What are we to make of Oracle announcing support for an open stack of cloud foundation software for its distribution of Linux and Xen? Are we seeing a culture clash?

Oracle has made Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux distribution generally available so customers can use it with the company's own version of Linux and virtual machine (VM) services.

With Oracle VirtualBox, you can have your Linux Mint cake and your Windows XP icing. A VM enables you to run a guest operating system on top of another operating system.

Like Windows, Linux also supports VirtualBox, though the limitations of the Type-2 hypervisor become apparent once you get into complex workloads. Performance-wise, it leaves a lot to be desired, ...

Oracle VM is the company’s server virtualization product, based on the open-source Xen hypervisor and able to run virtual machines on Windows, Linux or Oracle’s own Solaris OSes.

Previews of virtual machine (VM) images that enable Oracle workloads to run on Windows Azure are now available from Oracle and Microsoft.