"Larry Ellison has been on a shopping spree for the last three years," she says. "Oracle wants to grab off a piece of the virtualization market."
Virtual Iron
This vendor says it has gotten a big boost from hardware modifications developed by Intel and AMD that make it easier to develop virtualization software. Virtual Iron always supported Linux because the open source operating system could be rewritten to its purposes. Now it can support Windows as well because of the processor upgrades, company CTO Alex Vasilevsky explained last August.
Every vendor is benefiting from hardware upgrades, though, Burns notes.
"The question then becomes who can support those changes with the most optimized code or the broadest functionality, or who can convince those chip designers they need to keep doing more," he says. Intel and AMD face a double-edged sword, he notes, as further virtualization-related improvements in hardware would allow customers to run more workloads on fewer servers.
Virtual Iron's management tools have both live migration and live disaster recovery capabilities, DiDio writes. Bittman rates Virtual Iron as VMware's fifth biggest threat, ahead of Novell and Red Hat, whom he ranks sixth and seventh, respectively.
"Virtual Iron has interesting technology, but as a small vendor it's unlikely to survive," Bittman says. "They'll probably be acquired by somebody."
Small and midsize companies tend to be attracted to Virtual Iron, Hamilton says. "Virtual Iron's go-to-market plan is simple," he says. "They try to position themselves as having very similar capabilities to VMware at a fifth of the cost."
Novell
The Xen hypervisor is embedded free of charge in Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and only one Linux license is needed for all virtual images on a physical server, according to DiDio. Novell tries to differentiate itself with ZENworks Virtual Machine Management, which lets customers manage any virtual environment, whether it be Xen, Microsoft or VMware.
"Novell's positioning is they have very good management tools with the ZENworks suite," Hamilton says.
