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.

Oracle’s position has always been that it will not support third-party software in its stack. That meant it would dissuade customers from using virtual servers with their products and not give support when problems running Oracle software in VMware environments were reported.

Instead, Oracle came up with its own virtualization, which, industry insiders agree, is not up to enterprise standards like VMware is. By buying Virtual Iron and adding it’s management console and live migration technology to Oracle VM is an improvement, but it is still a long way off from VMware.

From Oracle’s point of view, VMware adds another layer of complexity and variables to be supported but then doesn’t virtualization alway do that and why should Oracle VM be anything different.

But hopefully something good will come out of this in the same way that our Microsoft support benefits from Hyper-V, maybe Oracle will change their support policy to support more virtual infrastructures than its own. Time will tell.