The rumor had some legs. Oracle announced today that is has acquired Virtual Iron for its virtualization management technology. This publicly-available white paper is a great description of the technology and product capabilities.
Here is a short overview (from here).
VI-Center provides the following capabilities:
- Physical infrastructure: Physical hardware discovery, bare metal provisioning, configuration, control, and monitoring
- Virtual Infrastructure: Virtual environment creation and hierarchy, visual status dashboards, access controls
- Virtual Servers: Create, Manage, Stop, Start, Migrate, LiveMigrate
- Policy-based Automation: LiveCapacity™, LiveRecovery™, LiveMaintenance, Rules Engine, Statistics, Event Monitor, Custom policies
- Reports: Resource utilization, System events
Interesting footnote: I read that SAP Ventures was an investor in Virtual Iron…
I also notice that the word “cloud” does not appear once in the list of all press releases issued by Virtual Iron over three years. For a virtualization start-up, that’s a pretty impressive level of restrain and hype resistance.
In all the discussion about Oracle’s SUN aquisition nobody mentioned the virtalisation technologies they picked up, containers for solaris and Virtualbox.