Wim Coekaerts Blog

*OracleVM 2.1.2 released !*

I am very excited to announce the new 2.1.2 release of Oracle VM. This is now available from the usual location : http://edelivery.oracle.com/oraclevm

A bunch of new features are included in this release :

* Guest VM HA : auto-restart a failed VM or, if a server fails, auto-restart all failed VMs that were running on that server (and that had the HA option enabled). A quick and easy way to increase application up-time without having to change anything inside your guest VM. Earlier this week(Monday), this was demoed during a keynote at Oracle World by Chuck Rozwat.

* P2V : the server CD allows you to boot in p2v mode which copies over the disk images from a physical server to an Oracle VM server in a server pool and creates a virtual machine for you.

* VMWare V2V: we now automatically convert VMware images into Oracle VM format instead of the manual steps that were previously required.

* Secure Live Migration:  Notice I said "secure".  That's because we are now the first major virtualization solution to SSL encrypt migration traffic natively and by default so you are not exposing sensitive information like account numbers and passwords in the clear.

* Other features such as rate limiting of virtual network interfaces, Disk IO priorities for guest virtual disks etc.

* And, RAC has now been certified with Oracle VM, adding to the list of Oracle products we've cerftified with.

And just like with the previous release, its free to download (both Manager and Server), free to use, no license keys, no alpha/be-our-tester version, all features included, no cpu limitations. Just pay for support, if you need it. You don't get that from anyone else.

I would like to remind everyone that you are allowed to download and use Oracle Enterprise Linux or Oracle VM for free. It is not required to purchase a support subscription first. Also, you can in fact run this in production, without a support subscription. You can redistribute this to others inside your own company or to anyone else outside, without a special contract, without a redistribution agreement, without a support subscription.

And best of all, this is not an alpha version of some future possible release with no supported products on top, this is the exact same code you can use on test, development, pay, no pay, supported, non supported production systems.

Why does this matter ?

Well, certain Linux Distribution / Support vendors don't let you freely download their product unless it's pre-alpha stage, have been known to claim that customers can't freely use this product without paying support (despite the GPL), and have even insisted through their sales team that a customer must power off servers when the server's support subscription expired. Now that doesn't make much sense and I wonder how this all works with a product that is released under the GPL. But this sort of FUD is not good. Especially not when it comes from a self proclaimed open source leader.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=open+source+leader