Oracle still seems to be trying to get both feet into the virtualization game. On the positive side, it just announced a few new pieces to its virtualization puzzle. On the negative side, the puzzle didn't come with a box, so we still have no clue as to what this thing is supposed to ultimately look like. And that makes it a bit more difficult to put the pieces together.

Still fresh off the heels of its acquisition of Virtual Iron (and then Virtual Iron's subsequent "death"), Oracle still seems to be hammering out the details of its converged road map. Part of that road map seems to include three new offerings: a free graphical tool for building custom templates, Oracle Siebel CRM packaged as an Oracle VM template, and new Oracle Validated Configurations for Oracle VM.

[ Also this week in InfoWorld's Virtualization Report: Virtualization giant VMware moved into the clouds by purchasing SpringSource | And is VMware making a mistake by moving VMworld Europe to October 2010? ]

First is an offering from Oracle called the Oracle VM Template Builder. The company described it as an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux "Just enough OS" (JeOS)-based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM. Basically, it's Oracle's answer to VMware's virtual appliances and the Virtual Appliance Marketplace. Oracle's VM Template Builder allows independent software vendors, software developers, or end-users to easily create their own virtual appliances using JeOS, a trimmed-down version of Oracle Enterprise Linux within a VM image. And while Oracle is mostly touting this new offering as a graphical utility, users familiar with JeOS scripts will be happy to know that they can also work with it from the command line as well.