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Oracle Launches New Oracle VM Template For MySQL Enterprise Edition

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In an effort to enable more efficient and lower cost deployments of virtualized MySQL environments, Oracle has announced the first Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition.

The new Oracle VM Template for MySQL helps eliminate manual configuration efforts and risks by providing a pre-installed, pre-configured and certified software stack that includes Oracle VM Server for x86, Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and MySQL Enterprise Edition.

By pre-integrating the world’s most popular open source database with Oracle Linux and Oracle Virtualization technologies, enterprise users and ISVs can quickly and easily deploy and manage a virtualized MySQL database server for Web and cloud-based applications.

“Oracle is committed to helping MySQL users more efficiently deploy and manage high-performance web and cloud-based applications at a lower cost,” said Tomas Ulin, vice president MySQL Engineering, Oracle. “With the introduction of the first Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition, customers can benefit from a fully integrated solution that is backed by Oracle’s world-class support, enabling faster deployments, increased reliability and higher uptime for MySQL applications in virtualized environments.”

Xsigo Announces Certification And Support For Oracle VM

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Xsigo Systems has announced certification and support for Oracle VM, a server virtualization solution for both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. The combination of Oracle VM and Xsigo virtual I/O delivers cost-saving improvements for virtualized data centers.

“Server virtualization greatly increases the demands on server I/O, often leading to bottlenecks that can sap application performance,” said Bruce Fingles, Xsigo’s VP of product management, alliances, and support.

“Xsigo’s support for Oracle VM means that customers can now get 4X more bandwidth to each server to help them run mission-critical Oracle applications in a virtualized environment without compromising on performance.”

Oracle To Terminate Virtual Iron Business

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Oracle recently acquired Virtual Iron, even if it wasn’t exactly generating spectacularly good financial results (to put it midly). Now The Register claims Oracle is discontuining Virtual Iron’s business. More specifically, Oracle intends to “suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.”

Oracle aims to fully integrate Virtual Iron technology with Oracle VM, the company’s server virtualization and management product, although it has not specified when the new combined product will arrive. Former Virtual Iron people are also being laid off.

Full report at The Register.

Following Move To Acquire Sun, Oracle Buys Virtual Iron

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As had been rumored for quite a while, Oracle has now agreed to acquire Virtual Iron Software, a provider of server virtualization management software that enables dynamic resource and capacity management in virtualized data centers (we’ve covered the company quite a bit in the past).
This comes right off the heels of Oracle’s move to swallow Sun Microsystems.
The combination of Virtual Iron’s technology and Oracle VM’s server virtualization product is expected to provide more comprehensive and dynamic resource management across the full software stack. Customers are expected to benefit from better capacity utilization, streamlined virtual server configuration, and improved visibility and control of their enterprise software.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close this summer. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
“Industry trends are driving demand for virtualization as a way to reduce operating expenses and support green IT strategies without sacrificing quality of service,” said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering. “With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle expects to enable customers to more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption. The acquisition is consistent with Oracle’s strategy to provide comprehensive enterprise software management and will facilitate more efficient management of application service levels.”
(Source: ZDnet)

Oracle Releases Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5

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Oracle announced today its new management capabilities for Oracle VM through the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 (10gR5).  With the new Oracle VM Management Pack, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 provides a comprehensive management solution that spans the entire lifecycle of applications and their virtual infrastructure.  The Oracle VM Management Pack helps customers accelerate the adoption of virtualization, enabling them to optimize IT resources, improve hardware utilization, streamline IT processes, and reduce costs – without adding the complexity and cost associated with multiple management tools. Customers can now manage both physical and virtual environments with a comprehensive top-down approach that provides a unique business perspective, enabling the understanding of user experiences and the business impact of IT issues, in addition to offering the best tools to manage each component in the stack individually.

Highlights of the New Oracle VM Management Pack

  • Manage virtual environments with an application perspective – allows customers to quickly diagnose whether the root cause of a problem is in an application component, in a virtual resource, or in a physical resource; enabling efficient consolidation and optimization of data center resources through virtualization.
  • Built-in configuration management – enables administrators to easily track application relationships and analyze configuration changes.
  • Policy-based management – helps reduce the on-going costs of IT compliance with the ability to define company specific policies for virtualization, to enforce configuration best practices and help achieve regulatory compliance.
  • Automated deployment – automates software deployment through Oracle VM Templates for packaged applications, middleware, database, and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
    • ISVs can now streamline deployment of their products and services for virtual environments by providing predefined templates.
  • Lifecycle automation – spanning test, deployment, patching and maintenance capabilities, including automated patching of operating systems and Oracle software running inside the guest virtual machines and live migration of guest virtual machines to other servers during server maintenance windows. This helps maximize return on investment in a virtualized environment, through simplified management across the application lifecycle.
  • High availability for virtual infrastructure – provides enterprise-class capabilities such as server pooling, automatic load balancing and server failover, helping to ensure business continuity in the virtual environment, usually associated with traditional high-cost physical servers.

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

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Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …