xVM in Europe

Vijay, our xVM marketing rockstar, has been on a whirl wind tour of Europe talking to customers, press and analysts about Sun's virtualization story.  Sounds like he's doing a great job, and having a good time.  He's been blogging up a storm while he's there, so feel free to surf on over and check out what he's up to.

• Vienna
• London
• Cannes (part 1)
  

I think he's having more fun that I am this past week.  I got to go to Chicago, and it was 10 degrees F while I was there!

Posted at 01:13PM Feb 27, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  | 

Update on Open xVM

I'd like to welcome the newest member of the Sun xVM team.  Scott Lehman has just come on board to be the full time manager for the OpenxVM.org community!  We've made some progress over at Open xVM in getting out the core code for Ops Center, but there is still much to do.  We have to get the rest of the Ops Center code read to post and start putting in place the structures to actually run a development community.  One thing that is going to be key is really making this a place where people can contribute and ensure that the code can move easily across Sun's firewall (in both directions!).  We want to get new code out to the community quick, and make sure we can digest it.  That's why I'm so excited about Scott.  He's actually one of the world's foremost experts on Source Code Management and will help us quickly build the structures we need to drive this.  You can read all about Scott's background over on Kier's blog.

Welcome aboard Scott!

Posted at 08:18AM Feb 26, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  | 

Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0

Today is the day we finally announce the general availability (GA) if Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0!  It's been a long time coming, so I'm really excited.  We'd planned to announce this last month, but decided to fix up a few more things based on some early customer feedback.

This is the first step in a journey for this team.  Sun xVM is the first new software platform that Sun has built in a long time, and I'm hugely proud of the Ops Center team that has worked so hard to achieve this milestone.

For our potential customers, and for the Sun sales and services organization, I want to make it clear that this is just the beginning.  We know that Ops Center 1.0 will find uses in a range of customers, but we have so much more planned.  As we go out to work with our first customers on 1.0, I'll be sharing plans for upcoming 1.5 and 2.0 releases of Ops Center. 

These releases will make the platform even more exciting.  In the mean time, the tech pubs and marketing team put together a little a little "commercial" for Ops Center 1.0.  I've never worked on a product with an actual commercial before, so this is really cool.  Click on the thumbnail below to watch it.

Posted at 05:58AM Feb 19, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |  Comments[5]

Open Solaris in a Box

So, I just did my first Open Solaris install!  I just put the new Developer Preview 2 of OpenSolaris into a VirtualBox VM.  Seems to be working great (running on top of Microsoft Vista!).  Here's a picture of the VirtualBox UI with my VM and Disk Image displayed.

Here's a picture of the VM running inside VirtualBox. You can click to see it fun

The one tip I can give you if you try this yourself is that you'll need to bump up the size of the default video RAM size on the VM from the default 8 MB.  Otherwise you won't be able to boot.  However, this was really easy in the VirtualBox control panel.

Posted at 02:26PM Feb 18, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |  Comments[6]

VirtualBox Coverage

• Sun Microsystems to Acquire Innotek -- Associated Press (also appeared in Forbes, CNN Money and MSN Money), 2/12
• Sun to buy VirtualBox maker Innotek -- IDG News Service, 2/12
• Sun buys desktop virtualization vendor in bid to boost its xVM strategy -- ComputerWorld, 2/12
• Sun Buys Innotek To Build Out Virtualization Products -- InformationWeek, 2/12
• Sun Acquiring Desktop Virtualization Specialist -- eWeek, 2/12
• Sun boosts virtualisation with Innotek buy / VirtualBox software will extend Sun's xVM platform -- VNUNet.com, 2/12
• Sun buys open source virtualization company -- InfoWorld, 2/12
• Sun Makes Virtual Desktop Play With innotek Deal -- CMP Channel, 2/12
• Sun nabs innotek's 20MB of open source, virtualized goodness -- The Register, 2/12
• Sun buys open source desktop virtualization vendor -- Network World, 2/12
• Sun acquires virtualisation business -- IT Week, 2/12
• Sun's Innotek Acquisition a Smart Buy -- InfoWorld Enterprise Desktop Blog, 2/12
• Sun Micro Wants Deeper Virtualization (JAVA, CTXS, VMW) -- 24/7 WALL ST, 2/12
• Open Source WeblogSun lays its open source virtualization cards on the table -- CBR Blog, 2/12
• Sun Gets Desktop Virtualization Chops With Innotek Buy -- LinuxInsider (also appeared on TechNewsWorld, E-Commerce Times and Top Tech News), 2/13
• PC Virtualization Provider Innotek Snapped Up by Sun -- IT Jungle, 2/13
  
• Can Sun turn downloads into dollars? -- InfoWorld (also appeared on Network World, PC World Magazine and ARNet Australia, Computerworld Australia and CIO India), 2/13
• Sun Champions Developers, Disruption Of Big Software Suppliers -- InformationWeek, 2/14
• Sun Virtualizes for Developers -- Illuminata, 2/12
• Sun buying VirtualBox - Desktop Virtualization and Virtual Labs -- RedMonk, 2/12

Posted at 04:36PM Feb 17, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  | 

This Isn't Your Dad's Desktop Virtualization

Today, Sun announced it has signed an agreement to acquire a small, German company called innotek.  innotek is the developer of the super slick VirtualBox application.  I think his is a huge deal for xVM, and even Sun as a whole, and I wanted to take a minute and tell you why.

