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.

Isn't this just Oracle re-branding RHEL 5.1

[BestNicksRTaken]

Seems a bit strange how RHEL 5.1 offers Windows virtualisation with Xen 3.1 and just days later Oracle does the same.

And how can this make VMWare stock drop by 10%? Xen ain't new (or great).

Sorta makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

for Oracle to get into the VM business.

Then they can ship pre-built VM images with oracle already installed and configured. Thus, the database server becomes a VM appliance (not quite a dishwasher yet...)
Easier to support (ie lower costs) especially if the VM runs Linux. As much as I hate Oracle, this following their 'legal theft' of RHEL it all starts to hang together.
However, it remains to be seen if they can build up their support side so that is basically 'sucks less' than it does now. There is a danger that they are spreading themselves too thin.

I don't think VMWare should get too worried by this. The overall market for VM's is huge. As long as the quality of their product stays high then their market will grow along with the overall market for VM Systems.

 

Re:Any word on if it works

[jobsagoodun]

We had interesting experiences of virtualising network services. Its all OK until you try to push lots of small interactions through your VM; then you start to push up against whatever way & freq the CPU is shared between VMs. Its less of a problem if you have more CPUs though.

Re:Can they compete?

[cerberusss]

I'd be surprised if they invest the time to actually make those work.

Yeah, me too. I spent some time at Oracle and while marketing paid lip service to the Microsoft stack, the division that did projects couldn't be less interesting. In a big department meeting, I asked the department head whether we will do something with C# besides Java. The room actually laughed. The department head didn't know what C# was.

Re:Any word on if it works

[larstr]

Critical servers are not typically virtualized because they get good performance or for consolidation reasons, but http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9468.pdf [vmware.com] because of http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0107.pdf [vmware.com] DR. Since storage IO is http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745?tstart=15&start=275 [vmware.com] slower inside a virtualized enviroment you will need to spend some more time to plan your storage environment and implement it right in order to get the expected performance even if it might a bit be more expensive.

Lars

Re:you're probably right

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the DBA here, but we have most of our Oracle servers running on Redhat ES on VMWare ESX 3, and they're perfectly fine. Which is exactly what you'd expect, frankly.

I've not heard that Oracle refuse to support systems installed on VMWare though. I think the last time we actually tried to get support from Oracle was, er, never. Our developers report bugs to them, and that's about it.

I suspect that if their refusal to support is true, then it's for bullshit reasons. Exactly what you'd expect from a company like Oracle, really.

Re:Can they compete?

[CandideEC]

Do you work in the real world? Who the hell have you met with a *right* mind? Everything I see is backwards and upside down...and people seem happy to have it that way. Plenty of places run mission critical systems on Windows. Nobody said it's smart or recommended. When I see something done smart around the businesses I work with, I do a handstand. Its an amazing moment indeed. Its half baked because they are coming after VMWare. Not supporting the most used Operating System at a reasonable speed yet is just half baked. Many tech centers we install at are just windows only. I can't dictate anything different to them.

Re:Can they compete?

[Estanislao Martínez]

But for the diversified stock-owner you dont want each and every one of your stocks weighted down by the dead fat they're trying to protect. You want lean companies generating high profits in a single area. If you wanted diverse, you'd _buy_ diverse. And then _sell_ it when a niche looked about to tank.

That's a pretty good point, but I think we can take it further.

If you're an investor, you have two ways to diversify your investments:

1. You can buy into the stocks of a wider, more diverse set of companies.
2. You can convince the companies you have shares in to diversify their business.

The former will always be easier to do--you just buy more stocks (or just go ahead and buy everything [vanguard.com]--and everything else [vanguard.com], too.

The latter is the only option available to people who are hyper-concentrated in one company's stock and can't trade out--i.e., people [wikipedia.org] who control companies [wikipedia.org] that are really big [oracle.com].

This is not to say that diversifying a company's business makes no sense--there's no reason in principle why it can't work, and in fact, bringing many things under one roof can achieve efficiencies that separate companies can't. But the point is that there is a definite potential for a conflict of interest between majority and minority shareholders.

Diversification [within a single company] is for those with a sentimental attachment to an organization.

And here, as you can guess, I think you're wrong. If you control a company, and that company forms the bulk of your net worth, there is nothing sentimental behind your desire to diversify your business. The only way you can retain all that wealth is by holding on to your stock, and diversifying the business can protect its value.