Oracles Virtualization Package Goes Together Like Bourbon Creams and Baked Beans

Another story from the Register: Oracle is claiming that they have the best unified enterprise server virtualisation solution on the market.  It is comprised of:

  • Oracle VM for x64 (Oracle’s Xen)
  • Oracle VM for Sparc (Sun’s LDoms)
  • OpsCenter (from Sun)
  • Oracle Enterprise Manager

That’s a lot of stuff that’s thrown together.  If I want a unified virtualization solution that is part of a greater systems management solution (flogging a dead horse here) then I go:

  • Hyper-V
  • System Center (VMM, OpsMgr, and maybe DPM and/or ConfigMgr).

That’s one solution that gives me virtualization (for servers and desktops [via XenDesktop]) and enterprise management for the entire IT infrastructure and applications.

Oracle also pushed the Sun (purple) blade package.  Hmm, I think not!  I’ve seen how much purple hardware costs.  I used to be able to buy several fully kitted servers for the price of a single 4GB stick of reconditioned purple RAM.  I giggled a bit when the Oracle marketing pitch made it sound like 10Gbps networking was something that only they could do.

One big gotcha: if you run Oracle s/w then you need to know that it is not supported on a non-Oracle virtualisation platform.  That means no running of Oracle software on Amazon E2C, on Hyper-V, on Citrix XenServer or on VMware.  But there are stories out there where Oracle customers have threatened to switch to the MS stack and have gotten bespoke support for running the s/w on non-Oracle virtualisation.

2 thoughts on “Oracles Virtualization Package Goes Together Like Bourbon Creams and Baked Beans”

    1. It is not supported on XenServer, Hyper-V, VMware, RedHat, you name it. Only on Oracle virtualization …. unless you threaten to terminate all contracts with Oracle to switch to MS, etc. Then their sales people will make a deal, allegedly.

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