I remember the first developer desktop virtualization product I ever bought.  It was 1994 and I was running a small Mac-only, boutique software development house.  We wanted to port our most popular Mac application to Windows (heresy, I know!).  I had limited desk space in my little office and I didn't want to buy a PC -- lest it fill up my entire desk.  Instead, I bought a PowerMac 6100 DOS Compatible system.  This crazy little computer was a standard PowerPC-based Macintosh with a funny half-height daughter card carrying a 486 processor.  You could actually run Mac System 7 and Windows 3.1 AT THE SAME TIME and switch between them quickly.  It was totally crazy, but I totally loved it.  I was able to swap back and forth between these two OSs on the fly and test different versions of my app.  In the end, solutions like this were pretty expensive, and the performance/$ sucked, so they died off.  However, thanks to virtualization, the idea has resurfaced in much more viable software-only form in recent years.

VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed.  Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to "host" any arbitrary collection of operating system instances.  Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit.  In fact, these days there are several pieces of software that offer some of this functionality, but VirtualBox is unique because it's completely free and open source, and supports almost every OS known to man.  It's no wonder that it's been downloaded over four million times in just over a year.

Now, as cool as VirtualBox sounds, some folks may be thinking that this sounds awfully similar to the xVM Server product we announced back in November.  Is this redundant?  Certainly xVM Server and VirtualBox both offer a computer the ability to run multiple operating systems.  However, xVM Server and VirtualBox are products targeted at radically different markets.  Here's how I look at these.

Sun xVM Server is a bare-metal hypervisor.  This means it installs directly on the hardware, not on top of an existing operating system.  It's a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT.  It includes high-end, data center features like live VM migration and dynamic self-healing.  This is datacenter grade virtualization.  Along with Sun xVM Ops Center, xVM Server will become the engine that drives a dynamic data center.

VirtualBox is what is technically referred to as a type-2 hypervisor.  It's an application that installs on top of an existing operating system.  VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris hosts, which means you can use it with your laptop no matter what OS you choose for your "native" environment.  This makes VirtualBox a software developer's dream.  You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multi-tier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box!  VirtualBox doesn't have xVM Server's data center features, like live migration, but it's incredibly light-weight.  I installed it this weekend.  The download was only 17 MB and the install took only minutes.  In less than 15 minutes from when I started the download until I was ready to start installing guests.

So, the way I look at it, VirtualBox really fills out Sun's virtualization suite.  Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop.  Except of course, that VirtualBox supports more host platforms than any of these products, and is open source and free!

So, this is all good, but if we're going to continue to give it away, why is Sun investing in VirtualBox?  In short, because the developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they're deployed.  We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine.  Beyond that, I think there is a huge opportunity to link with Sun's other developer-related assets like NetBeans, Glassfish and (soon) MySQL. Imagine the virtual software appliances we can create using these assets, and developers will be able to start using them instantly, making it way easier to install and configure these things.

If you haven't heard of VirtualBox, that's OK.  Despite it's gaining popularity, it seems there are still lots of people to tell.  In fact, in December, LinuxDesktop.com (an affiliate of eWeek) called it "The best virtualization program you've never heard of."  For another recent review of VirtualBox, you can go check out Techthrob, which favorably compares it vs. several other options.  However, the best thing you can do is go download it yourself and check it out.  Now with Sun behind it, you can bet a lot more people will hear of it soon! 

Posted at 08:00AM Feb 12, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |  Comments[10]

What is Predictive Self Healing?

Ten years ago Sun learned some hard lessons in scaling up Solaris to run on systems with large numbers of CPUs and lots of RAM. For example, if you have a system with 16 CPUs your odds of experiencing a CPU failure event go up by a factor of 16. In order for these large machines to be viable, we had to learn to produce a software layer that could survive a CPU or memory failure and protect the applications that were running. We call that technology Predictive Self Healing, and it’s one of the key features we’re adding to xVM Server. While a few years ago a system with more that two CPUs was exclusively the realm of high-end UNIX hardware, it’s now easy to find off-the-shelf x86 hardware with 16 CPU cores and a quarter terabyte of RAM. The number of components that can fail in a system like that is huge, and with server consolidation, a single failure could crash ten or even twenty operating systems. xVM Server can protect guest operating systems (even Linux and Windows) from various classes of hardware faults – even on hardware not built by Sun.

Posted at 05:00AM Feb 11, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |  Comments[1]

Second Life Video

The folks at Dr. Dobbs seem to have liked my Second Life presentation on Sun xVM so much they've used parts of it in an online commercial.  It's pretty neat.  Check it out.  My avatar is the guy on stage in the brown.

Posted at 03:55PM Feb 08, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in New Media  | 

Even More xVM Jobs

As we continue to see more and more interest in what we're doing with xVM Server and Ops Center we continue to dial up our efforts around them.  We're opening even more positions for engineers, marketers and sales people to work on xVM.  Surf over here to check out the latest postings (there were 23 of them last time I looked, and more are coming).  I know the Ops Center team is really looking for some AJAX hot shots to help us build the next generation of the user interface, so go on over and apply!

Posted at 05:00AM Feb 04, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  | 

My Trip to Second Life

 A few days ago I posted that we were planning an event on virtualization in Second Life.  It was actually great fun.  The team at Sun equipped me with a first class Avatar, and Dr. Dobbs provided a super cool venue.  I got to give a 30 minute presentation on Virtualization and Sun xVM to a bunch of interested and engaged people.  The folks in the audience were really engaged, cracked some good jokes and asked good questions.  I may have to go back to Second Life.  My thanks to everyone who helped set up the event, or attended.

One of the folks from Sun took a bunch of screen caps.  A couple of cropped shots are shown below.  Click on them to zoom out and see the full scene.

Posted at 11:02PM Feb 01, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in New Media  |