/

ghjkhgjkghjk

Don't forget VirtualBox

[somenickname]

Though probably not for data center use, VirtualBox would add a fourth virtualization technology to their list. I'm more interested to see what they do with VirtualBox than what they do with all their overlapping Xen offerings.

Re:Don't forget VirtualBox

[erroneus]

VirtualBox is really for the desktop... or developing VMs for the enterprise, which is where I hope they go with it. I really like VirtualBox. It's free, does everything I need it to do and has replaced my use of VMWare Workstation nicely. If VMWare Workstation were free, I'd switch back.

Re:Don't forget VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox is really for the desktop... or developing VMs for the enterprise, which is where I hope they go with it. I really like VirtualBox. It's free, does everything I need it to do and has replaced my use of VMWare Workstation nicely. If VMWare Workstation were free, I'd switch back.

Well it's free for now at least...

Re:Don't forget VirtualBox

[rbanffy]

No. It just costs nothing.

Re:Don't forget VirtualBox

[fatp]

Actually, since VirtualBox a desktop product, I think don't think Oracle has much interest in it. Oracle has never owned / marketed any successful desktop product. VirtualBox is actually the product that I worried most in it's recent acquires. I hope they will open-source the currently proprietary parts of the software if they are not interested.

Maybe Oracle's next target will be Citrix... then it will own and merge all major Xen based VM solutions.

(BTW, I don't think they will kill mysql. Instead, I think it will add several % to its market share by including mysql, or say that several more TB of data on the planet are stored in Oracle databases.)

Re:Don't forget VirtualBox

[erroneus]

I wish I could link one reply to multiple comments at once.

The VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) is making very good strides lately. I also worry about VirtualBox because I use it and love it. It works equally well on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Very few software projects can claim that. But if VirtualBox were killed, then I think the OSE would also fail and die.

Re:Don't forget VirtualBox

[mysidia]

It's not a purely desktop product. It can run in headless mode like VMware Server.

It can also run VMs without VT, and has some very nice advantages at what it does.

I would expect Oracle to see the value in that, and either continue development, so they can offer a "complete" alternative to VMware's software stack, or shelve it to be sold off in the future.

Re:Don't forget VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean Sun VirtualBox? The same Sun that Oracle has already said they were buying?

Let's see:
1. Migrate from VirtualIron to VirtualBox.
2. Oracle buys Sun / VirtualBox.
3. ??
4. Profit

Wouldn't that just be a kick in the ball sack?

Poor Sun employees...

[julie-h]

I really wouldn't want to be a Sun employee right now. For us none-Sun employee, it will be interesting to see, what Oracle will be using a Virtual machine technology.

Re:Poor Sun employees...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Oracle will fund the R&D of some super Virtual Machine technology that will merge all these VM's into one huge 'borg VM that will do everything obsoleting Xen, VI, VMware, and Java's VM all in one fell swoop?

Re:Poor Sun employees...

[malchus842]

There aren't all that many Sun employees left. A couple of major layoffs and I've seen my rep get RIFd 3 times in the past year....

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice fantasy you got there.

If by kill

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "kill" you mean take a product based on Xen and merge it with your product based on Xen.

How is that killing anything? Did Fiat kill Chrysler?

English motherfucker, do you speak it?

Re:If by kill

[Anonymous Coward]

Daimler Benz bought Chrysler, realized it was a turd (with union pensions destroying any chance of being profitable) and paid Cerberus capital management to take it. Cerberus was planning on selling it (to GM or someone else) as soon as they could, but the economy shit itself like John McCain after a prune eating contest. Instead of investing their own money, Cerberus begged for a bailout. George Bush and Barack Obama gave them money. When they ran out again, Barack Obama told them they wouldn't get any more unless they sold themselves to Fiat. So the problem is, Chrysler has been passed around like a 12-year old boy at the geek compound. While For and GM have strong international sales, Chrysler was whittled down to being a regional player.

Re:If by kill

[Anonymous Coward]

Kill as in not able to buy the product any more. Yeah, maybe Oracle will get around to merging VI with OracleVM, but it will probably take months at least. I'm a VirtualIron customer (one of a few) but I can tell you there's no way in hell I'm moving to Oracle or Microsoft. Citrix is having a hard time and might end up getting bought. Redhat too... I guess I'll be moving to VMware....

