Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Sun xVM - Virtualize Your Business

Today in London, Boston, and San Francisco we are holding a series of press and analyst chalk talks to preview our new virtualization platform, Sun xVM. Sun started shipping virtualization technology nearly 25 years ago with our open NFS (Network File System) implementation. About 12 years ago we created what has become one of the world's leading virtual machine technologies and application platforms, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Solaris 10 introduced OS level virtualization with Solaris Containers in January 2005. Today, we are previewing Sun xVM Infrastructure, consisting of the Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM Ops Center.

Our open, cross-platform Sun xVM Server will host Windows, Linux, and Solaris guest operating systems, complete with Microsoft support for Windows Server guests. For the first time, Windows guests will be able to benefit from Sun technologies like Predictive Self-Healing and ZFS which are built into the Sun xVM Server. Think about this scenario. You are running windows as a guest OS on Sun xVM Server using an x86 server from Sun, IBM, HP, or Dell. A memory DIMM starts to fail. Predictive Self-Healing built into the Sun xVM Server isolates the failing DIMM from the system and your Windows guest OS continues to run uninterrupted.

Of course everyone has their own hypervisor today, what is so different about the hypervisor technology built into Sun xVM Server? On the x86 platform, the hyperervisor is based on code derived from the work of the Xen open source community, via the Xen community on OpenSolaris.org. Sun is one of the leading participants in the Xen community and in fact is hosting the fall Xen Summit in our Santa Clara, CA, offices on November 14-16. When running on SPARC platforms, Sun xVM Server will use our proven LDOM hypervisor technology.

But virtualizing your business requires much more than a scalable, open, hypervisor. The real challenges in virtualization are in management. Sun xVM Ops Center is a highly scalable, full stack management tool to manage thousands of hardware and software entities. Sun xVM Ops Center will be one of the first tools to manage both your physical and virtual environments. Other virtualization management tools may be able to restart your VM when you have a DIMM failure, but then you need to switch to a different management tool to actually find the machine where the physical failure occurred. With Sun xVM Ops Center, you can do that all with one consistent management tool.

I'll remind everyone, we are not launching new products today. So why are we talking to the press and analysts about them. Well, we are just being open and transparent about our plans. Since the Sun xVM hypervisor work is being done in the OpenSolaris.org community, the code is already out there for everyone to see, and we wanted to let everyone know how that code would start to show up in Sun products over the next year. But don't worry, you won't have to wait a year to see the first supported Sun products. We expect to be back soon with our first Sun xVM product launches, after we finish a little more beta testing. Meanwhile, you can join OpenSolaris.org and start trying out some of the Sun xVM Server technologies for yourself today! That is exactly what Sergy Chelsky at Simon Fraser University did. Sergy was one of the speakers at our San Francisco chalk talk today, you can see what he is doing in this paper.

Posted at 07:40AM Oct 04, 2007 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[5]