On Monday Oracle briefly routed VMware's already traumatized stock - last week was a lousy time for tech stocks - when it announced from Oracle OpenWorld that it was entering the virtualization market with free code for industry standard machines called Oracle VM.

Wall Street failed to read past the second-sentence claim that Oracle VM is "three times more efficient than existing products" to discover that what Oracle is peddling is Xen, the open source product that VMware claims is an early stage technology anywhere from 18 to 30 months behind it that has yet to make it to production installations.

And it doesn't appear from anything Oracle said that Oracle has done anything to juice Xen up other than certify its database, Fusion middleware and applications on the thing.

And VMware will tell you that since Xen is an open source project development is haphazard.

Illuminata senior analyst Gordon Haff said Oracle's virtualization feint "matters even less than Oracle's Unbreakable Linux, which matters not at all," a reference to Oracle's toothless threat to put Red Hat out of business and Oracle envisions deploying Open VM with Unbreakble Linux and running the full Oracle software stack of Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Applications.

Haff is also critical because Oracle hasn't explained how it comes by the 3x efficiency claim - benchmarks, please, Oracle - and explains that the hypervisor is fast becoming commoditized anyway and is no longer the heart of VMware's business. Other services like VirtualCenter and VMotion are.

Still and all, Oracle, being Oracle, got the usual suspects like Dell, HP, NetApp and Pillar to climb on board its bandwagon.

The widgetry supports Oracle Linux 4 and 5, RHEL3, 4 and 5, Windows 2003 and XP.

Oracle VM should be available by now as a free download at www.oracle.com/virtualization. Although the code is free, 24x7 support is not. Oracle is charging $499 a year per system for a box with up to two CPUs and $999 a year per system for unlimited CPUs.