A couple of days ago Oracle finally announced its Sun merger plan.
virtualization.info reported live about those parts of the announcement that are related to virtualization.
While the company highlighted its commitment to continue investing and offering the Sun virtualization technologies (Solaris Containers, Logical Domains, Dynamic Domains, VDI, VirtualBox), it didn’t offer much details about how its own virtualization platform, Oracle VM, will benefit from this integration.
Shortly after the live event, Oracle also published a series of recorded webcast that provides more insights about the products roadmap.
The series includes a webcast about virtualization where Oracle exposes a part of the Oracle VM 3.0 and VirtualBox roadmap.
There’s not many new details compared to what was announced in July 2009, when Oracle suddenly killed the Virtual Iron product portfolio it acquired just a month earlier, but it’s a progress.
First of all, Oracle should complete the integration of Virtual Iron technologies with the 3.0 release, as already announced.
Oracle VM 3.0 is also going to introduce dynamic resource and power management, plus APIs that allow to manipulate network and storage elements.
The APIs will allow to discover and provision storage resources (like the Sun Open Storage products and other 3rd parties arrays) using the Oracle VM Storage Connect Framework:
Oracle also exposed a part of the roadmap for Sun VirtualBox, which will become part of the Oracle VM family:
Basically, Oracle is mimicking VMware here, using VirtualBox as the testbed platform for virtual machines that will be then deployed in Oracle VM production environments.
As virtualization.info highlighted several times, Oracle is now in a position that is similar to the Microsoft one: it can leverage the opportunity to reach a huge developers community (the Sun Java one) to promote its virtualization products as a mandatory component for agile software development.
To do so, Oracle has to turn VirtualBox into a powerful test and QA platform, which may imply the acquisition of a virtual lab automation company.
Microsoft took years to use the same identical opportunity with its .NET community, and while it prepares to launch Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management edition, VMware continues to be a must-have tool for many developers worldwide.