Oracle today announced availability of Oracle VM 2.2 as well as Oracle VM Storage Connect Program that will simplify management of storage infrastructure supporting virtual environments. The new release includes the following key features:

• Support for Xen 3.4 (latest Xen hypervisor)
• Support for migrating Virtual Iron VMs to Oracle VM images
• CPU power management, memory management, and direct disk I/O capabilities
• Support for the Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS2) 1.4 to enable faster VM provisioning and cloning
• Direct support for multipath storage devices that can enhance performance of clustered applications
• Options to set the scheduling priority for virtual CPUs in VMs and cap the maximum percentage of CPU time each individual VM can access
• Support for Intel Xeon 5500 series and six-core AMD Opteron processors

While Oracle may be coming late to the server virtualization party, it is clearly adding key enterprise features that are reducing the lead of its competitors. Furthermore, with Sun Microsystems, Oracle can offer what no other virtualization vendor can - a complete virtualization stack with all the key software and hardware components. And the complete stack can be easily designed and presented by Oracle partners using Lanamark Suite.