Virtual Iron virtually sold perhaps

The rumours are building around the virtualisation company Virtual Iron and if they are not quite at fever pitch, they are somewhere close. I normally avoid writing about rumours but this one is so strong and in so many news outllets that I think if it does not actually go through, more than a few people will be wondering, why not?

At the end of February, the first rumours started that the company was about to be sold to Oracle. No surprise there as Oracle is the traditional recipient of rumours at times like this.

Virtual Iron appeared to be as good a candidate as any other. It easily satisfied the main requirements of good technology, a good name and working in an up and coming field, such as virtualisation.

I was waiting to see what happens next until I read an article that brought this issue into sharper focus for me. Writing in Information Week, Charles Babcock, pointed out the following in answer to the question, why buy Virtual Iron?

"There's an obvious answer. Oracle VM is based on open source Xen, as is Virtual Iron's hypervisor. So the tools that Virtual Iron has built out around its hypervisor, such as LiveMigration for moving virtual machines around, and LivePower, for detecting and decommissioning underutilized VMs, could be useful in an Oracle customer's environment."

Of course, this does not mean that any sale is going to happen, that will be down to the finance people, but it suddenly means the idea make a lot of good sense. Still, how often do things happen because the idea makes good sense? Well, sometimes perhaps.