Oracle Losing Patience with XenSource, VMware

Oracle is fast losing its patience with both XenSource and VMware over their reluctance to work together to help develop a single interface that will integrate a variety of virtualization solutions in the Linux kernel.

"We certainly believe in one simple universal way to integrate a variety of virtualization solutions, and that is the way that Andrew Morton [the maintainer of the stable Linux kernel] wants to go," said Bob Shimp, the vice president of Oracles technology business unit, on July 31.

"I can say that Oracle is losing its patience over this issue and we are going to be pushing harder and harder on everybody to come to the table with a realistic solution," he said, noting that it is in everyones interest to get a solution thrashed out that benefits the open-source community as a whole.

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Oracle is a significant player in the open-source community and, as both an open-source and commercial database provider, has a very strong interest in getting virtualization technology into the kernel.

It recently successfully managed to get the Oracle Cluster File System technology, an open standard file system, adopted as part of the Linux 2.6 kernel, the first such technology to be included in the kernel.

It also acquired open-source database company Sleepycat and its Berkeley DB product earlier this year.

That acquisition helped Oracle reach smaller customers it may not have been able to before, Shimp said.

Oracles comments come hot on the heels of those made by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel maintainer for a number of subsystems and a maintainer of the stable Linux kernel team, on July 26 at the annual OSCON (OReilly Open Source Conference) in Portland, Ore.

Kroah-Hartman said then that XenSource and VMware were butting heads instead of working together to come up with a joint solution.

"Xen and VMware both supply huge patch-sets and are both trying to do the same thing, but their technologies dont work with one another, and we are telling them that we do not want to take one over the other, we want them to talk and work it out," he said.

To read more about how this conflict is holding back Linux virtualization, click here.

Getting the two companies to talk to one another and work together has been requiring mediation by neutral parties, including people from the Linux distributions, the community and vendors, he said, adding that these mediators "are currently trying to kick them in the butt and get them to work together. So that solution is not coming anytime soon," Kroah-Hartman said.

Next Page: Plans to merge.