You'd think there was a virtualization conference this week. But as it just so happens, three companies are vying for status in this growing market: market leader VMware, the perennial up-and-comer Microsoft, and a newcomer with a familiar ring to it: Oracle.

"The virtualization market is exciting right now, and we're glad to be a part of it," an Oracle representative told BetaNews at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. There, Oracle unveiled Oracle VM, a virtualization program promoted as three times as efficient against compositing products.

Oracle VM is a free download and will be available starting tomorrow morning.

"Since [we] believe many VMware customers use different Oracle software solutions," the representative continued, "we look forward to seeing what happens later down the road."

Oracle VM should effectively help the world's second-largest software maker wage war against the other established companies working in the virtualization sector. Allowing greater flexibility for system administrators, it was designed for both Microsoft Windows and Linux. "We've done thousands of hours of testing" to make certain Oracle VM works in Linux, stated Oracle's Linux engineer Kurt Hackel. Users will be able to use a Web-based management console to easily migrate and manage applications that run on physical or virtual servers.

Oracle has chosen the Xen hypervisor, created from XenSource, which is now a subsidiary of Citrix Systems. It's been certified to run Oracle Database, Oracle Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware. The company plans to provide 24/7 user support for $499 per year for single or dual CPU-systems, or $999 per year for systems with an unlimited amount of CPUs.

To counter the Oracle VM announcement yesterday, VMWare today unveiled VMware Server 2, "the next generation of the company's easy-to-use, free-of-charge virtualization product." Supporting more than 30 operating systems, system managers will be able to utilize USB 2.0 technology while using up to 8 GB of RAM for each virtual machine. The latest offering from VMware also lets users partition a single physical server into multiple virtual machines.

The VMware Server 2 beta is available immediately from the VMware web site. The final version is expected to be released sometime next year.

In a statement to reporters this afternoon, VMWare vice president for alliances Parag Patel officially welcomed Oracle to the virtualization market, but in its own special way: by painting a picture of it as just another implementation of something that's already available.

"There are at least five variants of Xen available to customers today," Patel said. "Oracle's will be the sixth. We believe customers want a consistent approach to virtualization that has a proven track record with mission-critical deployments and a complete offering."

Microsoft also unveiled details regarding its Hyper-V virtualization technology, previously codenamed "Viridian." Hyper-V Server is expected to follow within six months of Windows Server 2008's release, and is designed to offer a low-cost method to virtualize servers.

Hyper-V will eventually end up bundled with Windows Server 2008, with eight versions expected to launch in late February. The Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2008 will include Hyper-V. As BetaNews reported yesterday, users who choose a product without Hyper-V will not be able to later upgrade to the full version of Windows Server 2008, since they are "separate products."

Meanwhile, as a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews yesterday afternoon, Hyper-V Server (yes, there's a difference) is the separate virtualization product for consolidating multiple workloads onto a single physical server. It will sell separately for $28, and already the company's having a hard enough time distinguishing the two.