Virtualization from another perspective or four

OK, back to business. Here at Oracle OpenWorld, virtualization has nothing to do with dance parties in Second Life. No, not at all.

eWeek talks about Hewlett Packard:

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Nov. 12, HP executives will detail updates to its BladeSystem C-class infrastructure that include new ways to manage virtual environments across thousands of individual blades within a data center....

[T]hese advancements fit into HP's Adaptive Infrastructure initiative, which the company has been trying to advance for more than a decade. The goal of Adaptive Infrastructure is to use HP's various software, hardware and service offerings to look at the data center in a more holistic way and give customers a single, integrated infrastructure that can be changed to meet the needs of a company.


Oh, and Oracle talked a little bit about virtual stuff. From Slashdot:

BobB writes

"Oracle is going after its piece of the hot virtualization market by introducing an open source Xen-based hypervisor to compete against those from Novell, Red Hat, and VMware. Oracle VM, unveiled Monday at the Oracle OpenWorld convention in San Francisco, enables virtualization on Oracle and non-Oracle software applications and on the Linux and Windows OSs. It also operates on industry-standard x86- and x86-64-based servers. Oracle claims it offers virtualization at a lower cost than competitors can."

And Jose Antonio Ruiz spoke:

Oracle announced Oracle VM available for free download since tomorrow, November 14, 2007 at: http://www.oracle.com/virtualization.

Oracle VM is a server virtualization software solution based on Xen(TM) hypervisor technology.

Oracle VM installs directly on server hardware and does not require a host operating system, so we need to install it on machine from the scratch.

Oracle VM and provides better performance than products from other vendors and it’s going to become the best friend of Oracle Enterprise Linux for faster deployments.

NetworkWorld talks about Oracle's strategy:

By offering Oracle VM support at lower prices, Oracle again is pursuing a strategy it revealed last year when it offered less-expensive support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system than Red Hat does. By offering a Xen-based hypervisor, just as Red Hat and Novell do, Oracle could increase its competitive pressure.

Oracle VM provisions virtual servers, manages virtual environments and moves applications from one server to another while the program remains running. “With Oracle VM, users keep doing what they’re doing, whether they are running a database or running an application, they don’t see any change at all. Their job just moves from one machine to another,” said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of product development for Oracle, during a demonstration of Oracle VM at OpenWorld.

Companies like Oracle are introducing virtualization hypervisors to take some control away from the operating system over software applications in a server, says Gordon Haff, principal analyst with research firm Illuminata. But Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., also wants to muscle in on the market share of the leading hypervisor vendor, VMware, in nearby Palo Alto.

Interestingly enough, this lower cost strategy is also reflected in Oracle Secure Backup. (Sorry, I'm working this out in my head just now.)

Back to Oracle VM. Virtualization is outside of my specific scope of interest, but I found it interesting (especially after Oracle's announcement) that, upon my arrival at Oracle OpenWorld, the Schedule Builder had automatically scheduled me to attend an executive session...hosted by VMware. Unfortunately, I spent much of the meeting wondering about the application of VMware - or, for that matter, any vendor's virtualization technology - to my specific widget.

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