Oracle Is Latest To Take On VMware 109
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.
Relevance (Score:5, Insightful)
retarded comments in summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:retarded comments in summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly.
And why would we expect the market to "punish" them? Does anyone actually expect it to cost them sales or other revenue, or increase their costs, or otherwise have a relevant impact on their financial status?
Re:Can they compete? (Score:4, Insightful)
Never question the stupidity of a corporation when it's only ever going to improve the products you actually buy (or buy into).
Unbreakable Xen (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't this just Oracle re-branding RHEL 5.1 (Score:2, Insightful)
"Unbreakable Linux" is simply RHEL with a bunch of tweaks to make Oracle apps run better.
The tweaks are nice, but it is the same OS.
Re:Can they compete? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Any word on if it works (Score:5, Insightful)
Also - really can we get more retarded biased comments about stock prices in the summaries. It's good for a WTF chuckle.
Re:Unbreakable Xen (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd wager that Oracle is just adding another product for the purposes of presenting some sort of purely Oracle virtualized database solution. Petty grudges are not profitable.
Re:UnFAKEable Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Unbreakable Xen (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:UnFAKEable Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Relevance (Score:4, Insightful)
Oracle Is Latest To Take On VMware (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Can they compete? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.