We still don’t know what Oracle’s plans are for the Virtual Iron technology it acquired in May, but in light of these developments, a much bigger question is arising about a much bigger acquisition: Will Oracle kill off Sun Microsystems’ virtualization line too?

To answer this question, I did what any responsible journalist would do. I consulted the Magic 8-Ball. Its response?

On one hand, the future doesn’t look good for Sun virtualization. In the wake of the acquisition by Oracle — which is expected to close this summer — Sun has backed down on its plans to offer its xVM Server as a standalone hypervisor. It will only be available as part of the xVM Ops Center management console or the OpenSolaris operating system (but not the commercial version of Solaris).

Judging from this move, you’d think Sun sees the writing on the wall: Oracle wants to present a unified virtualization front, and all these different products from three different vendors won’t help meet that goal.

But on the other hand, Sun just yesterday released its VirtualBox 3.0 virtualization software. Why would Sun execs go through all the trouble of putting out a new release if they thought Oracle was just going to squash it in a few months?

It’s all very confusing for the three companies’ customers and partners. Oracle’s relative silence about the acquisitions isn’t helping matters. (Instead of responding to our questions about Virtual Iron’s future, the company just emailed us a link to its specifics-deficient Virtual Iron FAQ.)

Oracle knew what its plans were for both Virtual Iron and Sun when it bought them. Whether the Magic 8-Ball says “signs point to yes” or “outlook not so good,” any sort of definitive answer would be welcomed.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) suite will hit general availability Sept. 1, according to LeMagIT — which, for those of you who don’t parlez francais, means “The IT Mag.” Sept. 1 is the first full day of VMworld 2009, when VMware typically makes most of its major announcements.

RHEV marks a shift from Xen to KVM as Red Hat’s open source virtualization technology of choice, as senior virtualization director Navin Thadani said on last week’s edition of This Week in Virtualization.

(Shameless plug: Subscribe to This Week in Virtualization on iTunes!)

The suite is in private beta now, but Red Hat had been keeping its release date under wraps.

Red Hat’s attempt to turn VMworld into KVMworld is just the latest of several attempts to grab headlines during VMware’s show. Citrix dropped its free XenServer bomb at VMworld Europe in February, and Microsoft handed out its infamous “VMware Costs Way Too Much” poker chips at VMworld 2008.

Acronym overload is an unfortunate part of life in IT, especially in virtualization. But that doesn’t mean you can toss them around willy-nilly without knowing what they mean.

I came across a great reminder of this lesson this morning on FMyLife.com, the website where people share the unfortunate — and often hilarious — events that happen in their life. (The “F” stands for exactly what you think it does.) “MrZhang” from Australia wrote:

Today, I had an interview with IBM. For a week I did extensive research and preparation for the interview. At first the interview was going really well. I was hitting all the marks. Then just as a final casual question she asked with a smile “What does IBM stand for?”. I didn’t know. FML

Of course, not knowing an acronym’s meaning won’t typically cost you a job at one of the biggest companies in the world. But it can embarass you in front of your bosses and colleagues … and maybe even your BFF.

So why is VMware apologizing to Microsoft?

Because of a video VMware posted on YouTube (since removed), which showed Microsoft Hyper-V crashing while running VMware’s VMmark platform. The video also implied that Hyper-V crashes caused April’s massive TechNet and MSDN outages.

Two problems: 1) Hyper-V crashed in the video because it was running unsupported VMmark configurations, and 2) TechNet and MSDN crashed because of a spike in traffic surrounding the Windows 7 RC release. Conveniently for VMware, the video did not mention either of these facts.

And that really annoyed Microsoft’s Jeff Woolsey, the principal group program manager for Hyper-V. He wrote a scathing blog post that said “this isn’t how billion dollar companies behave” and chastised VMware’s Bruce Herndon for downplaying the video controversy as a “kerfuffle”:

A “kerfuffle” is going to the coffee shop ordering a mocha and getting a latte. A “kerfuffle” is getting your luggage lost at the airport. If the shoe were on the other foot, you wouldn’t be using the word “kerfuffle.”

Finally, on June 10, Scott Drummonds — the VMware employee who anonymously posted the video — apologized:

The video was a bit hyperbolic in its dramatization of Hyper-V’s reliability. Unfortunately, my intention to stir the pot with eye-poking banter has put my credibility and by association VMware’s credibility in question among some of you. … We will absolutely work our best to live up to the high standard you’ve come to expect from us.  And when we mess up, we’ll be the first to address the mistake head on.

