VMware’s response to the Oracle VM Announcement
November 22nd, 2007 | 
Author: Shortly after Oracle announced their new free Xen-based virtualization product VMware sent an email to all it’s partners addressing the confusion caused by Oracle’s claims. The following is a cut and paste from the email I received:
What Was Announced?
Oracle announced Oracle VM at their Oracle OpenWorld user conference. Oracle VM is a Xen hypervisor based on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle also announced that the Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server middleware and selected applications would be certified when run in Oracle Enterprise Linux virtual machines on Oracle VM. Oracle claimed that Oracle VM is more efficient than other virtualization products. Oracle VM is free, but annual support costs are $499 for two-socket systems and $999 for unlimited sockets.
Oracle Press Release:
Press/Blog Coverage:
- “ Oracle Introduces Oracle VM As It Leaps Into Virtualization” – Information Week
- “Analysts call Oracle’s virtualization bluff” – ZDnet
VMware Summary Response:
- Oracle VM is yet another Xen variant offering far less than VMware Infrastructure. Once customers investigate the Oracle offering, they will conclude that VI3 is the overwhelming choice for their virtualization strategy. VI3 provides the full complement of availability, resource management functionality and the maturity of a production proven platform with extensive certifications and support (2,000 hardware models certified, 30+ guest operating systems). Tens of thousands of customers have standardized on a “VMware first” policy. Informed customers will no more choose a Xen product over VI3 than they would choose MySQL over Oracle.
- Oracle’s open source offerings have very limited adoption.
- Ask your customers: How much of the market has adopted Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) one year after its launch against the leading Red Hat Linux distribution? Answer: An insignificant minority.
- We believe Oracle VM faces a similar hurdle, as the overwhelming majority of customers want uniform and powerful functionality for automation and management across all of their applications, not fragmented application- or vendor-specific virtualization silos. Oracle VM will now be the 5th or 6th Xen variant to be introduced (Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, Sun, Novell/SUSE, etc.) with each limited by incompatible virtual machines, differing functionality and divergent levels of certification and support.
- All the disadvantages of Xen. Oracle VM suffers from all the disadvantages of the Xen hypervisor’s OS-centric architecture, such as vulnerabilities from using a general-purpose management operating system, poor scalability and incomplete/missing enterprise functionality.
- Oracle continues to support customers using VMware; “certification” of Oracle VM is of limited practical value.
- Per Oracle MetaLink Note 249212.1, Oracle supports most of its products in a VMware environment by referring non-Oracle specific issues to VMware on an as needed basis. In addition, most enterprises have been able to negotiate unlimited full support with their Oracle representatives.
- Hundreds of customers run Oracle products (applications, databases and middleware) on VMware Infrastructure in dev/test and production – more than any other virtualization platform. Over 40 referenceable customers are running Oracle products on VMware Infrastructure today.
- Please contact VMware if your customers run into Oracle support issues, as we have been able to unblock most enterprise customers who encounter difficulties.
- Oracle’s “certification” of Oracle VM covers a minority of customer environments. Certification applies only to Oracle Enterprise Linux, which currently accounts for less than 5% of Oracle’s Linux user base. Oracle explicitly acknowledges very poor performance of Oracle VM with Windows environments, which represent a large majority of customer’s Oracle platforms.
- Set the facts straight around VMware and Oracle performance. Oracle claims around, “Three times greater efficiency,” are misleading marketing stunts. VMware extensively tuned ESX Server to run both databases and other mission critical applications well. Real-world Oracle database performance can run near-native on paravirtualized Linux guests with VMware Infrastructure 3.5, and runs very favorably without relying on non-standard guest patches. Please refer to “Ten Reasons Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware”and “Virtualize Your Oracle Landscape” for updated benchmarks that demonstrates the practical, real-world benefits of running Oracle on VI3.
- VMware will continue to work with Oracle because the majority of customers want the flexibility and choice offered by Oracle products on VMware Infrastructure.
- Given Oracle’s acknowledgement of x86 virtualization as a fact of life, we believe increasing and consistent customer demand will lead to fully unfettered support and virtualization-aware licensing policies. Please let the your VMware team know about customers who are interested in advocating Oracle to fully support VMware Infrastructure as an “equal” platform to Oracle VM.
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