This sucks.

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they just pay out a modest amount in refunds equal to the remaining value of the contract. Nobody would be able to sue them for significant damages.

They made the product even more virtual

[Anonymous Coward]

The product allowed people to eliminate physical boxes and still run dozens or hundreds of logical servers. Now, Oracle has discovered how to do away with customer support and engineering, too. Kinda like the next wave of virtualization - Virtual Virtual ("V-Squared") Iron, only from Oracle.

Re:They made the product even more virtual

[fishbowl]

>The product allowed people to eliminate physical boxes and still run dozens or hundreds of logical servers.

For us, ESX is the difference between needing a new contract with our electical contractor (hundreds of thousands of dollars) versus working with our current power capabilities. It's not about the host machines, the licenses, or even the sysadmin workload. It's more about the power supplies and cooling the racks than anything else.

Re:They made the product even more virtual

[Antique Geekmeister]

I agree that virtual machines are wonderful, especially for older, low-usage applications that don't need modern iron to run on, and especially for legacy applications and legacy environments. But if I see one more "Installing VMware Tools" status running for 3 days on the same virtual instance, or another unpatched RHEL security hole in what is essentially a 6 year old RHEL operating system stuffed into a managed environment, and with no RHEL license provided so you don't even get security notices about vulnerabilities in SSH or any other services nor the ability to install usable monitoring tools without grabbing the critical components from a registered ancient RHEL machine or a CentOS repository, I'll need, I'll need, I'll need.

Oh dear. Language escapes me. I've had to run a number of those recently, and it's awkward. I much prefer what RHEL did with Xen, incorporating it into the basic OS and providing good para-virtualization support with a much lighter weight, usable interface and licensing that included numerous virtual instances running on any registered RHEL server.

Re:They made the product even more virtual

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

Kinda like the next wave of virtualization - Virtual Virtual ("V-Squared") Iron, only from Oracle.

Duh, that's nothing, banks have been virtualizing their profits AND their capital for over two years now.

Re:They made the product even more virtual

[mysidia]

Well, importing ancient RHEL installs into a virtualization environment is perverse.

Clean CentOS 5.2 installs should be made, and the duties transferred to the virtual machine, long before remotely considering porting an ancient RHEL release to a VM.

Anything with a 2.4.x kernel is pretty bad in a VM, due esp. to kernel timing issues and system clock getting way out of sync with real time (and no, running NTP in such a VM doesn't help, due to the unpredictability of VM system clock latency, resulting unreliable NTP in the VM may in fact make it a lot worse)

Re:They made the product even more virtual

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Clean CentOS 5.2 installs should be made, and the duties transferred to the virtual machine, long before remotely considering porting an ancient RHEL release to a VM.

Oh, my. Oh, dear. You haven't actually tried this much, have you? Rebuilding ancient source code in a modern compiler is difficult enough, due to changes in POSIX over the last 10 years. Capturing their ancient build environment with which someone careless and without tools like "mock" or good build management compiled the code is worse, which makes resolving the dependencies a nightmare. _Finding_ the original source code, or the version used to compile it, its own nightmare: not everyone is good about using CVS or submitting all their changes or keeping the trunk of their source code repository clean. Couple this with fundamental changes in glibc, kernels, databases such as MySQL and Berkeley DB and SQLite, the switch from XFree86 to Xorg, etc.. And then there's the Perl modules. Do you really want to have to backport to old versions of modules for compatibility use, written by people who aren't available anymore? You pontentially multiply the amount of work by a factor of 10 or 20 having to resolve each of these differences, _if you even have the source code_ and _if you have the time to verify that it works _correctly_. That is a stunning waste of engineering time for obsolete or discarded projects which have to be preserved for legal or legacy data access reasons. A clean redesign from scratch is often a good idea, but that means you may not have access to your old data with the new tools. The upgrade tools automatically used with Berkeley DB upgrades, MySQL upgrades, etc. can reveal old bugs which no one can reliably repair without years of development effort and which didn't show up before in use with the old system.

