Oracle continues to stay mum about its integration plan for Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron hypervisors, but don’t hold anything when it’s time to talk about the new competitors.
Just two months ago the company dismissed the VMware virtual appliance initiative and its Marketplace, saying that it doesn’t contain anything but toy appliances.
One month later Oracle decided to clarify how the word co-opetition is not in its vocabulary, modifying the support policy to exclude every virtualization vendor that offer a hypervisor for x86/x64 architectures.
Today it’s time to hit Red Hat (and by some degrees Novell).
On its corporate blog last week Oracle highlighted its commitment to Xen and the open source:
…Oracle’s Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Not only does Oracle run the whole business on Linux, but also run the base development on Linux for all our products. Today Oracle has over 9,000 developers working on Linux and provides Global Linux Support in over 100 countries…
The key point of this apparently candid post is about the quality of support that only Oracle can offer.
To support the statement Oracle points to another article about the reasons behind the launch of Oracle Unbreakable Linux:
Oracle Unbreakable Linux launched two years ago as a support program for existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) implementations or for new Oracle Enterprise Linux implementations. Oracle Unbreakable Linux program is about enterprise-class support that customers can’t get (or is not available) from Red Hat.
…
Oracle brings the highest support quality, more value, and proven business practices to Linux support, including the following items Red Hat can’t:
- 7500+ professionals providing 24×7, global support in over 145 countries
- Lifetime support policy (7+ years of general product support with the ability to extend to unlimited number of years)
- Premier backporting (Request backport of specific features eliminating pressure to upgrade with every update release)
…Due to dissatisfaction with Red Hat’s quality of support as well as a desire to get more value, many users have switched from Red Hat Support to Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support…
The message is specifically directed to Red Hat because Red Hat is the company that promoted Xen for years and then decided a complete U turn by replacing the open source hypervisor with KVM.
Red Hat will (re)start competing with the other virtualization players in September when its new offering will become finally available.
And before any customer even think about jumping on the KVM bandwagon, Oracle wants to make sure that everybody knows how much better they are at support.