At its annual OpenWorld event in San Francisco, Oracle unveiled free open-source virtualisation software designed to help firms manage their virtual servers.

Oracle VM is based on the Xen hypervisor, and supports Linux and Windows
systems. It features an integrated management console that IT staff can access via a web browser to create and manage virtual server pools.

According to the vendor, the software is easy and quick to install – but perhaps most attention-grabbing is the claim from Oracle that the software is “three times more efficient that other server virtualisation products” – although further details on the performance and competing products were not given.

Introducing the product to the 43,000 delegates attending OpenWorld, Oracle president Charles Phillips said, “This is our context of virtualisation. It’s a single environment for managing virtualisation and Linux.” He added that complexity of IT environments was one of the biggest problems still facing customers, and so products such as Oracle VM were aimed at making it easier for firms to gain a unified view and management point for their IT assets.

Oracle VM will be available to download for free this Wednesday from here. For firms wanting Oracle VM with enterprise support, per-system charges are applied.

Pricing for a system with up to two CPUs is $499 (about £250) per year per system, while for unlimited CPUs this increases to $999 (about £500) per year.

Speaking at a UK customer and partner panel at OpenWorld, Ronan Miles, head of the UK Oracle User Group, said he thought Oracle VM was the "biggest announcement" of the show. "I was quite surprised by the virtualisation move – and by the lack of response from the audience," he added.

However, Angela Murphy, head of ICT at UK construction company City Building, said, "Virtualisation is just not something of interest to us at the moment." This view was echoed by the other panel members, who agreed that virtualisation's status as a hot topic did not mean it was in widespread use at companies.

Most of the panel members highlighted licensing and support as issues that Oracle still needed to address. However, they all supported Oracle's focus on consolidation and integration, the key themes of the event.

"Integration is painful for us, so if Oracle can solve that, it's a good thing," said Richard Down, technical governance authority at Vodafone UK. "Vodafone would definitely like to deal with fewer suppliers but whether we go down Oracle's integrated route for every application would depend on the pull between business requirements and commercial incentives – for example if we got a big discount as we use a lot of Oracle."