In November 2007 Oracle decided to enter the virtualization market and announced its own platform: Oracle VM.
The product is based on the open source hypervisor Xen, it’s offered free of charge, and features an enterprise management console called Oracle VM Manager.
So far the product was mainly pushed to those customers that were virtualizing Oracle Database on other platforms (read VMware) so that many potential customers didn’t even notice its presence or didn’t take the offering too seriously.
But the reality is that the company bills Oracle VM as a general purpose hypervisor that supports for many different workloads.
Now Oracle is taking further steps to demonstrate how serious it is in the virtualization market: last week it joined the Xen Advisory Board.
The move has a double effect: on one side it highlights a real commitment to improve the product, on the other it clarifies that there’s no intention to move to KVM.
Somebody in fact speculated that Oracle may want to switch to KVM because its Unbreakable Linux derives from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat is dropping Xen in favor of KVM.
The Oracle appointee is Wim Coekaerts, exactly the man behind Unbreakable Linux.
With him Oracle will send Dan Magenheimer, the leader of the Xen port on Intel Itanium architecture.