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Open Sourcing Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0

Tuesday Dec 04, 2007

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. Consider this blog post my attempts to help answer any questions. I'll queue up a podcast in a few weeks to discuss the open source process and what we're doing with Ops Center as well. Please let me know any questions you want answered. What we're open sourcing

The agentry infrastructure, AKA "CAC" or Common Agent Code. CAC is the basis and building block for the agent itself. This is the first component to be open sourced, and will be available on OpenxVM December 10, 2007
The agent itself. The agent does the actual work. The agent sits on each managed operating system instance
The proxy server. The proxy server provides both scalability and network efficiency. It has an embedded DB and a web server.
The satellite server. This is the main act - where all the UI is performed, the logic, and everything that makes ops center so great.

When we're open sourcing it

Turns out, open sourcing code is hard work. We need to scrub the code for 3rd party, copyright, encumbrances, etc. We need to pull out any non-relevant information. We need to do the actual physical process of getting code outside our firewall. We need to deal with lawyers. All of which means, it takes a while. We've been working on it for a few months, and we'll keep working on it for a few more.

Net net - we're going to do this in phases. To start, we're releasing the aforementioned CAC on December 10th. This is both a sign of good faith, plus demonstrate our commitment. It gives people a set of code they can start to evaluate and play with, and help expand some of the functionality. As we continue to get the code base approved and in process, we'll then be in place to release the entire product open source by 2Q 2008 (that's calendar year, not silly Sun financial year)

What about xVM server?

It's already open source! xVM is integrated into every nevada build now. We're working tightly with the community, and developing this further all the time.

If I missed anything, let me know via email or the comments. I'll either update this post, do another one, or even add it to my next xVM unscripted podcast!

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