virtualization.info Editors

Announcing its own Xen-based hypervisor, Oracle has been pretty clear about its support policy for 3rd party virtualization platforms: Oracle VM is the only x86-based server virtualization environment on which Oracle products are supported.

Since that day, trying to avoid panic from thousands of customers, VMware sales force spent endless efforts trying to reassure that previous support agreements with Oracle would be still in place.

But which kind of unformal support agreement Oracle may grant to VMware customers?

The enlightening answer comes from Oracle itself which replies an inquiry from ComputerWorld this way:

Oracle has not certified any Oracle software on VMware virtualized environments.

…

Oracle support will assist customers running Oracle software on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS without virtualization, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running VMware. If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS without virtualization. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for support.

Which basically means no support for virtualization at all.

That part of VMware sales force stating that this is a support agreement are implictly asking customers to be ready to reinstall their entire Oracle environment on a physical server, which raises several questions:

• Where the customer is going to install the environment?
• On a new server? If so how much time it would take to order, purchase, deliver, reinstall and configure? Weeks, months?
• And once on the new server, how the customer can grant the new hardware will not influence in some way the reproduction of the issue?
• On an existing server? If so how much time it would take to recognize the right hardware, free it from current platform, reinstall and configure?
• And one on the recycled server, how the customer can grant the old hardware will not influence in some way the reproduction of the issue?
• How much time the entire operation will take just to reach the point where the support request can be opened?
• And how much money the entire troubleshooting will take in terms of man/hours?

All these questions should be answered considering that on most cases Oracle products are used in production environment, for mission critical roles. So such form of support agreement would cost the company probably much more than just installing Oracle on a physical server, ignoring virtualization completely.

Such consideration appear evident to those professionals dealing with business continuity plan and related disaster recovery scenarios, but may be less clear for anybody else.

Update: virtualization.info is now in possess of the official transcript for the Oracle Analyst Meeting of Nov. 14 (the day Oracle VM was made avaiable online, and several days before the above company answer provided to ComputerWorld).

In this transcript Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, answers John DiFucci, analyst at Bear Stearns, about support policy for VMware customers:

John DiFucci: Okay. And, the second question one. Your one stack message, although it does resonate well, I think. But, some of the exclusivity
that it implies or, not only implies, but with the Oracle VM message that you only support Oracle products on Oracle VM and not on VMware.

Larry Ellison: Oh, no, no, we aren’t — we clearly support — we only support –. Lots of people are running Oracle products on VMware.

JDF: Exactly. So…

LE: That’s cool. And, it’s great. Our strategy is to be as… is to be open, and to support as many different product as we have… and platforms as we can.

JFD: So, if a customer has a problem running on VMware and — with the Oracle database, then call for support, the support will be
given in that kind of configuration?

LE: Yes, essentially, yes.

Now, while the essentially word introduces some vagueness in the confirmation, it still represents a statement of support.

Now considering that Oracle CEO provided this answer two days after the publishing of Oracle VM FAQs, which state exactly the opposite, and days before ComputerWorld answer, this basically means two possible things: first one is that Oracle strategy about 3rd party virtualization support is a complete mess and the company is unable to take a decision and stick with it, the other is that Oracle CEO provided an incomplete answer on purpose.

In both cases VMware customers should start asking very clearly and loudly an official support statement to Oracle before being trapped in endless support issues.

virtualization.info will provide updated reports if any reader will decide to share any answer or document Oracle will provide.

In the last month the stellar performance achieved by VMware stock suffered a major hit:

What’s the cause for this? The general bad trend hitting the entire market, the increasing competition with Microsoft, which is about to sell Hyper-V at $28, the suddely broken alliance with Citrix, which became the second threat after XenSource acquisition, or the recent tension with Oracle about support? Or something else?

Cowen’s Managing Director, Walter Pritchard, suggests the bad performance may depend on VMware sales model instead:

…

Pritchard, who has a Neutral rating on the stock, this morning wrote that the medium- and long-term investment case for the stock is “still mixed.” He asserted that over the next 24 months, the stock could trade anywhere between in line with the market to 34% below the market.

