Sun's announcement at Oracle OpenWorld does not compute

As described by Dan Farber, Sun Microsystems this morning announced the Sun xVM platform, a way to run Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems on top of Xen hypervisor technology. But the fact this was announced during a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld does not compute, because immediately following the keynote, I attended a session where Oracle's Ken Jacobs and other company officials stated that Oracle has no plans to certify the Oracle database or application stack to run on top of Sun xVM, opting instead to support Oracle's own newly-announced virtualization platform, also built on top of Xen.

(Confused yet?)

Curiously, no one asked about Oracle certification during the Sun press conference immediately after the Schwartz's keynote. Maybe it was the obvious question that didn't need to be asked. But I thought I saw more than one customer head shaking after they heard Jacobs lay it all out in the later session.

Sun, which is a Diamond Sponsor at Oracle OpenWorld, certainly got a bully pulpit to make their xVM announcement, and maybe that's all they wanted. But it's another sign of how strange things are in IT these days that Oracle wasn't actually on board with the announcement. When I asked Jacobs after his session, the best explanation he could offer is that Oracle customers could use xVM to run things other than the Oracle stack.

Strange times, especially for IT customers!