Apologizing was clearly the right thing to do, but for some, the move was too little, too late. For example, take “TimC,” who made this comment on Drummonds’ apology:

It seems like you needed a fair bit of prompting after the guy from Microsoft ‘first addressed the mistake’ by calling you on it. Are you ever going to truly come clean and publish a full description of your test environment? … If you don’t do that, I would continue to question how serious you are about this ‘apology’.

This whole fiasco has taken the Microsoft vs. VMware fight from the level of professional business competition into the realm of personal animosity. You’d have to think things will only get worse as Microsoft prepares to release Hyper-V R2 — and VMware prepares to stave off the biggest challenge yet to its market dominance.

Hoff, aka “Beaker,” runs the Rational Survivability blog and has held high-ranking security positions at several IT vendors and other firms — albeit none as big as Cisco. They include Unisys, Crossbeam Systems and the WesCorp federal credit union.

His hiring at Cisco comes as the networking giant is making its move into the virtualization and data center markets with its Unified Computing System.

UCS aims to unite computing, networking, storage and virtualization, making the technologies easier to manage in a data center — all the while giving Cisco more complete control over said data center (which some IT pros are worried about). It will also bring Cisco into competition with VMware, its partner, which has similar plans for data center domination with vSphere 4.

But if Hoff’s previous blog posts are any indication, don’t expect Cisco to blow up that partnership any time soon. (Although he may challenge Paul Maritz to a sumo wrestling match if things ever get testy.)

Last month, for example, Hoff wrote: “In environments that are designing their next evolution of datacenter architecture, the integration between Cisco, VMware, and EMC are critical. … Don’t think that Cisco and VMware aren’t aware of how critical one are to the other.”

In a blog post announcing Hoff’s hiring, Cisco data center solutions manager Omar Sultan wrote, “I know Chris has the tenacity of a squirrel chasing an acorn, and I am personally quite pleased to welcome Chris to the team as I see he will add both depth and breadth to our efforts.”

In response, Hoff said he was “beyond psyched” to be joining Cisco. He’ll officially join the company Monday.

These new products hold a lot of promise. But for now, the best application of mobile phone virtualization is to use mobile devices to manage existing virtual environments. The latest release in this area of the market comes from Hyper9, which yesterday unveiled its Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM).

Hyper9 claims VMM — which was designed by virtualization expert (and TechTarget contributor) Andrew Kutz — is the first mobile manager that supports VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer. It also lets users monitor virtual machine CPU and memory usage and configure VMs based on server name or browser type.

The Hyper9 VMM is not the first and definitely won’t be the last entrant into this market. Just last month, expert Edward L. Haletky wrote about TouchTerm, a free iPhone app he used to fix a VMware ESX server while on vacation.

With VMware MVP, you could potentially have your business phone and your personal phone on the same device — even on different carriers’ networks. And Citrix Receiver lets you stream non-native applications on your iPhone.

Still, both of these products are far from hitting the mainstream. (Even VMware partners say MVP is, to quote one eloquent journalist, “way too new.”)

VMware MVP and Citrix Receiver mirror the server and desktop approaches to virtualization, respectively, and most organizations still have a lot of virtualization challenges to tackle on their servers and desktops before they move to mobile devices.

So for the time being, the ability to manage your existing infrastructure from a phone  is clearly more valuable than what the sexier products from VMware and Citrix offer.

Well, in the words of Lee Corso:

There are still quite a few people out there who don’t feel totally comfortable virtualizing everything. And they’re not all newbies who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Case in point: Joshua Corman, the principal security strategist for IBM, a company you may have heard of before. He made headlines at Interop when he told attendees, “I highly recommend you don’t adopt virtualization for any regulated project.”

Server virtualization makes it difficult for organizations to show regulatory compliance, especially when they’re regularly provisioning and deprovisioning virtual machines. And it opens up a whole new Pandora’s box of risks, especially when live migration and other advanced technologies are involved, Corman said, according to Network World.

And at TechEd last month, Microsoft product manager Edwin Yuen warned attendees about additional virtualization challenges.

“You have to do all the maintenance, management and control of [virtual] machines that you normally do [on physical machines],” he said.

Some users also have their concerns. Mike Mucha, the information security officer for Stanford Hospital and Clinics, told InfoWorld last week that a recent virtualization deployment has muddied the waters around his organization’s security decision-making process.

