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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.

With VMworld 2007 nearing it's end, the virtualization world seems to be buzzing with all kinds of analysis and comments regarding VMware ESX Server 3i, VMware Site Recovery Manager and Open Sourcing VMware Tools as well as many other virtualization related topics that has been covered on VMworld this year.

I do feel that one thing has received a little bit less attention that it probably deserves: Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). While technically not announced on VMworld, I would think most of the attendants would find this very interesting.

A new proposed format, which basically is a XML wrapper for the three existing virtual machine types (VMware, Citrix/XenSource and Microsoft) that will allow full interoptability for virtual machines between the different vendors. The format also includes integrity checks that should twart any tampering attempts.

The new specification is created by DMTF, and supported by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and Citrix/XenSource sounds like a pipe dream, but apparently it looks like it could possibly end a lot of the current problems with moving virtual machines between different virtualization vendors.

According to eweek.com, Microsoft says no to virtualizing Windows on top of Linux:

Microsoft will not allow Windows Vista or Windows XP to be virtualized on top of Linux, Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's open-source software lab, said at the annual LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here Aug. 7.

I find this very hard to believe, and I'm struggling to find other sources for this little piece of information. Reading the rest of the article doesn't really give any more details, besides other comments from Sam Ramji regarding other details about the Microsoft Novell agreement.

The way the article reads, I doubt that Microsoft is really going to try and disallow running virtualized Microsoft producs on top of Linux. I think Mr. Ramji really meant to say that there will be no ability to move virtual machines from Viridian to Xen or vice-versa. Or at least thats what I hope he means.

After all, it is in Microsoft interest that people can run virtualized instances even if they run on a Linux host machine as virtual instances also needs to be licensed properly.

Does anyone have more info regarding this statement? It really strikes me as a bit odd, but I'm not quite able to shake eweeks spin on it entirely until I get confirmation somewhere else.

Back in August 2006 the Gallery team released version 1.0 of The Gallery Appliance and a new and improved version was released last Friday. The new release includes several improvements:

• 1. Updated Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 versions
  The new version includes Gallery 1.5.6 and Gallery 2.2.1
• 2. More Gallery 2 modules enabled, and Downloadable Plugins are also available.
• 3. SCSI emulation instead of IDE emulation makes it possible to run on VMWare ESX server.
  There is an VMware ESX image for those who want to run it on VI3.
• 4. rPath Appliance Platform (rAP) agent for remote appliance administration
  This is interesting. The people over at rPath has created a remote administration agent for appliances built on their rPath Builder service. It helps end users schedule backups, manage the appliance and makes updating to newer releases easier.
• 5. Increased number of build types.
  The appliance is now available in 9 build types, ranging from VMware and Microsoft VHD via Xen and Amazon e2 (ami-468c692f) to bootable cd based installs.

Now, where does the nice people come into it? Well, without the great help and drive from Valentyn Khokhlov and Michael K. Johnson of rPath this release would not have happened when it did. The first incarnation of the appliance was hacked together by Donald Webster, also known as fryfrog, and maintenance and upgrades were not first on the priority list. This time rPath approached us, asking if we were interested in updating the appliance now that new Gallery versions had been released. Of course we were interested, but lack of time and especially lack of rPath/Conary know-how limited us. Michael and Valentyn stepped up and pretty much rebuilt the whole appliance for us, while I kept the role as the nagging nitpick.

Hopefully we'll be able to do the heavy lifting ourselves when we update the appliance next time, and I really hope we don't need to rely on the goodwill of others to get it done properly.

Again, a big thank you goes out to rPath who helped us immensely this time around, they really did us a great favor!

So far the appliance has been downloaded over 300 times since friday, and feedback is starting to make it's way back to us. If you have tested it, please provide any feedback you might have in the Gallery Appliance forums and leave a comment here as well.

I'm very happy with this, and I hope we can make the next version even better.

It's official, the world is doomed and there is nothing we can do to save it. Ok, thats a bit over the top, but the recently announced collaboration deal announced by Microsoft and Novell is nothing short of extremely surprising.

Or is it? Think about it. Is Linux the biggest threat to Microsoft, or is it something else?

When looking at the Microsoft Press Release one thing springs to mind immediately:

it's all about virtualization

OK, they threw "Document format compatibility" into the mix as well as well as support and interoptability, but thats really minor points. It's very apparent that this deal is made to put VMware under more pressure than Microsoft can do in their own. The fact that VMware is able to pressure Microsoft into striking a deal with Novell, and Xen, shows that VMWare is a serious threat to the future of Microsoft virtualization platform.

It's also very interesting to note the following passage from the MS Novell FAQ

The patent agreement signed by Novell and Microsoft was designed with the principles and obligations of the GPL in mind. Under this agreement, customers of SUSE Linux Enterprise know they have patent protection from Microsoft in connection with their use of SUSE Linux Enterprise, further encouraging the adoption of Linux in the marketplace.

So much for GPL being cancer, Mr. Ballmer. If VMware scares you enough to sleep with the enemy, they must be doing something right.