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At JavaOne, Vijay Sarathy of Sun talked with analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk about Sun xVM VirtualBox, a high performance, free and open source desktop virtualization software. xVM VirtualBox allows users to create “virtual machines” into which they can install whichever operating system they choose, so the same computer can run multiple operating systems and applications at the same time.

Below you'll see a video of Cote's talk with Vijay and a demo of VirtualBox in which Vijay creates a Vista instance and runs it on his Mac in a couple of minutes. You can check out all the features of VirtualBox 1.6 here and if you want to give xVM VirtualBox a try, you can download it here or here for no cost.

Sun xVM VirtualBox Overview - Part 1

Sun xVM VirtualBox Demo

End users like xVM VirtualBox because they can access their favorite software using any operating system and developers like this hypervisor because they can easily build, test and run cross-platform, multi-tier applications on a single laptop or desktop computer. The latest version of xVM VirtualBox supports all major host operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

The stats are in... Sun's xVM VirtualBox has been downloaded more than 5 million times by developers, consumers and SMBs all over the world. And it doesn't stop there – the new VirtualBox 1.6 has been downloaded 10,000 times a day since it went live earlier this month.

Why so much interest? Well, Sun's xVM VirtualBox is transforming the way people develop software because there's no longer the need for developers to be tied to big testing labs. With a laptop from anywhere in the globe, developers can create multiple virtual machines, network them together and deploy them using their favorite operating system. Sun's VP of xVM, Steve Wilson, has some interesting info here.

Top 10 reasons developers dig xVM VirtualBox:

1. It's Free! Cost $0. Nada. You can get it here.

2. FIRST hypervisor that supports ALL major operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris and Windows as a host and Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Windows and OS/2 as a guest!

3. Ability to develop for any operating system in the data center right from a laptop.

4. Guest addition feature allows for transparent, full screen mode, so developers can flow around the Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or Solaris operating systems on the same screen and forget about the one desktop per environment experience.

5. Easy to use -- 20 MB file that takes 10 seconds to download with a decent connection, five minutes to install and off developers go, putting their favorite operating systems on it right away! No forced trade-offs needed.

6. Bye-bye FTP! Hello Drag & Drop! -- Shared folders capabilities between the virtual machines and the host OS allow developers to define a set of folders on their host desktop. As a result, the guest OS can read and write to that directory, making drag and drop really fast.

7. More control -- Developers do ALL the needed tuning according to the way they want it and can give IT encapsulated VMs with the exact environment they want, which gets carried all the way through. Think no more version control nightmares and bug fixes.

8. This baby got speed -- Delivers high-performance virtual hardware for its guests, enabling guest platforms to run at near-native speeds.

9. Advanced support for USB devices and built in RDP server, allowing developers to connect to any guests' virtual graphics card over the network.

10. xVM VirtualBox Hearts Developers.

Sun's xVM VirtualBox is currently licensed in an open source edition under GPLv2 as well as in its binary form under a Personal Use License, and you can download it for free at  http://www.virtualbox.org or from Sun.com at http://www.sun.com/virtualbox. 

 

 

If you've any interest in standards and open source, one of the most thought provoking topics in a long time (in my opinion) has been how to save your files in a way that you can access them in the years ahead.

On Wednesday, Microsoft issued a press release that states they will support ODF.

Since Sun has long supported Open Standards and Open Source and our commitment to them remains strong and unwavering. This news pinged my interest so I approached Jim Parkinson, vice president, Developer, Tools and Services at Sun, to ask him about these developments.

In summary, he stated, "Sun welcomes Microsoft's decision to embrace OpenDocument Format (ODF v1.1). We look forward to working with Microsoft on the OASIS ODF Technical Committee to complete the improved ODF v1.2 specification and to submit it as an update to ISO/IEC. This is valuable progress towards the interoperability and openness that customers are demanding worldwide."

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 UPDATED POST:

You might also enjoy an insightful perspective on Microsoft's decision in Simon Phipp's blog entry and and invitation from Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun, who is officially inviting Microsoft and others to join in the OASIS OpenDocument Format Accessibility subcommittee efforts.

