Vmware Vs Oracle

August 26, 2011

VMware Response to Oracle VM 3.0 Announcement
This flash can be shared with VMware Partners.

What Was Announced?
On August 23, Oracle announced the release of Oracle VM 3.0. Their marketing tagline for the release, “Oracle VM – 4x More Scalable; VMware – 4x More Expensive” shows Oracle is aggressively targeting VMware with Oracle VM 3.0.

Executive Summary
Oracle seesOracle VM 3.0 as key enabler of its ambition to block VMware out of its customers’ datacenters and to own the complete hardware/software stack. It has taken Oracle two long years to bring to market the virtualization features they acquired with Virtual Iron. Unfortunately, their customers have been punished for their patience with an Oracle VM 3.0 product that fails to deliver on Oracle’s easilydebunked claims of better scalability and lower costs compared to vSphere. Oracle VM 3.0 is five years behind vSphere 5 and will be a letdown for any customer expecting a viable alternative to VMware. Use this opportunity to re -engage with prospects that were deferring a decision to deploy vSphere due to Oracle’s discriminatory support policy.

Oracle VM Background
Oracle VM Server for x86 isbased on the open source Xen hypervisor and was first released by Oracle in 2007. Since then, Oracle VM has achieved very little market success – most surveys give it less than 1% market share and Gartner’s x86 Magic Quadrant classifies Oracle VM as a “niche player.” Oracle has tried to force its customers to adopt Oracle VM with a support policy that makes it the only “certified” hypervisor forOracle software products. Another product, Oracle VM Server for SPARC, is the former Sun SPARC Logical Domains virtualization technology and was not updated with this release.

Changes in Oracle VM 3.0
Oracle acquired Virtual Iron in 2009 and Oracle VM 3.0 finally integrates the key capabilities of the Virtual Iron product. Oracle emphasized the following new features in their announcement:  Anall new Oracle VM Manager server has an improved browser-based management interface. Configuration steps previously requiring command line access to each Oracle VM host can now be done from the Oracle VM Manager interface. Distributed Resource Scheduling balances VMs across a server pool based on CPU and network resource usage. Distributed Power Management consolidates VMs and powers off serverpool hosts during periods of low usage. Storage Connect is an API storage vendors can use to create plug-ins enabling Oracle VM hosts to control array-level features like cloning and snapshots. Virtual Assembly Builder packages multi-VM applications in Open Virtualization Format (OVF)-compliant containers. Most Oracle software products are available as downloadable and preconfigured OracleApplication Templates.

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VMware Confidential

VMware Competitive News Flash
 Virtual machine configurations have been increased to maximums of 128 virtual CPUs and 1TB RAM.

Oracle Claims and VMware Responses
With the Oracle VM 3.0 announcement, Oracle has continued claiming advantages against VMware vSphere and they have added new claims. Oracle Claim: Oracle VM 3.0 is 4x more scalable than VMware. VMware Response: Oracle bases this claim only on Oracle VM’s limit of 128 virtual CPUs per VM compared to the vSphere 5 maximum of 32 vCPUs. In reality, Oracle has not shown that performance of 128 vCPU Oracle VM guests scales to match a similarly sized native machine. In contrast, VMware testing has shown that 32 vCPU guests deliver 92-97%of native performance. Also, Oracle’s im plication that hypervisor scalability is determined by guest vCPU limits is nonsense – few x86 applications can scale to effectively use that many CPUs. The scalability that customers are more concerned with is the number of VMs a host or cluster a platform can support and that is where vSphere excels.  Oracle Claim: VMware is 4x more expensive than...