Remember those old Wendy’s commercials from the ‘70s, asking “where’s the beef?” That’s how the Oracle Virtual Server announcement at Oracle Open World came across to me. Oracle will run their products on their own Xen-based virtualization product and won’t support their products on other vendors’ virtualization technologies. (That’s how I understand their announcement, see more here .)
It makes sense that since Oracle specializes in very large, high performance, mission critical databases, they can best virtualize and achieve the needed performance and uptime on their own controlled technologies. But it’s not likely that Oracle will have wide spread support for their Virtual Server by other vendors, certainly not Microsoft, for example. That forces Oracle users to support dual hypervisor virtualization environments, with different load balancing, high availability, fail over and other management capabilities.
I’ve blogged previously that the hypervisor is now the primary decision to make when building a virtualization center. Forcing environments to mange two, three or more virtualization technologies impedes the benefits of virtualization rather than helping us realize the benefits.
Unless Oracle has more up their sleeve for virtualization, the Oracle Virtual Server has limited value outside of those running Oracle’s products. And it overly complicates things for those that do.
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