After one year and a half of work behind the scene, Oracle must have decided that it’s time to highlight its presence in the virtualization space.
To do so the team started a corporate blog covering Oracle VM and the industry at large.
The company didn’t waste time and immediately started to smash the competition, starting from the once-best-friend VMware:
The industry has talked of the power of “virtual appliances” for some time but despite the promise of being able to just download, start-up and use software, virtual appliances have not been widely deployed in the enterprise, so why is that? First and foremost has been the lack of availability of anything other than toy appliances to use. If you look at VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace, you will see about 1,100 appliances. Spend some time clicking through there…go ahead …I’ll wait. What do you think? See anything you want to use in your production enterprise as-is? No? Me either.
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For the production enterprise, you need an enterprise server operating system (not a workstation OS), that is supported by a real company (not just forums), and you need real enterprise applications (not “crippleware”) that are officially supported and licensed for production. Go ahead, go back and look at the Operating System Appliances category on VMware’s Marketplace: how many of these appliances contain server- (not workstation-) operating systems backed by a commercial company? What about the “Certified Production Ready*” appliances…surely that’s better, right? Er…well…some good software for sure, but again the included OS is almost always a workstation version and/or forum supported: not production-ready…
In the past virtualization.info highly criticized the current execution of the virtual appliance strategy (not just the VMware one) and it’s unlikely we’ll change opinion until the vendors will be able to address the manageability, performance tuning and security issues we see today (VMware is working on this with its upcoming vApps).
Despite that we don’t necessarily agree with the Oracle proposal to solve the current virtual appliances problems just using its own virtualization platform and products.