Gartner reports Oracle as a serious player, surpasses Microsoft

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Datamation just published a new article about Virtual Iron and its potential to win virtualization competitors.

The piece includes a very interesting Gartner chart that reveals surprising information:

Gartner_HypervisorComparisons

First of all the Microsoft virtualization offering is perceived as the less mature and stable compared with the other in the matrix. Even less than Oracle, the last vendor entering the virtualization space.This shouldn’t surprise much considering that Hyper-V is at its first edition while Oracle uses Xen as the hypervisor for its Oracle VM.
Nonetheless it’s a further confirmation that Microsoft still has a huge amount of work ahead if it wants to change the market perspective.

The second interesting detail is that the estimated number of deployed virtual machines for Microsoft already reaches 50,000, while some competitors like Virtual Iron can just double the number despite they are in the space since a remarkable amount of time.
Once again the fact that Oracle VM has more deployed virtual machines than Microsoft is surprising.

The third interesting fact is that Oracle VM is the only hypervisor perceived as secure as VMware ESX.
As mentioned above Oracle adopts Xen as virtualization engine, pretty much like Citrix and Virtual Iron, but compared with the other is the youngest in the space.

It’s unclear how recent this chart is, but for sure it’s related to 2008: considering that Oracle VM has been around for less than one year, if these numbers are reliable maybe it’s time to reevaluate the relevance of Oracle in the virtualization space.