“Virtualization tends to be … led by the server team,” he said. “The server people are taking on non-traditional roles, making decisions about network architecture.”

But at TechEd I also spoke to several IT managers and systems administrators who said their servers are or soon will be 100% virtualized. And these weren’t at rinky-dink mom-and-pop shops. Some were large organizations in sensitive verticals like healthcare and government.

When they were telling me about this, I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty cool that you’ve done so much with virtualization!” But after reading what Corman said about virtualization security and compliance, I wonder if my response should have been, “What? Are you nuts?”

The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Maybe some longtime virtualization users have found ways to secure their environments and show regulatory compliance. Or maybe some think they have and are in for a rude awakening. Maybe Corman is completely right about virtualization’s risks. Or maybe he’s spreading some good, old-fashioned FUD.

Should you consider and addresss the security and compliance concerns? Of course. But don’t let them stop you from realizing the benefits of virtualization.

In a blog post For shame! VMware is now banning competing vendors’ products from VMworld!, desktop and application virtualization analyst Brian Madden highlighted language that states exhibitors and sponsors can only discuss products which are “complementary” to VMware’s, where “complementary” is defined as “products/services that do not overlap/substitute with VMware’s products/capabilities, and help expand the reach and solution scope of VMware’s capabilities solely as deemed by VMware.”

With this move, VMworld will no longer be a “true industry-wide virtualization event” like it has in the past, Madden wrote, but simply “a big rah rah hug-fest.” Madden’s Web site, www.brianmadden.com, is owned by TechTarget.

Not true, said VMware. In a statement, Claire Darling, VMware senior director for corporate marketing said VMworld will continue to highlight “the rich, diverse ecosystem that is the virtualization marketplace.” She said the new exhibitor sponsor contract is “standard across the industry” and that it contains “nothing out of the ordinary or meant to limit the value of VMworld.”

Furthermore, “Nearly a hundred companies, including those with competitive solutions, have already signed up and will be participating in the conference this year,” Darling added, including Citrix and Microsoft. Deposits for booth space are due next week, and VMware will post the exhibitor list sometime in June.

VMworld 2008 attracted over 15,000 attendees and 200 exhibitors, many of whose products could be construed as overlapping with VMware’s.

Madden later wrote a follow-up post, VMware clarifies: “We WILL allow competition at VMworld” but his original post appears to have struck a nerve in the VMware partner community.

“News of the blog got around pretty quick,” said Christian Simko, senior director of marketing communications for VKernel, a provider of virtualization management software for VMware ESX environments, pointing to the large number of comments on Madden’s original post.

Simko said VKernel, which plans to renew its contract to exhibit at the upcoming show, was caught off guard by the language. “We don’t really know how this affects us,” Simko said. “We’re like, ‘Whoa, what does this actually mean?’”

In all likelihood, Simko said the new language wasn’t directed at companies such as Vkernel, but possibly at Microsoft, whose actions at VMworld 2008 raised quite a few eyebrows.

But nor was he surprised by the vehemence of the community’s response to VMware, which has a reputation for developing products that compete directly with those of its partners. For instance, Vkernel’s Capacity Analyzer competes directly with VMware’s forthcoming vCenter CapacityIQ.

But based on last year’s experience, Simko said VKernel is looking forward to the show, even though attendance is expected to be down because of the economy. “It was a great show. I can’t remember a show that had that much buzz the whole time.”

VMworld 2009 takes place from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 in San Francisco.

vSphere is a great release — if your hardware is supported and you have the money you may need to pay for additional licensing and training. If you do, then by all means upgrade and check out all the new features and functionality that is has to offer. If you don’t, consider these issues:

vSphere has different hardware requirements than the previous VI3 release. For starters, it only supports 64-bit server hardware. (VI3 supported both 32-bit and 64-bit server hardware.) Additionally, VMware’s Hardware Compatibility Guide, which lists the specific server models and storage and I/O hardware devices that support vSphere, only contains some of the most recent hardware. For example, with Hewlett-Packard servers, only the latest G5 and G6 models (as well as DL385 G2s, which are the equivalent of G5s) are supported.

Just because a server or device is not listed on VMware’s guide doesn’t mean it won’t work with vSphere — just that it’s not officially supported, and if you contact support with a hardware issue, they may not help you with it. vSphere will install and run OK on the HP G4 models (and also the DL385 G1s), but it’s not supported. But on most of the HP G3 and older servers, vSphere will not even install. Consequently many companies with older hardware may wait to upgrade to vSphere until they can afford to purchase new hardware.

