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Oracle Kills Virtual Iron

What is Oracle up to? This story from The Register says that Oracle is killing development of Virtual Iron products and even suspending shipments of Virtual Iron to new customers.

To catch you up quickly: Oracle announced last month that it was buying SMB virtualization vendor Virtual Iron. Virtual Iron has a small but important role to play in the virtualization community, since it targeted the lower tier of shops. At the time, I wondered how Oracle would work in that market, since it's primarily an enterprise player.

This, of course, was on top of the previous mont's bombshell that Oracle was buying Sun. Oracle got a lot more out of Sun than just virtualization -- Java, MySQL, Solaris and servers come to mind -- but I'm sure Sun's virtualization products, especially its management ones, were an important part of the deal.

Now, it looks like Oracle doesn't want much of what Virtual Iron has. The obvious question: then why buy the company? This is a real kick in the gut for companies that are using Virtual Iron, and understandably nervous about support going forward. It seems like Oracle moved on this really quickly; it's only been a month since the buyout was made public, and they've already decided to mothball Virtual Iron products.

According to the Register article, Oracle isn't even allowing partners to sell new licenses to customers after June 30. So those of you standardized on Virtual Iron will need to move to another solution beginning next month -- Oracle's cutting you loose. I just don't get why Oracle wants to create so much animosity among the Virtual Iron customer base it just bought into.

Oracle has a reputation of arrogance when it comes to virtualization; look at their licensing and support for non-Oracle products if you need a refresher. This latest action surely won't help that perception.

If you have a Virtual Iron implementation, I'd love to hear from you on this topic. Are you angry? Frustrated? Ready to explode? Unfazed?

Posted by Keith Ward on 06/22/2009 at 2:49 PM


Reader Comments:

Tue, Jun 23, 2009 MrT Indiana

We have been using VI in production for about 6 months and it's working well - 4 nodes at two locations, 12 virtual servers running. Oracle's letters to us about the takeover indicated they would take the best of VirtualIron and meld it with their product and I was hopefull that we'd end up with a better product and better tech support in the end. Well, maybe not... they just better give us, their NEW CUSTOMER, an upgrade path or VMware here we come (damn the price).

Tue, Jun 23, 2009 KGSBleu

We have been using Virtual Iron for over six months and finally got it working and into production as we were finding out they were being bought out. At first we thought this might be good since Oracle had also bought SUN. We knew SUN had a better virtualization product through XEN and felt we would be offered a chance to change to another product in time maybe under SUN's product line. We purchased Virtual Iron at the time because of the price and it had all the features that was needed for our particular application. We had assumed Oracle purchased Virtual Iron to absorb the customer base. Recently of course we received a letter from them letting us know our options and they were killing the product. I have to admit Virtual Iron's technical support was one we were not very happy with, so we are looking at other products and won't be going with an Oracle or SUN product. We have had success with Virtual Iron even with poor technical support. We are surprised at this development and with Oracle's response. We are also relieved in a way and look forward to pursuing a better product with a future and with the potential to grow the product in new directions.

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