He says the fourth quarter outlook is bullish, with declining days sales outstanding suggesting a healthy backlog position. “Thus we expect solid Q4 results, almost independent of Q4 business activity,” he writes.

But he is more cautious looking ahead. He notes that VMware is increasingly selling software under enterprise license agreements, which he says results in companies making larger upfront purchases, “often forward buying more capacity than they intend to deploy initially, but instead securing a more favorable price for the software through the larger and long-term commitment.” Pritchard says he does not mean to suggest that using the agreements are a bad idea; he says the company ought to use them to lock in customers in a market that will get competitive over time. But he does say that you need to be careful with the conclusions you draw about the current level of revenues and what they will mean going forward…

The canadian startup CiRBA goes beyond growth announcement, releasing Data Center Intelligence (DCI) 4.5.

In this release CiRBA introduces a single main new feature called Proactive Resource Placement, which forecasts workload patterns inside tracked virtual machines looking at their history (back to years). Once workloads projection are calculated, DCI 4.5 can interact with VMware VirtualCenter to proactively move virtual machines on those virtualization hosts granting them the biggest and safest room to grow.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

After security OEM agreement with Dell and HP, Citrix is now working on all other hardware vendors already in bed with VMware.

Quoting from the the official announcement:

Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation today announced a technology partnership with Citrix, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure. As part of the agreement, Citrix will provide support for Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition running on the Fujitsu PRIMERGY(R) RX300 S3 server, and the two companies will collaborate on future products. Citrix has also certified the PRIMERGY RX300 S3 Server for XenServer Enterprise Edition.

…

PRIMERGY RX300 S3 Server is now a fully tested deployment platform on XenEnterprise, and is listed in the XenSource Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)…

Quoting from the Neterion official announcement:

Neterion, Inc., the industry leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) adapters and a VMware Technology Alliance Partner, announced that its Xframe V-NIC 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters will have native support in the upcoming release of VMware’s ESX 3.5 virtualized operating system.

Engineering teams from Neterion and VMware have worked closely to mutually optimize support of 10 GbE in ESX, now offering near-line rate 10 Gbps performance at parity with native Linux or Windows operating systems. This was demonstrated at VMworld in San Francisco when Neterion, IBM and VMware jointly ran virtualized machines at 10 GbE speeds comparable to servers running single, non-virtualized applications. Many network intensive tasks, such as VMware’s VMotion, require a large network pipe to allow the nearly instantaneous migration of virtualized applications. As the datasets of these applications grow larger, Gigabit Ethernet will not be sufficient. Neterion’s 10 GbE adapters remove this network bottleneck, enabling a new class of I/O-intensive applications to be virtualized…

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it achieved record growth in the third quarter of 2007. With a record number of new deals in the third quarter, including the company’s first seven figure license deal, Surgient is on pace for 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Surgient third quarter bookings grew to almost three times the bookings for the same quarter in 2006.

Surgient signed several new customers, including Genesys Labs, Halliburton Landmark Graphics, Raymond James, Serena, Ultimate Software and Vontu. The company saw repeat business from BMC , CA , Dell, EMC, Information Builders, Kana and Target Corporation…

Quoting from the Cirba official announcement:

CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence, today announced that 2007 marked a year of tremendous growth in the emerging virtualization and consolidation planning software market as server sprawl, space constraints and power consumption force enterprises to take a more holistic and critical view of their data centers. CiRBA highlights from 2007 include the release of CiRBA versions 4.0, 4.2, 4.4, and 4.5, customer growth of over 130%, a new European presence, key strategic partnerships, as well as the industry’s most prestigious award recognitions…

Quoting from the Embotics official announcement:

Embotics, the Virtual Machine (VM) Lifecycle Management Company, today appointed Ron Nordin to its Advisory Board Council. Nordin is a leading executive in the software industry, and he joins the Board to help with strategy and organization associated with accelerating the growth of Embotics.