Other ODF related links:
* Patrick Durusau and ODF 1.2
* IBM and ODF

In the last three weeks, five Sun women have received honors for their work in technology and business. Susan Landau, distinguished engineer, has been named the Anita Borg Institute 2008 Women of Vision Award winner in the Social Impact category.

The YWCA of Silicon Valley has awarded four Sun employees a 2008 Tribute to Women (TWIN) award: Cheryl Cook, vice president of sales; Beverly Glasser, senior director of IT; Noreen Krall, vice president and chief intellectual property officer; and Karen Tegan Padir, vice president, software infrastructure.

The Women of Vision Awards, hosted by the Anita Borg Institute Board of Trustees, honored women making significant contributions to technology. One winner was selected in each category: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. Nominees were submitted by high-tech companies, universities, private industry, and the public. Each year YWCA of Silicon Valley honors the top women at leading organizations that have had a substantial impact on the organization relative to its growth, profitability, and innovation. Winners have outstanding leadership qualities and are successful role models for other women transitioning into executive positions.

Congratulations to all!

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server has achieved a new single-system performance world record[1] on the TPC-H data warehousing benchmark at the 1 Terabyte scale factor, demonstrating the effectiveness of Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) running Oracle 11g database on the SPARC-based platform.

Using the same number of cores, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server outperformed the best competing single system result, posted by the HP Integrity Superdome, by 69% with 18% advantage on price/performance.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 running the Solaris 10 OS maximizes utilization of your assets and is optimized for 24x7 mission critical computing. The system is ideal for large shared memory applications and business process computing such as BIDW and OLTP and provides for a long, highly scalable SPARC growth path.

To read all about this benchmark and to find out more information on the other world records broken by the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, go to: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000/benchmarks.jsp

[1] As of May 14, 2008: Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server (32 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads) 118,573 QphH@1000GB, $23.38/QphH@1000GB available 06/18/07. HP Integrity Superdome (32 processors, 64 cores and 64 threads) 69,999 QphH@1000GB, $28.69/QphH@1000GB available 06/18/07. Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), www.tpc.org <http://www.tpc.org/>

Sun has just released a new version of OpenSPARC T1, v1.6.  The release allows OpenSPARC T1 on FPGAs (field programmable gate array) to boot OpenSolaris. The result: an inexpensive development platform for hardware designers and developers to create hardware derivatives.

In December 2005, Sun first published the specifics for the UltraSPARC T1 processor, making it the first major processor design to be offered to the open source community. Over 7,000 copies of the OpenSPARC T1 processor RTL have been downloaded worldwide. Through the OpenSPARC technology program, Sun helps community members to build on proven technology at a dramatically low cost, and helps to drive down the cost of implementing designs into different technologies and products.

New Features in the Release 1.6 of  OpenSPARC T1

- T1 core supports single- and four-thread options on FPGAs
- Reference designs boot OpenSolaris on single- or four-thread mode
- Xilinx Virtex-5 technology support
- Networking (ftp, telnet) support

These new features are designed to enable a user to build real systems using the OpenSPARC T1 core.
For more details and to download the new release go here:  

Photo courtesy of Barton George 

The ever popular radio voice and blogger -- Barton George had an opportunity to meet up with Charlie Nutter and Thomas Enebo at JavaOne 2008. Check out his podcast, I believe you will find it very enlightening.

Some of the topics they discussed:

• A historical background, Ruby, then Rails, then JRuby.
• What the guys were doing pre-Sun and how Tim Bray lured them to the fiery orb.
• Three licenses is better than one (GPL, CPL, LGPL)
  
• How JRuby is working with GlassFish and NetBeans.
• The DaVinci machine project, jMaki and what ever happened to AJAX?
  
• Might we see a JPerl?
• Looking to get more involved with MySQL

Hopefully you've already seen our press release this week announcing new Sun Fire and Sun Blade systems powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors.

For more info, check out this short video. You can also go to the Web site for customer success stories, video walk-thrus and product tours.

Thanks to the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server -- Sun will be included in the newest edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Sybase IQ analytics server running on the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server has set a new Guinness World Record by powering the world’s largest data warehouse. This accomplishment was achieved using Sybase IQ, BMMsoft server and the Sun Data Warehouse Reference Architecture, comprised of a SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), with Sun StorageTek 6540 modular disk arrays.

