Tuesday May 26, 2009 Interview talking about xVM Ops Center
A few months ago I was filmed at our Grenoble Engineering Center talking about xVM and xVM Ops Center's architecture... it was ad-libbed, Luke, doing the interviewing, deliberately didn't follow the rough interview structure we'd agreed upon (thank you Luke!), this shows a little in places, but all the same, people locally have said that it explains quite well some more about xVM, so here it is for you to see too:
The second half is a white-board session that explains how xVM Ops Center's distributed management approach manages both physical and virtual machines through their various different management access points, a picture might be worth 100 words at least...
I was also the interviewer in another video, this time with our local resident Principal Engineer, Roch Bourbonnais, talking about storage performance, and in particular the performance of the blazingly fast and cost-efficient new Open Storage storage appliances that are capable of leveraging ZFS, flash memory, and JBODs.
Enjoy!
[Read More]
( May 26 2009, 12:41:54 PM CEST ) Permalink
Friday October 17, 2008 Tech Talk on the xVM Portfolio - VDI, Virtual Box, xVM Server, xVM Ops Center
As I've mentioned before,
I organize regular internal tech-talks at Sun's Grenoble Engineering
Center, on a wide range of themes from blogging to virtualization, from
collaboration and work-from-home tools to sun-labs projects.
This week it was my turn to animate a tech-talk again, and the theme was on and around the xVM Portfolio.
 xVM Ops Center |
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xVM VirtualBox |
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| xVM Server |
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( Oct 17 2008, 04:03:43 PM CEST ) Permalink
Wednesday October 01, 2008 The new user interface of xVM Server 1.0 and xVM Ops Center 2.0
I'm really impressed and proud of the work that the UI team has been doing on xVM for our upcoming release. The best UI of any management product I've ever worked on (and I've worked on quite a few).
In my last blog entry I showed a little teaser of the xVM Ops Center 2.0 user interface, that screenshot had been captured by Ben during one of our integration testing sessions.
xVM Server, the hypervisor stack that turns your x86 box into a host for virtual machines, comes with the same embedded web-server offering your browser a full graphical user interface. Not only is this GUI available inside your browser, wherever you are, on whatever device you're on, but it's also available directly on the xVM Server's console itself. No need for any tools, no need even for another machine with a browser if you just want local access!
Wouldn't you rather view this on your screen... |
... than this...? |
... and wouldn't you rather be using your choice of browser
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...rather than have to install a fat client app that only runs on Windows?
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Over on the xVM Central blog, there is some more of xVM's UI to see.
( Oct 01 2008, 02:28:42 AM CEST ) Permalink
Saturday September 13, 2008 xVM Server and xVM Ops Center 2.0
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Our xVM portfolio was launched this week, and the products that I'm working on - xVM Ops Center 2.0 and xVM Server - are getting ready to ship. What
a ride! These past few weeks we've been working round the clock with
our world-wide team to integrate and test everything, from the network
discovery and provisioning of a machine that's just been unpacked and
racked in some lab the other side of the world, through to the live
migration of a virtualized machine running Windows, Solaris or Linux
from one physical xVM Server to another. |
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We'll be demoing the products next week at VMWorld, I'm flying out tomorrow to help on the demo stand.
Here's a little peek under the covers at the APIs and data model behind the scenes.
[Read More]
( Sep 13 2008, 05:21:24 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [2]
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 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
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