Ron Nordin brings over 20 years of executive-level experience in the software industry and serves as an advisor and board member to early-stage technology companies. Most recently, Nordin was a senior partner at Atlas Venture in Boston, where he invested in a number of software and internet companies, including eRoom Technologies, which was acquired by Documentum in 2000 in one of the largest private software transactions of the year.

Prior to Atlas, Nordin was president and CEO of SQA Inc., a venture backed, enterprise software company. He led SQA from a start up to a dominant player in the software quality assurance sector. Under his leadership, SQA had a successful IPO and became a highly valued public company. SQA was acquired by Rational Software, which in turn was acquired by IBM. Nordin established his career early at Cognos, where as senior vice president, he served on the executive team that developed the company from a start up through its IPO, helping it become one of the major players in the software industry…

Embotics and Fortisphere are not the only startups emerging in the virtual machines lifecycle management market. A third, expected competitor unveils today: ManageIQ.

The company founded in 2006 and based in Mahwah, NJ, is managed by Joseph J. Fitzgerald, former CTO and Director of Product Development at HP, and Oleg Barenboim, R&D Leader at HP.

ManageIQ is mostly privately funded, with the exception of Worldwide Technology Partner investment.

At launch date two products are presented, EVM Insight and EVM Control, available as stand-alone solutions or as bundle in the Enterprise Virtualization Management suite.

The first one, EVM Insight, is a web-based virtualization management solution with some new and interesting features in the space like:

• capability to super-manage multiple virtualization management products and instances of the same product (VMware VirtualCenter only in the first version) at the same time
• capability to track events happening to a virtual machine inside a so called Virtual BlackBox, which follows the VM but doesn’t stay inside the guest OS
• capability to discover detailed informations about guest OS, including installed patches, applications, users, with an agentless technology (even for offline VMs)

The second one, EVM Control, is the real lifecycle management solution bringing granular policy management in the virtual data center with:

• capability to define security policies to prevent rogue virtual machines power on or virtual network access (what a security professional would define as endpoint security for virtual environments)
• capability to simulate policies application with what-if impact analysis
• capability to enforce separation of duties

ManageIQ is already a VMware and XenSource technology partner and in fact products support will be extended to Xen in Q1 2008.

Both products will be available at the end of December.

ManageIQ entrance in the market is welcome, given the number of complex challenges that biggest virtualization adopters are facing today.

Anyway on the long run the company approach, mostly because of its management part, will put it in competition not only with other young VM lifecycle management competitors, but also with biggest technology providers. Microsoft is the first one on the list, with its combined offering of Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Operation Manager (SCOM) and Configuration Manager (SCCM).

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

In April 2007 Zeus Technologies, a company focused on load balancing appliances, tried to enter the virtualization market launching its own connection broker: ZXTM VDB.

Since that time the company released no more news about the product, and today virtualization.info discovers that Zeus simply removed it completely from its website.

Any reference to ZXTM VDB disappeared, despite the website still contains the manual and Google Cache still contains some original pages.

It’s unknown what happened about the product, but it’s sure that the competition in desktop broker market must be tough. virtualization.info expected similar exits since VMware acquired one of the players, Propero, severely hitting its own VDI ecosystem.

Zeus Technologies has been removed from the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Last vendor entering the virtualization arena is the german company innotek.

They launched an open source desktop virtualization product called VirtualBox in January 2007, but besides that the company mostly runs in stealth mode. In fact VirtualBox didn’t get much traction over the year, given the hard competition with VMware Player and Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC and Parallels Workstation.

Anyway innotek is much more interesting for another product, a true bare-metal hypervisor with microkernel architecture, that is in development since a while: hyperkernel.

At today there are no public informations (tech specifications, features, release dates, etc.) about this possible competitor for VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and all the others, but the launch date may be near: the official website now exposes a very short statement saying the product is currently in use by selected customers, despite not yet generally available.

This leads to think innotek reached private beta for its new hypervisor and we may see an official launch in 2008.