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Oracle has announced their own Xen based virtualization solution called Oracle VM. Finally Oracle is recognizing that their customers want and deploy virtualization solutions, but bringing "Yet Another Xen" (YAX) solution to the market seems to me to be a bit strange. How many do we have now? 5? 6? In addition, refusing to offer support for other virtualization products like VMware ESX server seems like a bad move.

What Oracle fails to understand is that a great number of their clients already run their products on other virtualization solutions and will be hard pressed to move their virtual machines to a "new" platform. They have already invested time and money in their infrastructure, and bringing another virtualization solution in to the datacenter is not something most clients will do in a heartbeat.

In the same way that Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that most virtualization customers want a OS-agnostic virtualization vendor, Oracle still fails to understand the basic virtualization needs of their clients, as they have for a long time with regards to their licensing policies.

From the Oracle VM FAQ:

Will Oracle support customers who are using Oracle products on other x86 server virtualization environments?
Oracle VM is the only x86-based server virtualization environment on which Oracle products are supported.

Bad move Oracle. Your clients won't like to be locked in like that, especially the ones that have already implemented virtualization in their infrastructure.

Until the hypervisor is an embedded technology, like the BIOS, customers will want freedom of choice when looking for virtualization partners. I'm pretty sure that in the future the hypervisor will be embedded in the hardware, and this discussion will be pretty moot, but for now it's not.

As mentioned before, Microsoft wants the hypervisor to be a part of the OS, Oracle wants the hypervisor to be a part of their product. I think both of them are dead wrong in their assessment of this, I think clients wants to separate their virtualization efforts from their other software providers.

Until now, I had this sneaky feeling that Oracle would acquire Citrix at some point, but this move by Oracle probably means that my predictions were wrong. I can see why Citrix bought Xensource and integrate Xen into their portfolio, it fits into their application/service delivery strategy. Incorporating the whole Citrix infrastructure into Oracle would also make some sense, at least in my eyes, but just doing a rebranded Xen version and then only offering support for their own version seems outright stupid.

One thing that this move highlights though, is the need for a unified virtualization management solution. There is definitely a market for a "one management solution to rule them all" strategy here, it will be interesting to see who comes up with something like that first.

Update:

Chuck Hollis, from EMC, has posted "Oracle's Virtual Play" where he does a way better job than me outlining some of the problems with the Oracle VM release.

Broadly speaking, I think many parts of the IT industry has figured out what they're going to do with virtualization. They realize it's a big deal that means a lot to their customers, and changes all manner of things going forward.

Unfortunately, I don't think Oracle is one of them.

Yet.

And that's too bad.

I couldn't agree more.

Citrix has made Presentation Server 4.5 for Windows available via MyCitrix, and as far as I'm concerned the timing is perfect. I'm about to redo our Citrix farm, and I had scheduled a pilot installation next week and now I can do that on the new version instead.

I'll be sure to post more details about the new version as I set it up and test it.

According to an unofficial price list announced on thincomputing.net the post-Microsoft pricing of the Softgrid products will be drastically lowered, up to as much as 85%. According to the news posting, the new prices will be

Softgrid Desktop Licenses: €32 / $38 (list) Softgrid Terminal Server Licenses: €18 / $21 (list) Softgrid Terminal Server Licenses will no longer be based on the concurrent number of users (as in all Microsoft products) Softgrid ZeroTouch will be free and part of the Softgrid Server software. Softgrid SMS Connector: Free (if you have other Softgrid licenses) The Universal Desktop license will disappear: it's either a Destop or a Terminal Server license. Softricity Software Assurance will disappear completely.

While I was sure that the Microsoft buyout of SoftGrid would turn into lowered licensing costs for the products, I don't think anyone guess that the price cuts would be this big.

No official word on this yet, so it's still very much unconfirmed. If this turns out to be the case, the entry point for enterprise application virtualization has been dramatically lowered. Especially the Terminal Server license price looks to be dirt cheap, and SoftGrid is an excellent way of doing application isolation in Terminal Server/Citrix setups. No more application silo's sounds very, very intriguing to me, and frankly Citrix Application Isolation in Presentation Server 4.0 leaves a lot to be desired. Citrix has it's own Tarpon project, but so far I can't comment on that as I've never seen or used it.

Interesting times for all those of us that are interested in virtualization on any form.

Microsoft has launched a test site where you can try out beta 2 of Office 2007. Based on a Citrix setup you can try it out without installing anything locally, except the Citrix Web Client. You need a Windows Live account to be able to logon, as well as Internet Explorer 5.5+.

Check out http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testdrive.mspx for a no-install test of the upcoming Office 2007 release. There is also a full set of tutorials to help you walk through the preview.
I'm pretty sure this setup will also be a testing ground for Microsoft and their pay-as-you-go service announced earlier this year.

Again this is a perfect example of how to separate the local computer from the applications and provide a safe test environment utilizing virtualization techniques. I know this isn't virtualized in the true sense, but it does go a long way in providing a test environment where your own local client isn't affected by running the software locally.

By the way, the servers are running Windows Server 2003 R2 with the Luna theme. Pretty spiffy!

In a press release dated the 22nd of May 2006, Microsoft outlines their Virtualization Road Map.

Mostly well known news there, but one thing caught my attention though was the following passage:

Intent to acquire Softricity, Inc: Softricity’s application virtualization and streaming technologies provide application compatibility and accelerate corporate desktop transitions to Windows Vista.

Softricity is an american based company which makes a very nifty application virtualization suite (Softgrid) that helps you entirely sandbox applications in their own virtual environments. Often used in combination with Citrix based Terminal Server solutions, but their applications also allows you to stream applications to a desktop computer.

To me, this sounds very much like Microsoft is definately moving towards a more "applications as a service" approach, and moving away from traditional software installation/distribution. "Pay-as-you-go" applications, available anywhere and at any time, virtualization and more. Seems like Microsoft is really shifting gears and they do start to look more like a service provider than an a pure OS/Office provider than before. For more reactions and analysis on how this will affect how we distribute software in Windows based solutions, check dabcc.com

Be sure to catch Bill Gates Keynote at Winhec live at 9PM PST on the 23rd of May. I'm sure these topics as well as Terminal Services are going to be covered.