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.

Relevance

[R15I23D05D14Y]

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.

retarded comments in summary

[timmarhy]

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"

Re:retarded comments in summary

[evanbd]

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?

[Bacon Bits]

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).

Unbreakable Xen

[passthecrackpipe]

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.

Re:Isn't this just Oracle re-branding RHEL 5.1

[I kan Spl]

Yup.

"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?

[martyros]

I think this quote from their Oracle VM FAQ is more telling:

Recognizing enterprise customers' demand for fully supported server virtualization, Oracle now offers Oracle VM backed by a world-class support organization, as well as a full suite of Oracle product certifications.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Unbreakable Xen

[prichardson]

Are you suggesting Oracle is doing this out of spite? Entities run by committee aren't exactly the breeding grounds of emotional decisions.

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

[Drinking Bleach]

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.

Re:Unbreakable Xen

[cerberusss]

Say what you want about Ellison, but he's the boss and he's very much a human being. If he has a petty grudge then there can be a hundred committees in Oracle but none will be in the way.

Re:UnFAKEable Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Relevance

[Anonymous Coward]

No stock prices reflect the number of people who want to buy the >stock as compared with the number of people who want to sell it. Stock prices may have nothing to do with the viability of the products and services the company sells (at least in the short run). That's why there was a dot com bubble in the first place.

Oracle Is Latest To Take On VMware

[Alex]

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

Re:Can they compete?

[deroby]

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.