News coming out of Oracle OpenWorld:

• Demonstrating its commitment to help customers increase data center efficiencies and reduce costs, Oracle today announced that Oracle(R) VM    (http://www.oracle.com/technologies/virtualization/index.html) server virtualization software achieved "Up-to-Spec" performance certification by The Tolly Group, a leading third-party information technology testing, research, and certification organization.
• In a comparison test between a bare-metal server running an instance of Oracle Enterprise Linux and an Oracle VM Server, hosting an identical single Oracle Enterprise Linux virtual machine (VM), the Oracle VM Server achieved 94 percent of the bare metal server transaction level using an Oracle Database 11g instance supporting 50 concurrent users.  This result indicates an exceptionally low six percent performance overhead, even under heavy workload, demonstrating Oracle VM's leading performance amongst available server virtualization solutions, where 20-30 percent performance overhead has previously been considered typical.
• Tests also showed that Oracle VM continued to scale strongly as additional VMs were added to the server to increase the load.  When adding a second, identical virtual machine with 50 users to the same Oracle VM Server, the throughput reached 160.9 percent of the single virtual machine result with 72 percent more database transactions on two virtual machines under heavy workload compared to a single virtual machine.
• The tests were conducted using freely available Swingbench and LMbench testing tools, allowing customers to easily validate the results using their own workloads and to compare Oracle VM's overhead with other available server virtualization products in their environment. 
• Today's announcement supports Oracle's strategy of delivering complete, integrated and end-to-end product suites on an open, standards-based middleware and database architecture. Oracle's approach helps customers to simplify computing environments, lower cost and risk, and provides greater choice and flexibility.

Lower Overhead Enables Greater Consolidation and Reduced Costs

• Oracle VM's next generation architecture supports the use of virtualization-aware paravirtualized guest operating systems to allow more efficient, lower overhead operations in areas critical to performance such as memory and I/O management. This not only enables higher performance, it also supports excellent scaling as workloads increase, due to the addition of virtual machines, or an increase in workloadload on existing VMs.
• With Oracle VM, it is now practical to consolidate a greater number of physical servers on to a single Oracle VM Server, as compared to other commercial server virtualization offerings, lowering costs associated with power, cooling, and real-estate.  Additionally, customers can now plan to consolidate production database and other servers with heavier    workloads than were previously possible, further reducing costs and increasing quality of service. 
• In addition to lowering costs, Oracle VM's included advanced management features such as Secure Live Migration and Guest VM high availability restart also improve service availability and operational agility for consolidated workloads.