With the acquisition of Sun and Oracle now has a complete virtualization solutions portfolio that can virtualize and manage full hardware and software stack, from applications to disk.

1) Desktop virtualization. Virtualizing the desktop, which separates an individual desktop environment from a physical machine so that all the programs, applications, processes, and data used are kept and run centrally, improves security, reliability, maintenance costs, and manageability. Oracle has four products to support desktop virtualization.

• Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure provides a solution for managing, hosting, and providing access to virtualized desktop operating systems hosted in the datacenter.

• Oracle Secure Global Desktop provides secure access to centralized, server-hosted Windows, UNIX, mainframe, and midrange applications from client devices such as Windows PCs, Mac OS X systems, Oracle Solaris workstations, Linux PCs, and thin clients. Oracle Secure Global Desktop also provides access to fullscreen desktop environments, allowing administrators to use a single solution to provide access to both server-based applications and server-hosted desktop environments.

• Oracle’s Sun Ray Clients are low-cost devices that display server-hosted virtual desktops. They work with Sun Ray Software and/or with Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Sun Ray Software offers Oracle Solaris or Linux desktop sessions and can make remote connections to Windows Terminal Server (without Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). Thus Sun Ray thin clients can offer virtual desktops through Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Oracle Solaris, Linux, or Windows Terminal Server sessions directly through Sun Ray Software.

• Oracle VM VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop computers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, allowing users to get the most flexibility and use from their PCs. Oracle VM VirtualBox supports many host and guest operating systems and provides high performance and support for virtual appliances.

2) Server virtualization. Server virtualization masks server resources, including processors and operating systems, from server users. The administrator uses a virtual machine or virtualization at the operating system layer to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual instances. Oracle has three products for server virtualization.

• Oracle VM Server for x86 supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications and Oracle Enterprise Linux, Solaris x86, and Windows operating systems and provides a single point of support for entire virtualization environments, including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications, as well as Sun Servers and Sun Storage, which are certified with Oracle VM. Oracle VM Templates deliver rapid software deployment and eliminate installation and configuration costs by providing preinstalled and preconfigured software images.

• Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides virtualization capabilities for Sun SPARC Enterprise T-series servers with chip multithreading technology, which allows up to 128 virtual servers to be created on one system.

• Oracle Solaris Containers allow organizations to have many virtual partitions within a single Oracle Solaris instance. Each container appears to the user as a separate operating system (OS) instance but provides simplified management because all partitions reside in one OS instance. Containers are ideal for consolidating many applications but with very little overhead.

• Dynamic Domains are hardware partitions in Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise M-series servers. Dynamic Domains are completely fault-, service-, resource-, and security-isolated partitions that are ideal for consolidating a wide variety of applications onto a single server, thereby improving system utilization. They can be resized dynamically to meet changing workload requirements.

3) Virtualized storage. Storage virtualization hides, abstracts, or isolates the functions of a storage system from applications, hosts, or network services to enable network-independent management of storage or data. Virtualization can be applied to storage devices to aggregate functions or devices. Oracle has many solutions for storage virtualization.

• Sun Storage, including tape and disk solutions, supports heterogeneous environments and enables cost-effective virtual storage infrastructures.

• Oracle Automatic Storage Management is an interface that is consistent across all server and storage platforms. As a vertically integrated file system and volume manager, Oracle Automatic Storage Management provides the performance of asynchronous I/O with the easy management of a file system.

• Oracle Exadata Storage Server combines Oracle’s smart storage software and Sun hardware to deliver database storage performance.

• The Oracle VM Storage Connect Framework feature provides integrated server and storage management and isolation between the underlying storage arrays and Oracle VM.