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Compellent Technologies Adds Support for Oracle VM

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Compellent Technologies today announced support for Oracle VM server virtualization software. Compellent’s advanced virtualization creates a powerful storage infrastructure, delivering high performance, reduced cost of ownership, simplified storage management and an ideal platform for Oracle VM. More information about the partnership can be found here.

Oracle VM server virtualization software supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications, and offers scalable, low-cost server virtualization. Oracle VM’s next generation architecture supports the use of virtualization-aware paravirtualized guest operating systems to allow more efficient, lower overhead operations in areas critical to performance such as memory and I/O management. Oracle VM consists of open source server software and provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for creating and managing virtual server pools across an enterprise. Key Oracle products including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications are certified with Oracle VM.
Compellent is part of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program, and will extend that support to include Oracle VM. Compellent’s innovative software applications, including Thin Provisioning, Remote Replication and Automated Tiered Storage, allow data to be easily accessible, easily replicated and dynamically expanded in less time than traditional storage solutions.

Top VMware Executive Richard Sarwal Returns To Oracle

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Richard Sarwal has left his position as executive VP of research and development at VMware to return to database software giant Oracle. VMware hired Sarwal from Oracle less than a year ago, and declined to give details of why Sarwal decided to go back to Oracle.

Stephen Herrod, CTO at VMware, will assume Sarwal’s day-to-day duties temporarily. Sarwal is currently still listed in the management structure as outlined on the company website.

[Source: San Francisco Business Times]

DTMF Accepts Draft Specification for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the acceptance of a draft specification submitted by leading virtualization companies (VMware, Oracle and CA recently joined the task force) targeting an industry standard format for portable virtual machines. Virtual machines packaged in this format can be installed on any virtualization platform that supports the standard simplifying interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures.

The companies behind the collaboration on this specification include Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource. This group of virtualization industry leaders has submitted the specification to the DMTF for development into an industry standard. DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF will continue to develop this technology into a successful, open industry standard and promote it worldwide.

The proposed format, called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines.

(IBM recently announced its open-ovf project.)

Most importantly, OVF specifies procedures and technologies to permit integrity checking of the virtual machines (VM) to ensure that they have not been modified since the package was produced. This enhances the security of the format and will alleviate security concerns of users who adopt virtual appliances produced by third parties. OVF also provides mechanisms that support license checking for the enclosed VMs, addressing a key concern of both independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers. Finally, OVF allows an installed VM to acquire information about its host virtualization platform and run-time environment, which allows the VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for the particular virtualization environment.

In addition to providing portability, integrity, and configurability of existing virtual hard disk formats. OVF is also extensible to support future developments of virtual hard disk formats whose specifications are openly available.

Oracle releases VM virtualization templates

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At LinuxWorldExpo this week in San Francisco, Oracle Announced that it It is releasing a series of preconfigured templates for deploying software on its server virtualization technology.

The templates, which are already available at Oracle.com include configurations for Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Siebel CRM 8.0 and Oracle Enterprise Linux.

“All four of these products can be deployed as Oracle VM templates, thereby bypassing the installation process,” said Monica Kumar, senior director of Linux and open source product marketing.

The templates should save customers anywhere from a few days to a few weeks of effort, according to Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux engineering at Oracle.

This is a perfect start for testing and development environments and allows people to play around with virtual Oracle instances with little to no installation effort.

At his own blog Wim reports

We decided not to create blackboxes but create virtual machine images which have been pre-configured with recommended patches, recommended OS settings, then the Oracle product on top with the recommended patchset level and also other changes and fixes applied.

In an interview with Techtarget Wim Coekaerts also mentioned that Oracle plans on releasing VM templates for Oracle products on a monthly base.

Oracle VM Reaches Version 2.1

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Oracle VM, the company’s server virtualization software unveiled in November 2007, is a surprisingly strong offer that you hear little about, even though Oracle boasts an impressive list of technology partners on their websites with names like Dell, Intel, HP, IBM and NetApp. Ericom recently announced PowerTerm WebConnect, a desktop virtualization (VDI) solution based on Oracle’s server virtualization software.

As Alessandro points out, the software has evolved a bit since its launch and now carries version number 2.1.1. The release notes for the Oracle VM Server component can be consulted here.

You can download the new version free of charge here.

VMware, Oracle and CA Newest DMTF Board Members

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced the addition of three new companies to its board of directors. VMware, Oracle and CA step up to the board level – joining industry heavyweights like AMD, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and othrs – to help drive the overall direction, strategy and activity of DMTF.

DMTF logo

Together, the board of directors will collaborate to set cross-industry priorities, promote interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments, foster alliance partnerships, and lead the organization’s committee work.

Winston Bumpus, director of standards architecture for VMware will join DMTF as board representative.