Quoting from official announcement:
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, and the Server Technologies division of Oracle today announced a new relationship covering cooperative product development, performance engineering, and marketing.
“Our growing partnership with Oracle’s Server Technologies division mirrors customers’ increasing preference for VMware virtual infrastructure environments to address business-critical computing requirements,” said Diane Greene, president, VMware. “The extension of our relationship demonstrates our mutual commitment to deliver performance-optimized, fully supported systems consisting of industry-leading database, application server, business applications, and virtualization solutions. Moreover, VMware virtual machine containers maximize hardware utilization, facilitate provisioning and management, enable full flexibility across hardware environments, and allow servicing of systems without downtime and dynamic rightsizing across server farms through VMotion.”
“This partnership brings great value to Oracle Server Technologies product development efforts,” said Prem Kumar, vice president, Server Technologies Engineering, Oracle Corporation. “Our use of VMware as our standard virtualized development platform will simplify and accelerate our infrastructure product development efforts as well as help ensure that our Oracle 10g infrastructure software is developed, tested and optimized for execution on VMware virtual machines.”
As part of this new relationship Oracle and VMware are working towards an agreement to facilitate the following objectives:
VMware as a Standard Virtualized Development Platform for Oracle Server Technologies Products: Oracle Server Technologies development teams plan to standardize on VMware virtual infrastructure as part of the standard Linux and Windows x86 development, test and support environment for Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, and Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g.
With more than 7,000 VMware virtual machines proposed for internal deployment, Oracle Server Technologies division plans to use VMware virtual infrastructure as a standard virtualized development platform for its database products. This use of VMware products within Oracle Server Technologies can help accelerate product delivery for Oracle customers.
Software Distribution in VMware Virtual Machines: Oracle plans to continue offering a pre-installed and fully configured evaluation version of an Oracle Database 10g environment within VMware virtual infrastructure. To date, more than 12,000 copies of Oracle Database 10g have been distributed within VMware virtual machines.
Joint Support Alignment: As part of this partnership, Oracle and VMware intend to work together to provide customers problem resolution for Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g running on VMware. Oracle plans to provide support of the Oracle Server Technologies software running in VMware virtual machines as it provides support to other supported physical hardware.
Joint Marketing and Customer Solutions: Oracle plans to market solutions including VMware virtual infrastructure for customer environments focused on hardware containment, cost savings and dynamic rightsizing provided by virtualization environments. The two companies also plan to collaborate on proven joint solutions and deployment guides for Oracle migrations, co-existence strategies, and Oracle hardware containment strategies.
For more information about the Oracle-VMware alliance, go to www.vmware.com/oracle.