Oracle has announced the latest release of its Xen-based hypervisor, Oracle VM 2.2, which simplifies management of virtualized enterprise applications.

Release 2.2 includes support for the latest Intel and AMD chips, which have added more hooks into the hypervisor's operation, allowing for speedier operation of virtual machines. Oracle VM takes advantage of the features of the Intel Nehalem chip, issued as the Xeon 5500 processor line. It also takes advantage of six-core Opteron processors from AMD.

Both Oracle applications and Oracle databases can be run in virtual machines and will show performance gains under the 2.2 release, said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle VP of Linux engineering, during a press conference Oct. 13 at Oracle OpenWorld. OracleVM can also be used to run another vendor's application in a virtual machine, he added.

Oracle VM 2.2 runs applications with only a 1% to 3% addition in virtualization overhead, compared to non-virtualized applications, he said. "Oracle VM performance versus VMware is very good," he said. While Oracle is a backer of the Xen open source hypervisor project, it has no plans to use or support the KVM hypervisor now embedded in the Linux kernel.

"KVM is not proven technology. There's no documentation or information on its performance and reliability," he said during the press conference. That means a change in the KVM scheduler will be dependent on a change in the kernel scheduler, and no such changes will be made without the express approval of the Linux kernel committers, especially Linus Torvalds. "The future of KVM is in Linus' hands. We have no intention of supporting KVM," he said.

Release 2.2 is offering the first integration resulting from Oracle's purchase of Virtual Iron. Virtual Iron users can now migrate their virtual machines to Oracle VM without worrying about encountering unexpected barriers, he said.

Oracle announced May 13 that it had acquired the privately head company for an undisclosed amount. Virtual Iron was a startup that had been trying to track VMware's virtual machine management capabilities for the Xen hypervisor market at the time it was acquired.

New power management capabilities are included in Release 2.2 in the set up and running of a virtual machine's CPU.

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