Thursday January 31, 2008 xVM Q&A with Steve Wilson
If you're interested in reading a good Q&A session about xVM with Steve Wilson, our VP, there's an excellent interview I'd recommend.
[ Nick ]
( Jan 31 2008, 01:47:01 PM CET ) Permalink
Monday January 21, 2008 Software Technical Event at Grenoble Engineering Center
The Sun site I work at in Grenoble is a software engineering center, where close to a couple of hundred of us work on all kinds of software, from Open Solaris kernel internals to xVM, from Open Directory Server to Java SE. Notice a common theme? That's right, open-source is Sun's development and business model for software.
Last week we held a 4-day Software Technical Event, for Sun's parters from France and across Europe, working with the technical sales force based all over Europe to construct an agenda designed by and for software developers, with the Grenoble staff being able to contribute to many of the tracks.
The event, the first of its kind in Grenoble, was a huge success, with over 200 people attending.
As concerns the technology our team is involved with, Common Agent Container and xVM, we were very happy to see a presentation by InfoVista on their performance-management solution that leverages the Common Agent Container DTrace module for remote monitoring of vanilla Solaris 10 boxes using DTrace.
We also gave a presentation on xVM Ops Center, the Common Agent Container, and the upcoming xVM Ops Center next release as well as xVM Server, which was well received... the slides are available here.
( Jan 21 2008, 09:47:43 AM CET ) Permalink
Monday December 10, 2007 We've set our code free!
The Common
Agent Container has been set free!
I'm very pleased to announce the availability of the Common Agent Container open-source project as the first piece of the larger goal of open-sourcing the xVM project.
Want to know what it is? Read a little more in my last blog article, or follow the links below for detailed information...
The Common Agent Container project is released under the GNU General Public License v3 with
the ClassPath exception and is hosted on Java.NET at the following URL:
This website is the main entry point for everything related to this project; once there, you can:
Read about the Common Agent Container, what it does, and how it works, via its Principles Of Operation and other documentation
Browse or check-out the sources
Download pre-built binaries (runtime, SDK and DTrace module) as packages or tarballs for the Solaris(SPARC/x86) and Linux platforms
Join the community and the project mailing lists
Take a role in the project and contribute
And much more...
Please visit our project site and do not hesitate to send feedback (by clicking "Send Website Feedback" on the left panel).
See you there!
( Dec 10 2007, 08:56:46 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [2]
Friday December 07, 2007 Open sourcing technology from xVM Ops Center - the Common Agent Container
As the first product from Sun to be released under a GPLv3 license, there's a ton of interest and questions coming up around our Ops Center open source plans.
The first piece that is being open-sourced just next week is one of the bits I'm the most involved in - the Common Agent Container, or 'CAC'. We've been working on, and using, the Common Agent Container for several years now, and it's an exciting moment for us all to be able to make it available to the community, especially under the new GPLv3 license.
[Read More]( Dec 07 2007, 03:36:20 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [3]
Monday November 19, 2007 xVM launched
xVM was launched by Jonathan Schwartz, Rich Green, and Steve Wilson last week at Oracle Open World where it got quite a lot of press coverage including titles such as:
"Sun Wows the Crowd"
"Sun Commits $2 Billion to Virtualization" and
"Sun rises on xvm stategy".
I'm proud to be a small part of this, being involved in the management infrastructure used by xVM... it's great to see the spotlight come our way after all the hard work being done by our team... and going open-source with the great road-map we've got lined up is even better!
 | Want to see Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, demonstrating xVM Ops Center? |
 | At the same time we launched OpenxVM, the project to house all the xVM open-source projects, this is something I'm pretty busy with at the moment, since we're going through the process of open-sourcing our management infrastructure, the Common Agent Container, I'll be blogging more about this soon... |
( Nov 19 2007, 04:18:35 PM CET ) Permalink
keytool - backdating a self-signed certificate
Have you ever had to deal with clock-skew across machines? When distributing self-signed certificates to create a network of trust between machines, clock-skew can be a real problem if one machine thinks that the other machine's certificate isn't yet valid...
Here's a new feature in Java 7 that can help you to create self-signed certificates that are immune to this...
( Nov 19 2007, 03:20:28 PM CET ) Permalink
Monday November 12, 2007 Diving in at the deep end - testing scalability of the xVM Ops Center at TACC
xVM Ops Center is the software that we are busy building for managing data centers (yes, in the plural).
It needs to scale up to thousands and thousands of managed systems, spread across multiple geos.
( Nov 12 2007, 04:53:14 PM CET ) Permalink
Tuesday October 16, 2007 Sun's Customer Engineering Conference, and xVM Ops Center
As I said in my previous blog article, I've been on the road visiting the 'states again, with a packed agenda.
After a few days at the Innovation at Sun conference and a couple of days working with the team in the bay area, I then flew out to Las Vegas to go to Sun's Customer Engineering Conference, a 3-day event for Sun's customer-facing engineering work-force and some of Sun's partners... a big event, with a total of four thousand people.
The conference was pretty impressive, with some excellent general sessions and several different tracks of breakout sessions, with a total of about 80 presentations going on plus plenty of discussion time. I gave a presentation on Sun's xVM Ops Center, which was well received in a packed session.
There were plenty of other things going on at CEC, from a huge party to the launch of a whole new range of servers and blades based on the state-of-the-art, 8-core, 8 threads per core UltraSPARC T2 processor. Yes, that does mean 64 threaded hardware concurrency, not to mention the multiple on-chip crypto-units and 10 Gb Ethernet... This whole system is designed about serving the web, securely, fast.
( Oct 16 2007, 12:00:00 AM CEST ) Permalink
Monday October 15, 2007 Sun's xVM strategy - the cross between virtualization and management
Sun has just publicly previewed its plans around virtualization and management, a systemic approach putting together the individual technologies in such a way as to make a compelling solution.
As you might be able to tell from some of my other blog entries, my side of things focuses around system management. I'm part of the xVM Ops Center development engineering team, involved in the systems management technology used at the heart of Ops Center - where the "system" we're talking about managing isn't a desktop, it's one or more data centers. The core of our technology is also across a wide range of other Sun products for their management and monitoring solutions, including in Solaris and across Sun's entire middleware in the Java Enterprise System stack.
It's an exciting place to be!
( Oct 15 2007, 12:55:24 PM CEST ) Permalink
Innovation at Sun
I've just been on the road visiting the 'states again, with a packed agenda.
First off, I spent 3 days at Monterrey Bay at an internal Sun conference around Innovation. Some of the stuff we've been working on in the management space has been pretty innovative, and I'd had a paper accepted to this conference which is organized by Sun's CTO organization to get Sun's innovators together with our Distinguished Engineers and Fellows to share what we've all been up to and to be able to build synergy standing on each others shoulders to build even greater things.
Here's a snap of Gilles and myself down on
the beach at 6am, before the conference started...
( Oct 15 2007, 12:22:19 PM CEST ) Permalink
Friday July 06, 2007 Rock climbing - the Mont Aiguille
The Mont Aiguille (literally "Needle Mountain") is a giant rock structure, with vertical walls, the shortest being 600 feet high.
I had fun this weekend with a group of friends climbing up its sheer face.
( Jul 06 2007, 05:37:24 PM CEST ) Permalink
Friday June 29, 2007 Open-Sourcing of Solaris Cluster
Great to see Solaris Cluster starting down the open-source road. [Read More]( Jun 29 2007, 01:02:39 PM CEST ) Permalink