Oracle VM

Why does VMware care about Virtual Iron customers?

Good news, Virtual Iron customers: In the words of Tom Petty, you don’t have to live like a refugee.

VMware is reaching out to Virtual Iron users, following Oracle’s decision to kill off the Virtual Iron product line last week. (Oracle acquired Virtual Iron in May.) As my colleague Alex Barrett reports today, VMware is offering Virtual Iron customers 40% off the list price of vSphere and vCenter.

The offer is an apparent attempt to keep Virtual Iron’s customers from moving to Oracle VM (which is what Oracle wants them to do). But that raises the question: Why does VMware care?

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Oracle-Sun: A threat to VMware?

You may have heard this morning that Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Like Ron Burgundy, it’s kind of a big deal.

Most of the early reaction to the news has focused on the fallout in the database market. Oracle, the market leader, now owns the biggest thorn in its side, Sun’s open source MySQL.

But the real legacy of the Oracle-Sun acquisition could be its effect on the virtualization market — particularly on VMware.

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Oracle beefs up virtualization offering with management capabilities

I have to admit that I have been less than kind when it comes to Oracle’s virtualization software and licensing policies; I’ve written articles about their stubborn refusal to support their customers who use VMware, user frustrations with their licensing policies, and their unsubstantiated performance claims about Oracle VM being three times faster than other server virtualization software.

But, the newly released Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 (10gR5) includes a VM Management Pack for Oracle VM that gives people using Oracle VM competitive features like high availability, lifecycle automation and application relationship management, making it a more attractive virtualization option.

Oracle’s Xen-based hypervisor runs on x86-64 Intel- and AMD- based systems and can support any operating system that runs on those platforms. Oracle officially certifies Linux and Microsoft Windows to run as a guest OS. The Oracle VM management tool (Oracle VM Manager) comes in the form of a Web-based interface that manages virtual server pools and performs tasks like live migrations.

The Oracle VM Management Pack 10gR5 gives users a way to manage their physical and virtual environments from one console. Some features include diagnostics of whether a problem is due to an application component, a virtual machine or physical resource issue and built-in configuration management that gives IT a way to track application relationships and analyze configuration changes.

The new management pack also lets you assign specific policies for virtualization, automated deployment through Oracle VM Templates for packaged applications, middleware, database, and Oracle Enterprise Linux. There are also lifecycle automation features for testing, deployment, patching and maintenance capabilities, including automated patching of operating systems and Oracle software running inside the guest VMs.

Lastly, Oracle VM users can now get high availability with new features that allow for server pooling, automatic load balancing and server failover. Many analysts say high availability is an absolute necessity when it comes to virtualization, so it’s great that Oracle decided to add that feature.

Perhaps I should start considering Oracle VM a contender in the virtualization market, especially against Microsoft Hyper-V, which doesn’t even have live migration yet. Or maybe not. Either way, it is an option.

If you run a ton of Oracle apps and you want to give Oracle VM a shot, it is free to download form their website. Oracle VM support per two-socket server costs $599, and includes access to software and updates through the Unbreakable Linux Network and 24X7 support. Oracle VM Premier Support costs $1,797 per two sockets for three years, and includes network access plus 24×7 support.

Xen version 3.3 enhances performance, scalability to open source hypervisor

Xen.org announced the release of a new version of the project’s open source hypervisor, Xen 3.3 today, with enhancements to security, performance and scalability.

The release is now available for download from the Xen.org community site and is the product of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 hardware, software, and security vendors.

The new Xen 3.3 release provides users with the new features including:

* Power management in the hypervisor
* Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) emulation domains for better scalability, performance and security
* Shadow pagetable improvements for the best HVM performance ever
* Hardware Assisted Paging enhancements
* Device passthrough enhancements
* CPUID feature levelling that allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models (within the same vendor brand - Intel or AMD)

Xen 3.3 provides virtualization for x64, IA64 and ARM-based platforms, and through close links with CPU and chipset vendors in the Xen project, Xen 3.3 also supports the latest hardware virtualization enhancements, like Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT).

With Xen’s memory ballooning feature, the hypervisor can reallocate memory between guest Virtual Machines (VMs) to guarantee performance and allow greater density of VMs per server. Xen 3.3 also offers CPU portability to allow live migration of VMs across different CPUs, active power optimization to reduce server power consumption, and significant security enhancements.

Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems, said in a statement, “In just two years, Xen has rapidly gained share in virtualization, much as Linux did in operating systems - and in the same period Xen has driven the price of competing hypervisors to zero, allowing any vendor to include virtualization for free.”

In addition to its growing development community, Xen hypervisor is the standard virtualization platform used by cloud computing providers like Amazon.com. It is also used in virtualization products from Citrix (XenServer), Fujitsu, Novell, Oracle (Oracle VM), Sun Microsystems (Sun xVM), and Virtual Iron, and is available as an embedded option in many x86 servers.

Ericom desktop virtualization now available on Oracle VM

Today, Ericom software announced the availability of Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect for Oracle VM desktop virtualization (VDI) software as a free download. This announcement of an Oracle VM for the PowerTerm VDI product extends Oracle VM’s footprint to the VDI space with an Ericom product that has excelled over the years in products based on terminal services.

Ericom currently offers support for the 14 largest hypervisors including Oracle VM through products such as WebConnect. In this configuration, the Oracle VM virtual host is managed by Ericom’s WebConnect instead of Oracle VM Manager. This configuration of Oracle VM is the base product without modification. WebConnect provides the address and credentials to the Oracle VM virtual host to start the configuration and management process.

I had an opportunity to hear from Oracle and Ericom about this release. Eran Heyman, CEO of Ericom said that his company “wants to remove the barrier of entry for a VDI solution,” as many organizations are considering implementing VDI, but do not know where to start in the selection process. “The cost is minimal, licenses will be zero and the equipment can be reused if another solution is chosen” when choosing a Oracle VM, according to Heyman.

The Oracle VM hypervisor and the Oracle VM Manager suite deliver template virtual machines, which model a virtual appliance for database products such as Oracle Database 11g.