Oracle has announced two new products intended to enable companies to run Oracle WebLogic-based applications within virtualized environments. The first product, Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option, brings together Oracle WebLogic Server with Oracle's JRockit Virtual Edition. This release is optimized for virtualized environments and able to deliver higher application performance and increased hardware utilization.
WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option "allows you to run WebLogic Server directly on the Oracle VM Hypervisor without an operating system," notes Steven Harris, senior vice president of application server development for Oracle. "What that means is that you have in a virtualized environment you have reduced footprint, you have better performance than when running on a guest operating system, you have better utilization overall." Harris says the tool also provides users the ability to deploy and manage applications as appliances."
Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition handles operating system functions including TCP/IP, hardware device interaction, file I/O, and process scheduling, while freeing up hardware and management resources by removing operating system capabilities that are not essential for enterprise Java applications. "The technology that enables us to deliver WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option is JRockit Virtual Edition," Harris says. "The way to think about it is that Java, and Java Virtual Machine, effectively does things for WebLogic Server and applications running on it."
The second new offering, Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, provides a framework for automatically capturing the configuration of existing software components and packaging them as self-contained building blocks known as appliances. The new software enables administrators to quickly configure and provision these appliance applications, enabling users to "wire applications together as assemblies of appliances in a way that allows you to support complex multi-tier applications," Harris says. These assemblies treat applications as "pluggable building blocks," he adds.
Oracle WebLogic Server can now run directly on Oracle VM without an operating system, a unique capability enabled by Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition. Oracle VM is an x86 server virtualization solution certified for all Oracle software.
Read more about Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder.