Oracle Corp.‘s (NASDAQ: ORCL) release of its Oracle VM 3.0 server virtualization and management platform will allow partners to offer one more choice to their customers, one of the company’s solution provider partners said.
“What’s of real interest is that it really opens up that space for us to potentially be able to get into the enterprise,” said Will Childs, software-as-a-service (SaaS) practice director at Tenzing, a cloud hosting and services company based in Toronto.
There are several smaller subsidiaries of large enterprises that can be targeted with this release, he explained. “I think now it sort of gives us a compelling case for at least evaluating Oracle VM,” Childs said.
The company launched the updated solution on Aug. 23. “This is the biggest enhancement we’ve done since the beginning,” said Adam Hawley, senior director of product management for Oracle VM.
“The use case for virtualization is really moving beyond server consolidation,” added Monica Kumar, senior director virtualization marketing at Oracle. “It’s about being application driven virtualization.”
Oracle VM 3.0 is four times more scalable than the latest VMware offering, supporting up to 128 virtual CPUs per virtual machine, according to the vendor. “We support 128, VMware supports 32,” Kumar said. “As customers are virtualizing heavy duty large workloads, the virtual machines need more power.”
This release has three main areas of improvement, Hawley said: performance and scalability, policy management capability and network and storage capability. “You can do things like create separate independent networks for traffic,” he said.
Users can also consolidate their virtual machines to run on the lowest number of servers when workloads are down-for example on a weekend-and have it go back up on a Monday morning. “All that can be done centrally from the manager UI so it’s very convenient and easy to set up for large numbers of servers,” Hawley said.
It is also free, with no cost for licensing and partner profit will be made on the value-add services that go along with hosting, services and support.
“They are significant enhancements,” said Gary Chen, research manager for enterprise virtualization software at IDC. “They leap-frogged a little bit,” to catch up with other vendors in the space. “Easy of use is really big,” he said. “That was a big complaint of the previous version.”
“I think maybe there was some confusion in the market about support for Oracle on virtualized products,” Childs said, which explains the low demand for the previous releases. “Oracle’s cloud story is starting to involve.”
“The Oracle app stack has always been quite elusive because of the support,” Childs said. This release opens the door to introduce customers to other Oracle technology as well. He is also starting to see more customer leads for the VM 3.0 release.“At the end of the day, we’re there to serve the client.”
“This now gives us potentially a new option,” he said. “It now opens up the Oracle story to our clients.”