Oracle buys Virtual Iron

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.