Is Oracle on a good start with Virtualization?

This one things thinks (just hate those typos when the mind is running faster than those clumsy fingers..where is my AI Assistant, right now good friend Kris is burdened with the spell-check thing!) yes in the long run.

It's still early days for Oracle VM, however, with demand for virtualizing enterprise applications just ramping up, Wolf said. And on the management front at least, there are several efforts afoot to create parity between Xen-based platforms and ESX. Wolf cites standards efforts from the Distributed Management Task Force Inc., such as the Open Virtual Machine Format and its Common Information Model, or CIM, management profiles for virtualization.

"In a couple of years, running multiple different virtualization platforms might not be that big of a deal," Wolf said.

Despite VMware ESX's huge lead, "Oracle is off to a very good start," and a lot of Oracle shops will probably bite on Oracle VM, Wolf said. "Oracle has a lot of clout. If the product is good and less than VMware in cost, then a lot of organizations are going to take a good, hard look at it."

Link Here

Here Larry Ellison, the CEO comments that Live Migration a commodity now.

"Our new announcement is doing something that Red Hat is not doing, shipping Oracle VM underneath Linux. ... We have live migration. You can migrate the virtual machine while it's running from machine A to B," he said.

In a jab at VMware's VMotion migration tool, he added: "Some companies say, 'We're the only ones who can do that.' Not any more."

Technical support for Oracle VM is priced at $999 a year for a four-way server. "That's a better price than you can get from VMware," he said.

Ellison also said Oracle VM was Xen re-engineered by Oracle to be "dramatically faster than our competition. It runs a lot faster."

VMware responded with a blog on its site that listed ten reasons why Oracle runs best under VMware's ESX hypervisor. ESX can support near native performance of Oracle in a virtual machine and drive over 63,000 database I/Os per second, about 50 times the requirement of a typical database, the blog said.

Steve Lanchak, head of BearingPoint's Oracle consulting practice, said there may be debates over the fine points of Oracle's announcements but its movement in Fusion middleware and Fusion applications was in step with "simplifying the movement toward an SOA environment."

Enterprises looking to reorganize their software infrastructure around services were being given lots of choices through "the sheer number of SOA-enabled end points in the new applications," added Rob Youngblood, a lead consultant with BearingPoint's Oracle Solutions Practice Group.

In other words, there are lots of ways to connect application function to application function, or business processes to data under the Fusion approach, he said.

IW covered that issue.

And this article disagrees that Oracle's virtualization bid can make any difference:

Oracle Corp. is making a lot of noise this week about its introduction of the Oracle VM Xen-based hypervisor. But analysts and channel partners -- many of whom sell or use open source virtualization software -- still think Oracle's virtualization effort is too weak to make much of a difference to them.

"I don't care what Oracle comes out with and I don't care what Microsoft comes out with -- VMware owns the market and they are two to three years ahead compared to their competitors, who all have to catch up," said Sandy Cohn, general manager and director of technical services at the Albany, N.Y.-based ATEC Group. "I can't change what we've started with our customers; VMware has a proven product and I can't shift now to another virtualization vendor," Cohn added.

TechTarget link here.