The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, the foundation for the world's largest data warehouse, delivers mainframe-class reliability,  availability and scalability (RAS) in an open system. In addition, the SPARC Enterprise M9000 server is an ideal platform for virtualization and consolidation and is optimized for 24/7 mission critical computing.

For more information on the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server and the Sun Data Warehouse Reference Architecture for Structured and Unstructured Data please visit: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000/ and http://www.sun.com/service/refarch/datawarehouse/

Click here for the press release on this new Guinness World Record.

Hello Students...

A lot of you are already trying out OpenSolaris and NetBeans, and we wanted to make it a fun exercise for you... with cool prizes!

All you have to do is...

1. Download OpenSolaris 2008.5 OS and/or NetBeans IDE 6.1.
2. Test the product and post a review!
3. Submit the URL of the review.
4. Do it before June 6, 2008.

And you can win upto $250 in Visa Debit cards!

The details are in this blog post as well as in the main student reviews page.

Get going, folks...

Good Luck!

JavaOne has always been about learning and having fun – and this was certainly the experience of 20 university and high school students who were lucky enough to join the Father of Java, James Gosling himself, for a private tour of the JavaOne pavilion on day three of the conference. We first checked out Project Blue Wonder, based on the Sun Java Real-Time System, where colored balls cycle through a complex circuit moved and sorted by motors and sensors, all controlled by a diskless, fan-less, single-board system.

We then moved onto the Java-powered Tommy Car created by Team Jefferson. This robotic, autonomous vehicle, which was a  DARPA Grand Challenge semi-finalist, was a huge hit with the students.

 

While chatting with the group, I discovered that two students from Fort Lewis College had driven 17 hours from Colorado just to attend JavaOne this year.

 

[Photo by Mary Grush, Campus Technology] 

It was inspiring to see our students and so many other young people at JavaOne, sharing their enthusiasm for Java technology and their excitement about the opportunities it could bring them. Here is a group photo.

 

Here are a couple of stories from two journalists who joined the tour.

- "Students Sound Off About Java," by Michael Singer

-"University Students and Researchers Enjoy JavaOne," by Mary Grush

Sun continues to shatter world records with its x64 servers! The Sun Fire X4450 server -- powered by four Quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 processors; the Solaris 10 OS; and the latest version of Sun's Java Platform, Standard Edition software -- delivered top-notch four-socket performance on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark. The 2U server, at least half the size of competitive servers, obtained a World Record score of 464,355 SPECjbb2005 bops (58,044 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM) for all four-socket systems.

 

For more info and competitive comparisons, check out the benchmark details.

 

When Sun launched Solaris 10 5/08 last week, a major part of the update to the OS stemmed from its collaboration with Intel on platform-tuned power management capabilities and optimized support for Intel processors and graphics technology. This week the Sun-Intel alliance has yielded yet another milestone, bringing open source Threading Building Blocks (TBB) support to both Solaris and the Sun Studio software toolchain.

TBB for Solaris will make it easier for developers to build threaded applications in C++ for newer multi-core processors, including Quad-Core Intel Xeon. Sun Studio software offers a complete integrated toolchain for Solaris and Linux platforms, including parallelizing compilers, performance and thread analysis tools, memory and code debuggers, NetBeans-based Integrated Development Environment, and more. TBB for Solaris will be included in the OpenSolaris repository in the near future.

Intel's Doug Fisher made the announcement during his "Innovations through Software" presentation today at the 2008 JavaOne conference.

A download of TBB for Solaris is available here, and you can learn about more Intel Threading Building Blocks for Open Source by visiting www.threadingbuildingblocks.org.

At the recent Service & Support Professional Association's (SSPA) Best Practices conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Sun received three SSPA STAR Awards and the SSPA's Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award!

The STAR Awards recognize Sun for exceptional leadership, innovation and commitment in developing and implementing best practices in three areas: Best Practices in Value-Added SupportTM, Best Service Delivery Optimization, and Best On-Site Support (GCS-Americas); the induction into the SSPA Hall of Fame recognizes Sun for winning five awards since the inception of the STAR Awards program in 1990.

To learn more about the SSPA STAR Awards, please visit the SSPA Web site or contact Eleanor Crow (eleanor.crow@bitepr.com): http://www.thesspa.com/press_releases/05_06_08_starawards.asp