When Oracle announced that it will be acquiring Sun it didn’t just impact the database market. It’s not just the question of what will happen with MySQL, OpenOffice and Java. The impact on the virtualization market is big as well.
At the moment Sun has a very confusing virtualization offering: they have different flavours, different tools and, depending on which Sun representative you talk to, another technology is their next big thing. They indeed cover the 3 big areas: with Solaris Zones they have a nice OS virtualization alternative, with xVM they have a powerful Xen-based Bare metal virtualization technology based on paravirtualization, and with VirtualBox they have a Type II hypervisor ready to tackle the deskop market. A nice set of features indeed.
Oracle on the other hand was really focussing on Xen, and probably will continue to do so, so what will the future hold for Solaris Zones and VirtualBox hold.
Some people already mentioned that VirtualBox could merge up with Hosted Xen .
Now what was Oracle’s Cloud offering again? Sun already has a strategy here, and with the acquisition of Qlayer earlier this year they also have got a solid product line.
Xen just got another really strong vendor backing it’s technology, with both Citrix and Oracle behind it now. We’ll probaly find out soon.
A really interesting green computer technology I found is desktop virtualization. It’s where multiple people can use the same computer at the same time each with their own monitor, mouse and keyboard. This saves a lot of electricity and e-waste. A company called Userful recently set a virtualization world record by delivering over 350,000 virtual desktops to schools in Brazil. They have a free 2-user version for home use too. Check it out: userful.com
First I must say Oracle was the best condidate for Sun. Sun needed a strong and focus person behind their product developement and to market that technology. As you said they had some of the best products in the world in relation to virtualization and enterprise technology but they fail to materialise on it.
I think Oracle will take the best of the products e.g. Java and others that have a good customer base leave the rest. Also Oracle will keep the Zone/container technology and just support LDoms until they can migrate existing customers off the technology, because the techology is hardware dependent and Oracle is not interested in hardware.