Oracle unveils virtualisation strategy for enterprise apps

Oracle has unveiled its desktop to server virtualisation strategy which it has positioned as a more rounded suite compared with the market leading VMWare.

The company aims to expand the use of virtualisation to support mission-critical applications and provide IT departments with a way to offer the business IT as a service.

Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, said, "The number one reason why people use virtualisation is for server consolidation. Most people do not deploy their most critical applications in a virtualisation environment and use virtualisation in less critical applications such as file and print, and web servers."

He said lines of business expect IT to deliver capacity on demand, so datacentres are evolving from fixed locations to service centres. To address this, he added, Oracle wanted to provide virtualisation which is integrated up and down the software stack, with applications pre-assembled for virtualisation.

With the acquisition of Sun, Screven said Oracle now provides storage, desktop and storage virtualisation.

"Our overall strategy is to provide full support for virtualisation from application to disk, so customers can choose everything they need for their IT environment from Oracle."

To help IT departments deploy virtualised enterprise applications, Oracle has developed what it calls VM Templates. The template provides a preconfigured virtual machine, which users can deploy directly into their virtualisation environment.