When early march this year we talked about Oracle eying Virtual Iron we noted that Oracle needed to fill the VM Management gap that RedHat was leaving on Xen level by moving to KVM.
Turns out that that indeed was their main target, late last month Oracle announced their key virtualization strategy to their old Virtual Iron customers,
Oracle is clear that they want too provide a Xen based next generation Virtualization architecture has zero license cost and zero key management.
They will be providing official application certification , they were already providing their customers with different OracleVM templates which gave them different Oracle based Appliances and earlier this month they announced they will be providing the community with their own Open Source Virtual Appliance builder, based on yet another JeOS, (Just Enough OS) platform, this time one based on Oracle Linux.
But more importantly was their message to the old Virtual Iron customers, Virtual Iron Products sales has been stopped, software download availability will be discontinued , also replacement media won’t be available anymore. there won’t be any more upgrades , support for the different Virtual Iron products will end in February 2010 at last (that’s for the last 4.5.16 release)
Oracle is giving the old Virtual Iron Customers 3 options ..
– When they continue to run Virtual Iron’s existing platform they will get support from Oracle they then can migrate at their own pace with migration tools provided by Oracle, Oracle realizes there will be some effort involved but they will do their best to make it easier.
– Another option is to already start running OracleVM today side by side with Virtual Iron, that way users can gain experience with the platform quickly. Oracle will be providing V2V conversion tools that can convert VHD virtual disks to Oracle VM disk images.
– And the third option is to move to OracleVM today, at no additional license cost, customers only need to pay for OracleVM
Looking at the time Oracle still wants to support the Virtual Iron platform to us that translates to .. you have 12 months to migrate, better do it fast. off course there’s already plenty of VM management frameworks that support Xen around , so Virtual Iron customers can choose to migrate to another platform if they want to.
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