Last years’ acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation created lot’s of new opportunities for both Oracle and it’s Partners. There was, obviously, a lot to do about the MySQL Database, Java and other Sun technologies like the Solaris operating system. But there also is this great, small virtual machine inside the acquisition, VirtualBox.
As I’ve written yesterday, Oracle released a new version of VirtualBox into the wild yesterday. Offering some new features that makes the tool a lot more professional and mature. These new features, and the complete offering of Oracle technology could create some great new opportunities for the Oracle corporation and Oracle Partners.
One of the tough thing with Oracle technologies is that the fast majority of it can be complex to install, implement and configure. For demoing purposes, this can be demanding on the workforce and overhead involving these kinds of actions in most sales projects demanded today. Oracle’s VirtualBox could simply change that, and more.
The new version of VirtualBox offers support for the OVF standard for virtual machine images and configurations. This means that a single machine, once created, can be installed in multiple virtual machines. Oracle could offer images for it’s mostly used technologies online, and in that way offer a non-install, quick setup, way to deploy, demo and develop on Oracle Software.
Think about it. You want to know more on how a particular piece of software could change your business and all you need to do to check it out is simply download an image and run it. Things could become so much more simpler. At this moment there’s one OVF image available on the OTN network, one for the Hands-on-Labs on Database and Java development. It’s an image running Oracle Enterprise Linux, Database 11gr2, TimesTen In-Memory Database, XMLDB, SQLdeveloper, Application Express, Jdeveloper and lots more. But there could be more specific and leaner machines available.
Besides demoing and developing, what would other great opportunities be from offering VirtualBox and virtual images for the Oracle Corp and it’s Partners?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Douwe,
is not that easy, first there are a lot of images , oracle vm guest os, no virtualbox. and it has to be linux because of the license , windows would be better but that is not license free.
thanks
Hi Edwin,
True. Oracle offers images on Oracle’s VM (based on Xen, right?). This technology is not designed for desktop virtualisation like VirtualBox is, it’s hardware virtualisation so you’ll need a blanc machine to deploy it on, not just your laptop…
But the OVF standard works pretty good on importing images on any VirtualBox instance, not even depending on the host OS.
And of course, Windows guest OS would be nice, but expensive. Fortunately a lot (if not most) Oracle software is first delevered on a Linux basis.
Yesterday I created a ubuntu plus XE and APEX image on my mac, and then deployed it on my Vista machine running VirtualBox, no problems there.
What do you think?
Regards and thanks!
Douwe Pieter