Last Friday I attended a VDI presentation from an Oracle (formally Sun) reseller on the brand new Oracle VDI solution. First of all, the audience was very different from the ‘usual virtualization’ crowd. A lot of former Sun enthusiasts, who have a very different view on solutions. This article is from my viewpoint. Not all participants of the meeting might agree with me.

The first statement from the Senior VDI manager: ‘ Oracle VDI is here to stay. It’s being heavily invested in. Larry Ellisson wants to be number 1 in the VDI market. Therefore, VDI has been positioned as a separate global business unit within Oracle.‘

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According to buzz in the blogosphere, last July VMware COO Tod Nielsen met with Charles Phillips President of Oracle with regards to the ongoing support issues/questions customers experience when using VMware virtualization technology.

Tod Nielsen providing Oracle with a list of over 500 VMware customers asking for Oracle to support their apps running on VMware. Charles appreciated this but stated that this is a challenges for him as he has not personally received this request from customers, and until he does, cannot see making this a priority for his team. So the bottom line is that Oracle doesn’t feel that many people run critical apps on Oracle in a Virtual environment.

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After some hard pushing and nudging with Oracle sales the last couple of months I almost became a Oracle licensing guru. Not what I had in mind and was aiming for to be honest. While completing some business cases about virtualization for several customers, Oracle products became a hot issue again.

The Oracle Soap

I advised the customer to be careful about mentioning that they were striving for virtualizing the Oracle servers on VMware. The Oracle account manager could smell blood and would jump on the band wagon to let them pay for their attempt to make the infrastructure flexible and ready and supportive for a fast changing business. So the first thing what happened when the Oracle account manager heard the word virtualization was that he mentioned to the customer that it would cost at least 200K Oracle licensing costs even without knowing what the customer was pursuing.

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Title: Webcast: Deploying Oracle on VMware: Challenges and Opportunities
Location: online
Link out: Click here
Description: Many IT organizations are standardizing on VMware as the default platform for all their applications. However, virtualizing Oracle solutions – including databases, RAC, WebLogic and enterprise apps – can pose unique challenges.

In this webcast, VMware will discuss when and how to virtualize Oracle solutions and provide guidance on how to convince application owners that their Oracle deployments will run better on a VMware platform.
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2009-03-24
End Time: 19:00

Word on the street is that Oracle has bought Virtual iron. At the end of last week and the beginning of this week there were rumors that Oracle signed a letter of intent to acquire Virtual Iron. Yesterday one of my tweets already reported that the deal was closed and today multiple source confirm that Oracle bought Virtual Iron.

Personally I don’t quite understand the acquisition. Oracle is one of the leading database vendors for large enterprises and Virtual Iron is a small business virtualization solution which claims to only have around 2,000 small and medium-sized business customers. In addition to that Oracle has never been much of a virtulization fan as their support and pricing clearly shows.

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