Database giant Oracle launched the third version of Oracle VM this week, its hypervisor offering which it hopes will help it gain a foothold in this space by luring in VMware customers.

Monica Kumar, senior director of product marketing at Oracle, said that v3 introduces a number of new features. These include a more efficient interface, policy-based management, and “advanced storage management” provided via the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in API. Oracle VM 3.0 also ships with support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and what the company refers to as Oracle VM Templates, or free preconfigured software installation files.

Oracle revamped its virtualization software and marketing tactic in more than one way with this launch.  Kumar noted that the offering is designed to create a “notable reduction” in the amount of admin time spent on tasks, as well as overhead, and delved a bit into what advantages Oracle is offering as a part of its plan to match VMware.

From eWeek:

“Oracle VM 3.0 is four times more scalable than the latest VMware [vSphere 5] offering,” Kumar said. “What I mean by that is VMware supports up to 32 processors in a single virtual machine, whereas Oracle VM 3.0 supports up to 128 processors in a single virtual machine. That makes a lot of difference to a customer with large workloads that require more processing power.”

Oracle is competing on the performance side, as well as with price, in an atypical move for the company. VM 3.0 itself is free, and the company will be making its money by selling per-server, subscription-based enterprise support services.  It also says Oracle VM is seven times cheaper to run than vSphere.

VMware also had a few updates recently. Last week, security firm IdentityLogix extended its security software with the SpyLogix for VMware module.