I agree about kernel performance issues, but given that the underlying hardware is often 4 times as fast as the old hardware the old OS was originally running on, and the virtual machine takes a performance hit but should be lightly loaded because it's just for legacy access, it's normally an acceptable performance hit. And it's _cheap_ to run a lightly loaded virtual system.

Also note: I didn't restrict myself to RHEL. I've done this and helped provide resources to do this with OS's all the way back to RedHat 7.1 and several BSD UNIX's, and that kind of code porting is a lot of work. It's why I urge people to have a good general toolchain, like good source control with the actual working code in a clean tag with all the necessary build tools, using GNU autoconf and gcc and GNU make and tar rather than more sophisticated but less stable IDE based systems, keeping their documentation in text files rather than Wiki's, etc.

Purpose of open software

[noidentity]

In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it 'will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.' One partner said, 'So basically, anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI... is now totally in the s--.

This is a good example of the purpose for requiring that you have access to and can compile the source code to the software you're using. If the current developer decides to close shop or has it closed for them as in this case, you can just take ths code to another developer or set up a new shop, rather than be totally screwed like this.

Re:Purpose of open software

[jd]

It's also a good example of why being a company "likely to be around for a while" isn't worth a damn. Mergers and buy-outs happen, to small companies and large, and it renders all those nice platitudes as to why commercial products are so much "safer" to go with into meaningless drivel.

Re:Purpose of open software

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yes, I'll just take virtualization software source code and send it to another developer for fixes. I'm sure just any old development shop can handle that <rolls eyes>

The funniest part is that the OP was probably dead serious when he wrote that. If this is a "good example" of anything, it's an example of why having the source code doesn't buy ordinary people diddly squat.

Re:Purpose of open software

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good example of the purpose for requiring that you have access to and can compile the source code to the software you're using.

Customers do have access to the source, at least partially, since Virtual Iron is based on the open source Xen hypervisor:

http://www.xen.org/

Re:Purpose of open software

[braeldiil]

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that this product was completely open-source. But the core development team just got scooped up by Oracle to work on a competing project. So exactly the same situation, except the source code is freely available. What changes? Well first, the sales partners could keep selling the existing technology. They could probably afford a few bug fixes, but none of the sales partners would have anywhere near the revenue stream to hire a new team to support the project. If that had that kind of revenue, they wouldn't be sales partners. Not to mention, the sales partners are integration shops, not code shops. It's a different skill set, and there are going to be significant growing pains. Not too mention the months it would take to get a new programming team up to speed. That's the kind of risk that breaks companies, even if it goes fairly well. The community won't be any help - despite all the claims to the contrary, the vast majority of open-source code work is done by paid programmers in an environment similar to any other programming shop. You'll get the occasional bug fix from the community, but you're not going to get many new features. You want to keep up with your competitors, you need a full time team. So the sellers could keep selling the same product. But without a source of updates, that's a slow trip to bankruptcy. Any sales partner worth a damn would look to immediately migrate to a supported platform. In other words, exactly what's happening here. Having the code wouldn't really change anything.

Re:Purpose of open software

[jonbryce]

One of the problems VI customers are facing at the moment is that they won't be able to deploy the system on new machines or extend the licence numbers etc. That would not be a problem with free or open source software.

Re:Purpose of open software

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they hire someone competent to do so. It's no different with virtualization software.

Many embedded software vendors use QEMU heavily for testing and emulation and do have QEMU developers on their payroll.

There's a similar arrangement with hosting companies and the Linux-VServer project.

Re:Purpose of open software

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, yes, I'll just take virtualization software source code and send it to another developer for fixes. I'm sure just any old development shop can handle that "

Why not? I'm not any kind of programing guru (I'm not even a programer by trade but more of a sysadmin) and I write little maintenance patches and backports to our Xen 3.0 sources till we can manage to upgrade to a more modern release -for a company under 100 people. I can't see how a multimillion dolar company can't devote a hacker's or at least half a hacker's time to that if the need arises.

Re:Purpose of open software

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a complete idiot, and probably never dealt with Oracle support. Oracle will support a product for as long as a customer is willing to pay for it. Not selling to new customers has nothing to do with issuing new licensing to an existing customer.

