Oracle VM 3.0 Launch

ESG Senior Analyst Brian Babineau's take on Oracle VM 3.0 launch

My colleague Brian Babineau had the opportunity to attend the Oracle VM 3.0 launch where the company outlined its “Application-Driven Virtualization” strategy and solution portfolio. Although I personally have not dug into the details of the entire announcement (it is a busy time of year for anything virtualization), I wanted to share a couple Brian’s thoughts and provide some quick analysis. Once I return from VMworld, I will have more to offer on Oracle VM 3.0, especially if our Lab team has a chance to test it in action.

It is relatively clear from the subtext of Oracle’s messaging, “Application-Driven Virtualization,” that the company does not want to be viewed as your vanilla hypervisor or even a “horizontal” virtualization platform. Oracle’s mission is to enable virtualization for mission-critical application environments (One could easily alter that phrase slightly to “mission critical Oracle applications.”). Oracle isn't interested in helping customers just achieve physical server consolidation/higher CPU utilization rates or move virtual machines around for better availability, your standard virtualization benefits. Oracle’s goal is to deliver those benefits and drive application (and all core components: databases, web servers, firewalls, etc.) more efficient provisioning, performance, upgrades, change management, and availability in ERP, CRM, HCM, SCM, and all of the other three-letter acronym applications. The strategy is not surprising given that Oracle’s heritage, but it also may be very timely. According to ESG’s Server Virtualization Maturity Model, many organizations have yet to include mission-critical applications in their virtualization deployments. ESG research indicates that application support on virtualized platforms, performance, security, IT organizational alignment, and IT skill sets remain top barriers to adoption.

As far as specifics go, Brian did rave about the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder which enables users to create a series of linked/connected application components running in virtual machines. Each virtual machine is created using a template which also includes information about the connection to the other application components. If anything happens to one or all of the components, the virtual machine(s) can be recreated with a few simple clicks within Virtual Machine Manager or the Virtual Machine Manager plug-in to Oracle Enterprise Manager. Provisioning redundant or test and development environments or rebuilding an application component is now plausible within minutes and without many operational headache.

We will provide additional analysis later, but give Oracle credit for segmenting the virtualization market (just as ESG did) and recognizing where the next opportunity is.

• Virtualization
• Oracle
• virtualization
• VM
• VM3.0
• VMworld