Next there is vSphere licensing. You need to have active Support and Subscription (SnS) contracts with VMware to be eligible to upgrade from VI3 to vSphere. If you do not, you will need to renew them before you can get vSphere licenses. Additionally, for customers that have Enterprise licenses, VMware is pretty much forcing you to pay to upgrade to the new Enterprise Plus edition in vSphere. Sure, it’s not mandatory, but VMware is phasing out the Enterprise edition license at the end of the year, and any new license purchases will be Enterprise Plus licenses.

Therefore, if you have Enterprise Plus licenses and want to use their additional features like Host Profiles and Distributed vSwitches, you will not be able to effectively, because your other servers with Enterprise licenses will not support them. The only way to ensure all your hosts can use these features is to pay to upgrade your Enterprise licenses to Enterprise Plus.

Finally there is training. vSphere made many changes to VI3, and it’s best to be prepared before you start using it. VMware does offer two new classes that you can take to get up to speed on vSphere. The first is a two-day class entitled VMware vSphere: What’s New for $1,495, the other is a four-day class entitled VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage for $2,995.

VMware is pretty closed-lipped until they actually release the product, so many companies do not have the information they need to plan ahead and budget for these costs. Because of this some companies may have to hold off on upgrading to vSphere for now until they can include these additional costs in their budgets.

It would be nice if VMware could let customers know earlier about the requirements, release timeframes and costs of upcoming releases. That way customers can plan ahead, because many budgets are set before the year begins and are locked in afterwards.

Microsoft has been very content over the last nearly 30 years letting the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM build physical servers with nary a care. When VMware introduced commodity server virtualization back in 1999, Microsoft hardly batted an eye. So what’s happened to make Microsoft not only care, but care enough to invest millions of dollars into their own server virtualization solution?

It’s all about control.

Today, Microsoft pretty much owns the x86 data center above the hardware. Sure, Linux has established a beach head and Apple is blowing up some dust, but by and large, if it’s x86, it’s running Windows.

How did Microsoft get into this position? By making it easy for developers to build applications on top of the Windows operating system. Look at Novell NetWare — arguably a much better network OS than Windows NT, but a really difficult development platform for ISVs. You had your choice of development languages, as long as it was Watcom C. You also had your choice of user interface, as long as it was exposed across the network.

Microsoft gave the developers freedom to choose the development language they liked to work in and to build a rich user interface. The rest is history. Sure, there are still people who choose Novell for their technology, but Microsoft has usurped Novell’s customer base and Novell has been relegated to a second tier vendor.

OK, so what in the world does all that have to do with Microsoft caring about virtualization? Well, think of today’s developers. Do they develop applications for Windows? Mostly, no. They develop against an application framework. Be it .Net, Struts, Ruby on Rails or something else, it’s the framework that’s important, not the operating system.

You can run many (most?) .Net applications on Linux with a simple recompile under Mono. The other frameworks really don’t care what OS is underneath. As for the user interface, Ajax provides near fat client user experience through an industry standard framework. Microsoft’s response to Ajax is Silverlight, an attempt to keep control over the user experience.

Microsoft is nervous because they see their firm grip on the data center slipping away. And it’s not only the data center. Ajax is loosening the grip on the client, too. No longer do you need to have a Windows server offering up data to a Windows client. You can now have a Linux server being accessed from an Apple client — and many users would be challenged to know the difference (much less care!).

So again you ask, what does this have to do with virtualization? It’s simple…all it’s going to take is for a virtualization vendor to implement the frameworks in their hypervisor and there’s no longer any reason to have Windows on your servers. Implement a thin client in a client-based hypervisor and there’s no longer any reason to have Windows on your desktop or laptop (assuming ubiquitous network access).

In this scenario, the hypervisor really does become the “datacenter operating system”. Microsoft becomes an application vendor who would have to compete head-on with Google and whoever else decides to play in that space.

In short, if Microsoft loses the hypervisor battle, they lose control of the datacenter. They lose control of your IT budget. They lose. It’s not something that Microsoft does very often, and I expect them to fight vigorously in their attempt to keep from losing this battle. Whatever happens, it’s going to make for an interesting couple of years while the titans of virtualization fight it out to see who winds up in control.