Oracle buys Virtual Iron

Oracle did it again, they bought one of the last available Xen specialists on the virtualization market. Today, they announced the acquirement of Virtual Iron.

Now, Oracle owns three Xen-based virtualization solutions: Oracle VM, xVM-Server and Virtual Iron. It seems clear, that Xen is the strategic virtualization technology for them. Which could mean, that Xen has a great future, although Redhat, Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions use the rival technology KVM.

But, I have to say, I don't feel very well after reading the announcement (FAQ):

. . .
How will Virtual Iron fit into Oracle’s overall virtualization management strategy?

The combination of Oracle and Virtual Iron supports Oracle’s strategy to provide complete, full stack management across the virtual and physical enterprise and is expected to provide customers with comprehensive and dynamic virtualization management. The combined suite of products is expected to simplify the deployment and configuration of physical servers, virtual machines, and applications while providing a highly available platform for hosting Oracle software and other enterprise applications. In addition, dynamic virtualization management software will help maintain virtual machine performance, improve data center utilization, and optimize power consumption. Virtual Iron combined with Oracle VM and Enterprise Manager, is expected to provide a functionally rich virtualization management product suite that can efficiently manage the entire software stack across virtual and physical environments to make applications easier to deploy, manage, and support.
...

Oracle Enterprise Manager should be extended to manage Xen virtual machines?
"... management across the virtual and physical enterprise ..."? - Wait I've heart about it, ... Sun xVM Ops Center! Right?, Not?

I really don't know Oracle Enterprise Manager, but according to this press release, it sounds, that Oracle Enterprise Manager should become very similar to Sun xVM Ops Center.

xVM Ops Center 2.1 is today in a quite good shape, but xVM-Server is only as beta available, I guess it well take some time, until it's ready.

Another interesting question for Oracle's virtualization strategy is: Will they use Linux for the Xen dom0 or their own Solaris, in the future? ATM, Linux is used by Oracle VM and Virtual Iron. Solaris is used for xVM-Server. Solaris in dom0 would mean: ZFS, Dtrace, SMF, FM, Crossbow and a lot more great Solaris technologies, but does it matter for Oracle?

There are potential conflicts with the xVM portfolio, a clear roadmap for virtualization, especially for xVM, is strongly needed. Oracle, Sun are you listening?