While it is still early days, we're making good progress and interestingly, the system referred to in the original "Hello World" was a 2-way Opteron box running Solaris and Linux side-by-side. What this means to our users is that the fourth pillar in our server virtualization strategy is up and running, with any luck we should have a technology preview available in the coming months.

One of the questions this begs is "why are you investing in multiple virtualization technologies that essentially solve the same problem?" and the answer is pretty straight forward, as with many Solaris features it's all about choice.

Server virtualization can have many different meanings depending on a number of different factors, e.g. the problem you're trying to solve, the business your in, platform availability etc. Our belief is that there is no one size fits all answer to the problem and our solutions reflect that.

The four pillars (as I see them) are Hardware Partitioning with Dynamic System Domains, Server Virtualization with Xen, Resource Management with Solaris Resource Manager (unique name huh?) and OS virtualization with Solaris Containers.

I won't go into great detail here but customers can choose the virtualization technology they want based on the problem they're trying to solve, I tend to think of it in terms of a couple simple questions:

*Question 1:* Do you need to run multiple different OS versions on the same platform? If YES go to Question 2, otherwise go to Question 3.

*Question 2:* Do you want the multiple OS versions to be electrically isolated? If YES, choose Dynamic System Domains, if not, go with a Hypervisor technology like Xen or VMWare.

*Question 3:* Do you want to isolate multiple applications and/or users on the same system from one another. If YES, choose Solaris Containers, if not, go with Solaris Resource Manager.

These questions verge on oversimplification but they get to the heart of the problem and provide a good basis for discussing how the technologies can then be used together to provide additional levels of flexibility.

Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Dynamic System Domains Solaris Resource Manager VMWare