I knew something big was getting pushed out from Oracle related to virtualization, but I didn’t expect it to be quite like this. Maybe now RAC will be supported in a VM :). I missed it, but apparently that was the big announcement in Charles Phillips’ keynote this morning.
Update: I was only half joking about the RAC support, but now I’ve had time to read the FAQ and found this: “Oracle Real Application Clusters testing is in progress and it will be supported with Oracle VM in 2008 (calendar year).” …Excellent!
I thought that was quite interesting myself. How come I have this sinking feeling that Oracle is diversifying a bit too much? A bad feeling about trying to do too much at one time? When is Oracle Desktop coming out? =)
I’m not sure that this event would be the trigger for saying they’re risking overdiversification. After all, they’ve been on quite a shopping spree lately. However, I agree that this is new territory and most of the acquisitions have fit into areas where they’ve already had some presence. It’s a big company, though, so I imagine they can handle more than one thing at a time.
I didn’t think that OEL was being widely adopted and still don’t, but it is *new* (relatively) and such things take a while to “catch on”. The real evidence will be to watch how much of the marketing and development resources are poured into Oracle VM from here forward. If it ends up as Oracle Collaboration Suite (haven’t seen that on oracle.com homepage in quite a while), I’m not sure it will be successful. Like they say in the medical field…the next few [months] will be critical.