Re:Purpose of open software

[omz13]

The funniest part is that the OP was probably dead serious when he wrote that. If this is a "good example" of anything, it's an example of why having the source code doesn't buy ordinary people diddly squat.

So true! Years ago when I worked at a software house our CEO was paranoid about the source code... he wanted it locked away as he was afraid our "competitors" could get it. Now, there were a few problems with this. Our customers got the source code when they bought our system, since it needed to be compiled on their systems (as no two customers had the same configuration). Also, we didn't really have any competitors. Now, the joke is that even though our customers had the source, and the security blanket that should our company go down they could continue, the customers could do no more than compile the code. The real knowledge was locked in the heads of the programmers who knew HOW and WHY everything was put together in the source code... and, sadly, this is something that is still overlooked. The source isn't everything, but just part of it, and most people don't realize what the missing part is.

Re:Purpose of open software

[hemanman]

This is excactly why people buy Microsoft software, pure and simple.

-H

Re:Purpose of open software

[noidentity]

Oh, yes, I'll just take virtualization software source code and send it to another developer for fixes. I'm sure just any old development shop can handle that The funniest part is that the OP was probably dead serious when he wrote that. If this is a "good example" of anything, it's an example of why having the source code doesn't buy ordinary people diddly squat.

And having access to my car's engine doesn't buy me, an ordinary person, diddly squat, except that I can take it to an expert and have him do useful work on it.

If I were using a product, and I were offered the choice of either having the product just disappear overnight, or having the source code after its maintainer disappeared overnight, I'd takt the latter, because there is some chance I could find a developer who could at the very least make bug fixes. Also, chances are that I'm not the only company using said product, so there would be others who could pool their resources in order to set up a new maintainer.

Re:3 words from Oracle to existing VI customers...

[jd]

I thought it was "Emacs, Emacs, Emacs!" or "Developers, developers, developers!"

Oracles treatment of Virtual Iron

[Anonymous Coward]

"In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it 'will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.' One partner said, 'So basically, anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI... is now totally in the sâ".'"
There are reasons why people like Free/Open Source software. One of the reasons is its very reliable. Another is the low cost. Another is that you can do code audits independently and have security in your own hands (maintenance and development too). Nobody is forcing you to, and if you don't others will. Another big reason is that *if* you do a big setup and finally get things just so...., someone won't come along and say "no, you can't do that", or "sorry, we're pulling the plug, you have 5 days to stop using our product delete it from your computers and send us all original disks plus all backup copies.

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[oldhack]

Hey, if the shit's got shit, it's got shit.

The s-.?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I don't speak EditorStupid. What does "s-." mean?

Bastards

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bunch of scumbags. The people who wrote the technology their were unabe to get the shaft in the middle of a recession and they get the benefits.

we are still hanging in there

[Anonymous Coward]

the closer you are to the customer, the better off you are, as I see it. Many have a hopeful belief that Oracle will come in and fix everything that the current management either couldn't or wouldn't do. Me, I'm not so sure. Oracle management is going to have to prove they are any better than what we have now.

This is what People Worry About

[Orion Blastar]

What if they phase out MySQL in order to promote the Oracle database?

I guess Oracle considered it didn't make sense to have three different virtual machine technologies and wanted to combine them all into one product and got rid of Virtual Iron but kept their IP and source code and technology. But then the VI customers and employees get shafted. Nice public relations there Oracle, you are channeling Microsoft through you on that one.

I guess they didn't learn their lesson from the Dotcom bubble bursting, and I figure it will come back and haunt them later.

Re:This is what People Worry About

[javajawa]

except... Microsoft bought out about four different accounting packages and still offers all of them, or is in the process of merging different packages into similar ones... with backward compatibility... No. Microsoft has more brains than this.

Re:This is what People Worry About

[davecb]

They bought the relational engine that MySQL uses over a year ago, and then instead of shutting it down, invested money in improving its performance.

Larry reputedly says he wants more people to learn SQL, because in the long run it will bring Oracle customers.

It looks like the cases may be different.

--dave

Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is more evil than microsoft

VI

[Tokerat]

Real datacenters use Emacs.

