xVM in eWeek

eWeek just published an interview I did with them a while back.  I actually did this back just before we announced the innotek acquisition, but wound up doing an update of it with the writer before it got published.  That seemed to mess up their publishing calendar and then took a while to get back to the top of the queue for publication.  Anyway, I think it came out really well.  Go on over and check it out.

Posted at 09:34PM Apr 25, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |  Comments[1]

xVM Server UI Sneak Peak

You've been hearing a lot about xVM Server that's due out this summer.  Many people who follow Solaris are familiar with the work going on at OpenSolaris around the Xen hypervisor.  However, a lot of people don't realize there is a lot more to xVM Server than just that.  When you install the true xVM Server it will not be as if you're installing Solaris.  Instead, xVM Server turns the computer into a dedicated virtualization Software Appliance with a top-of-the-line, easy-to-use interface you attach to over a standard https connection.

The UI that is served up by xVM Server's embedded web server is coming along really quickly now as the team picks up speed using the new AJAX toolkit they selected.  The screen shot posted below is actually representative of the UI for xVM Server, and also for Ops Center 2.0 (both due in the summer).  It's not complete yet, but gives you a sense what things will look like. 

The most impressive thing about this interface can't be seen from a static screen shot.  The new UI architecture the team is using does way more processing on the client than the Ops Center 1 interface.  This means way fewer trips to the server and provides for near instantaneous feedback on most actions.   I'll keep you all posted on progress here and let you know when the first download is available!  Stay tuned.

Posted at 08:44AM Apr 11, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |  Comments[6]

Open Service Tags now under GPL 3

In April of 2007 we announced a new concept in IT asset tracking.  We called it Sun Service Tags.  These small software assets offer the capability to discover and introspect hardware and software assets.  About a month later we introduced Sun Inventory.  A free, hosted service that allows individuals and teams to track and manage their IT assets.

Since this introduction less than a year ago, we've seen an explosion in these use of this technology.  Product teams from across Sun have started to take advantage of this technology and it's now built into most of Sun's hardware and software products.  In addition, customers have started to use it.  We now have almost 300,000 individual assets registered into the Sun Inventory system!

Now we're ready to take the next step with this technology.  We'd like to see companies outside of Sun start to take advantage of it.  We did ports of Sun Service Tags to operating systems like Microsoft Windows and RedHat Linux, so that people can track those assets in the Inventory system.  However, we think this can go much farther.  Thus, we've decided to free the source code to these little technological gems.  Now, as part of the Open xVM community, you'll find a sub-project called Open Service Tags.  Complete source code is available there under a GPL v3 license.  Go check it out and participate!

Posted at 01:42PM Apr 07, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  |