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TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS
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Oracle ramps up software virtualization strategy
Tony Baer
Oracle ramps up software virtualization strategy
The release of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder is step one in its strategy to simplify configuration and deployment of the entire Oracle software stack in virtualized environments, both on premises and in the cloud. The tool supports Oracle WebLogic Server 11g, with limited support for Oracle Database 11g. It highlights the advantages of an Oracle-on-Oracle architecture thanks to “application-aware” capabilities that treat virtual containers as interdependent tiers of a distributed application system. Oracle needs to round out the technology by integrating design, test, deployment, and runtime capabilities, and extend support to recently-acquired Sun Solaris on SPARC platforms.
Oracle aims to reduce the guesswork from managing virtualized applications
There are many tools that manage the lifecycle for virtual machines (VMs), especially in the VMware world. However, a key drawback of existing approaches is that they treat VM instances as application-agnostic “black boxes,” with scant knowledge of the applications that run inside them. For instance, VMware supports grouping VMs into collections known as "services" and specifying lower-level dependencies such as boot sequences. VMware has also declared support for Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a DMTF standard for specifying the elements of a VM, and we expect that Oracle will eventually follow suit. But OVF does not peer inside an application, other than to identify it and validate its licensing.Oracle is applying a “white box” approach for its own software stack, where the tool for managing virtual machine containers understands what is inside them. Oracle's newly released Virtual Assembly Builder manages metadata for each virtual application container, tracking parameters such as transactional dependencies with other application VMs, and component-specific configuration plans.This approach helps rationalize management of VMs, which becomes critical as applications scale. While VMware's vSphere management tooling tracks VM interdependencies, Oracle adds a more granular, transactional, application-level view based on native visibility to its own software stack. Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database customers that deploy within private clouds can benefit from these features today. We expect that Oracle will eventually extend support to Oracle Fusion Applications as they mature.A good start, but certain pieces are missing
As a first release, Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder currently lacks key design, test, and deployment features. At design stage, the GUI-based, metadata-driven environment makes it simple to assemble VMs based on specific software and infrastructure configurations, and then replicate them. But in the long run, replicating VM configurations can cause VM sprawl. It would be a logical step forward for Oracle to have a more formalized modeling capability that would manage the design process to ensure that users assembling VM configurations are not reinventing the wheel.At performance or load testing stage, Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder customers could benefit from integration with model-driven test harnesses that automatically spin out specific combinations of VMs to test, such as that already offered by Surgient or VMware's Lab Manager. Oracle could partner or OEM from Surgient or develop its own by extending the test management technology that it previously acquired from Empirix. At deployment time, Oracle needs to integrate Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder with Oracle Enterprise Manager for automating deployment and runtime management. We expect that Oracle will add such capability in upcoming releases of Oracle Enterprise Manager. In turn, Oracle Enterprise Manager should adapt its runtime management capabilities for optimizing VM load balancing, resource pooling, distributed virtual switches, fault tolerance and high availability, proxy-less backups, power management, security APIs, site-to-site failover, storage live migration, performance analysis, chargeback, and other capabilities that VMware currently offers.This release is about pure Oracle platforms
While Oracle promotes its use of standards, its development and management tooling is clearly optimized for the Oracle software stack. Oracle Virtual Assembly Manager is no different. Its application-aware capabilities are limited to Oracle software platforms, and are restricted to deploying on Oracle VM, Oracle's version of the Xen hypervisor on x86 platforms.With the companion release of Oracle WebLogic Server with Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition (JRVE), customers have the added choice of using Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder to deploy VMs either on what used to be called “bare metal” (with the hypervisor and VM taking the place of the OS) or on Oracle VM with Oracle Enterprise Linux as a guest OS. As this is only a first release, we expect that Oracle will soon extend these capabilities to its recently acquired Sun Solaris on SPARC platforms.
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