Re:VI

[Tokerat]

.....aaaannnnddd -1 Redundant, beaten by an AC. FML.

Antitrust

[moosesocks]

Why isn't this illegal?

Re:Antitrust

[mysidia]

Because buying out a company to kill their product is a legitimate practice, unless Oracle has a monopoly over virtualization technology that they are perpetuating or creating.

Which they clearly don't. Oracle's virtualization technology isn't very popular, it's a tiny fraction of the market.

They must have a better reason in mind for taking VI than killing a competitor, and the reason they'd stop developing it, would be that it's a cost that doesn't contribute towards their current strategy.

Clearly Oracle wants to use VI's work to help jumpstart their own integrated virtualization stack with better management tools, rather than continue to support VI's product.

If they're firing all VI employees but 10, i'd be very interested to know what 10 they are keeping.

If my hunch is right, the 10 would include developers, software engineers, architects, or project managers that have a deep understanding of the VI management architecture, who would best be able to assist with the integration of VI technology into Oracle's architecture.

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[rbanffy]

Yeah, right.

Just remember the product roadmap just vanished in the air and you will have to plan a platform migration for as soon as your support contract ends, if Oracle doesn't decide to end it prematurely.

In any case, you lose.

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[hairyfeet]

Uuuhhh....correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Virtual Iron based on Xen, correct? So why wouldn't the former customers of VI simply go to Xen for their needs and buy support directly from the developers of the product? As my dad always says "better to deal with The Chief directly than all the little Indians." I'm sure the Xen guys have some sort of support structure in place.

After Oracle dumped me like that I wouldn't do business with them anyway. Just dumping an enterprise product like that without some sort of migration plan in place for the customers just strikes me as amateurish.

Death FIRST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me VI or give me death!

Paddle

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

after a short time: all your paddle are belong to us

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[Hurricane78]

They can't. At least not, without you agreeing. I mean what's the point of a support contract, that can be canceled, as soon as you need support? That would be fraud, and thereby illegal.

Existing customers NOT "in the sh--"

[wealthychef]

The current customers are not really screwed like the article claims. I think their life will get better, as they are now dealing with a steady established company.
FTFA: ""When the integrated product becomes generally available, Virtual Iron customers will be able to move to the new, integrated product and benefit from a more feature rich-solution than is available today." But Oracle has not said when the combined product will arrive, and Virtual Iron's partners and customers may feel that Oracle has left them out to the cold in terminating the company's product so swiftly. Presumably, it will take several months - if not a full year - to combine the two products."

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[sjames]

Except the part about expanding. That's where customers are at now. If they need more licenses to expand their operations, they are SOL.

That's exactly the situation Free Software never puts you in. You can always install another copy. If Virtual Iron had been Free Software with a support contract, then the existing customers would still receive that support for their existing installations but would also have the ability to expand if necessary and even find someone else to support them.

I'm also guessing that if any bugs are discovered, they'll be marked "won't fix" even if the workaround is no better than "so don't do that". Support tends to become very limited when you don't actually want to sell or support the product anymore and only do so to meet old (inherited) obligations.

Re:But Open Source if flakey and you cannot rely..

[JAlexoi]

I believe that every contract has a cancellation clause. And it usually states what can be and what cannot be done. Canceling a contract is one of the basics of contract law in all legal systems. And those support contracts either are one sided, the support provides does not guarantee anything, or they have ramifications to the supplier, usualy financial ones. I believe Oracle can just pay those cancellation fees and be done with it.

You can depend on Oracle for commericial support

[Anonymous Coward]

... for their own Oracle-branded rendition of RHEL and the Oracle-branded rendition of Xen-based virtual machines. It works quite well, is fully "certified" by Oracle and you can indeed by formal support for this platform.

sun products are next

[theshowmecanuck]

Anyone who uses Netbeans needs to start leaning how to use Eclipse or JDeveloper. Never mind all those who use Open Office.

Is the war finally over?

[SL Baur]

'So basically, anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI... is now totally in the sâ".'"

Emacs wins!

We use Virtual Iron at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK

I worked in a company that did exactly that.

[jotaeleemeese]

Just because you have worked in small companies it does not mean it can't be done.