Well, according to the bottom of the press release, their VM is based on Xen, which plays into an open source software push.
I've installed E1 on virtual machines, mostly VMWare, and I don't see what's wrong with doing it. They mention that Oracle VM will be the only virtual machine that has support, but obviously a lot of people must do it.
I think that they should eventually get around to certifying the other parts of their product line. Since they say they support both Linux and Windows as guest OS, then everything for E1 should be OK. The only real magic I've seen in installing virtual machine software is to make sure you install the special drivers so performance isn't in the toilet.
I've kind of been tracking the capabilities of the differnt virtual machine vendors, and I can see some reasons why Oracle would go with Xen first:
1) Xen is open source.
2) Given what was available while they were conducting certification, I think Xen was scaling better than ESX at the time (8 virtual CPUs and 32 GB per virtual machine as opposed to 4 virtual CPUs and 3.6 GB in VMWare).
3) Esoteric and technical arguements as to which is the "better" virtual machine architecture - Xen started life with a different approach to the problem and may have fewer performance scaling issues. This is a long topic in itself.
As to what a VM is good for in the technical architecture of E1, here are a few thoughts:
- In a shop with little ongoing development (I've seen a few dozen of those and I bet you have too), how much use does your Deployment Server get? This makes it an excellent candidate to be installed on a VM, and use the processing power for other tasks. It's also the first arguement that comes up when deciding to introduce virtual machines into your network at all.
- An extra logic server on a VM, to take up some batch processing load, or business function processing.
- Maybe an extra JAS server, to quickly take up extra users when joined to WebSphere ND, or as Oracle OAS cluster.
- A node in a disaster recovery cluster: This can be done as a standard Windows cluster, Oracle RAC, or perhaps with XenMotion, where the machine quickly relocates to available hardware if the current server goes down.
If you can't tell already, I'm a fan of the direction this is going. Let's just hope Oracle doesn't lock us into their one-and-only supported solution. There is a whole world of possibilities that come up when you take your servers virtual ...