History of Oracle VM

Oracle VM is a relative newcomer to the field, considering that its biggest competition, VMware, was introduced in 1998 and is majority owned by EMC. VMware introduced its first virtualization product for the desktop in 1999 and its first server product in 2001. Then, in 2003, VMware introduced the VMware Virtual Center, the vMotion, and Virtual SMP technology. These products made virtualization viable for server consolidation in the enterprise. Prior to that, VMware was primarily used only as a test or training platform. In 2004, VMware introduced 64-bit support. EMC also acquired VMware in 2004.

As with Oracle VM, VMware is supported on the Intel/AMD x86 platforms only. This, in part, has led to the race between Intel and AMD to focus their efforts on providing an extensive set of features that optimize virtualization on their platforms. With both Oracle VM and VMware, fully virtualized systems are now supported. In addition, Oracle VM supports paravirtualization, in which the underlying operating system realizes that it is running on a virtual system and makes intelligent choices based on that knowledge. Although VMware provides replacement drivers for video and I/O, it isn’t the same as paravirtualization. However, both products also support any OS that will run on the x86 platform in a fully virtualized guest.