Oracle Announces VM Included Free

It never good for a software company when another, larger software company decides to give away for free the some functionally as your primary product, just ask the guys over at Mozilla.

So the managers over at VMWare must be scratching their heads and polishing their resumes at Oracle's announcement that the will be including Free VM in their upcoming offerings.

Here is part of eWeek's take on the announcement Oracle Free VM Offering Raises Eyebrows:

Oracle is the latest player to jump into the virtualization market, and the news helped cut the price of VMware shares.

But VMware did not hesitate to respond to the announcement Oracle made Nov. 12 at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco regarding its plans to offer free server virtualization software.

"Oracle's introduction of yet another variant of Xen is clearly a response to the significant virtualization industry that VMware has established," said Parag Patel, vice president of alliances at VMware. "The offering does not address the capabilities required to achieve the cost savings and IT simplification that customers are realizing everyday from VMware's Virtual Infrastructure."

The sniping was in reaction to Oracle VM, which will be available for free download on Nov. 14 and which Oracle officials contend offers scalable, low-cost server virtualization up to three times more efficient than rival offerings. The product, which is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor technology, features both Windows and Linux support and includes an integrated Web browser- based management console.

To speed installation and deployment, Oracle VM utilizes preconfigured Virtual Machine images of Oracle Database and Oracle Enterprise Linux. In addition, it is certified to work on Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications.

"Customers can now optimize resource consolidation by deploying Oracle VM with Oracle Unbreakable Linux and run the full Oracle software stack—Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Applications—all with one worldwide support call," said Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect, in a statement.

"With Oracle VM, customers can respond more rapidly to business changes, increase ROI and reduce lifetime total cost of ownership. Oracle VM brings enterprise-class support and backing to server virtualization, giving customers the confidence to deploy virtualized solutions," he said

VMWare needs to take a good look at this new Oracle VM product and see if they can differentiate themselves from it. If not I'd be looking into making a deal with them.

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