This week carries a new episode in the Sun/Oracle/EU saga: The EU Comission has issued a statement of objections on the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Since I am a Sun employee, I will just provide the basic links, no matter how tempting it might be to go beyond that... • (Nov 9th) EU issues SoO - I've only found indirect references to the SoO, like Sun's K-8 Filing. • (later that same day...) Oracle reacted with a PR Statement. • (a bit later...) The DOJ issued their own comment on the EU SoO. • (next morming, Nov 10th) And the EU comments on the DOJ comment (Reuters) • (and, on Nov 11th) According to eWeek Europe, the next step is a hearing on Nov 25th.

The material would make for good pulp fiction. It's very sad to see the impact on people, but today I was talking with a friend that was affected and he was being very good at keeping things in perspective, so I thought of using the front cover of a true pulp fiction: Doc Savage - which I first encountered in an old Spanish translation in a storage room in my grandfather's flat in Barcelona (together with copies of The Shadow and El Coyote).

Perhaps also time to watch again the movie? Blu-ray, pretty please?

Data Deduplication is a big deal, as was shown back in July when EMC spent 2.4B$ to acquire Data Domain. This morning Jeff announced that dedup has been added to ZFS; this has generated quite a bit of buzz in the 'web, although I've yet to see Oracle's stock going up... or Apple changing their mind. Check Jeff's post and comments; it is a nice read. Also read on disk savings at ZFS-Discuss.

No idea if there is any correlation, but this last week had sightings of Sun's products at two high-volume "gadget" news blogs: Engadget and Gizmodo. Engadget covered the New Sun FlashFire Cards while Gizmodo talkeda about VirtualBox. I checked and the last time Engadget covered us significantly was back in 2007; Gizmodo has a few more hits. Does this means we are cool again? :-)

This entry is quite longer than usual; it started as a short update on the recent 2.1 release of xVM OpsCenter but it quickly grew to cover other intertwined announcements. I could have done several separate posts but a single one seemed more useful, so...

Start with Steve's What's Up with xVM or in the Virtualization Page at Sun.com; the 5 inter-related areas down from there are: VirtualBox, xVM Server, xVM Ops Center, LDOMs and VDI.

VirtualBox (Community; Sun) is a Type 2 ("hosted" VM) virtualization solution. VirtualBox has a very fast release cycle (see ChangeLog) and it regularly adds features and performance and addresses bugs. The last release was 2.2.2 and it has received very positive press reviews (eWeek 1 and eWeek 2). VirtualBox is a solid hit; check the latest Google Trends; also see entries tagged VirtualBox.

xVM Server (Community previously here but now at Xen@OpenSolaris; Sun) is a Type 1 ("native" VM) virtualization solution based on the work of Xen Project and this is the area that seems to be in most flux. Steve addressed some of the points in the above-mentioned entry and later in Free Hypervisor Options. Quoting from the first entry on feedback from the beta program:

As a result of these and many other observations, we concluded that a general purpose, multi-node solution is required. Thus, we refocused our efforts around use-cases where Ops Center becomes the central way to manage the hypervisor and the underlying hardware. In addition, we've started on a trajectory where we will converge the xVM Server and OpenSolaris lines so that exactly the same codebase is used for both.

xVM Ops Center (Users, Sun) is Sun's unified systems management tool - it provides Management and Monitoring of pysical and virtual assets, provisioning, patch automation and IT compliance. The latest release supports power management and interacts with Sun's ILOM; see Availability of 2.1, Change Page and Demo. Also check the Free Training and the Integration with Halcyon Neuron.

Logical Domains (LDOM) (Community; Sun) allows the grouping of system resources into logical groups to provide very cheap, built-in (no hypervisor) virtualization for Sun's CMT systems. The scope of this technology is more limited than the previous virtualization solutions but it is very efficient and meshes very well with Sun's hardware story. A (separate recent announcement was that of Solaris 10 Branded Zones, an addition to previous Linux and Solaris 8 and 9 zones; see Bob's Zones vs LDOMs for an overview of the two technologies.

Finally there is VDI - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Sun). I think of it as SunRay meets VBox: the goal is to maximize IT infrastructure utilization and improve manageability of desktop deployments and the latest release, VDI 3.0, leverages VDI broker, VirtualBox and OpenStorage servers. ZDNet has a Positive Review that ends asking for more publicity on the technology, so... check Markus' series: Installation, Configuration and Usage, Claudia's Demo Configuration Instructions, Deployment Guide, and the Coralville Adoption Story.

Hope this helps to understand how the 5 pieces relate to each other. This entry is also a good example of how blogs, wikis and other self-publishing tools accelerate information flow within a corporation. All the writeups mentioned above are mini-essays on the different topics; they are all published directly by the authors and cross-linked via the internet. Add Blogs.Sun.Com and an Internet Search Tool and I can grab a thread and construct the story... And, if I get it wrong, somebody will correct me... It is not fool-proof, but try to replicate this by registering into N**M mailing lists!

Of course, you need some significant level of transparency in the organization; otherwise one needs to get a legal approval to post anything! The alternative is to try to replicate the internet dynamics within the corporation, which may work for a very large company like IBM, but would not work for us at Sun, and does not help in communicating directly to the customer.

Now back to our short blog entries...

Harpreet is coordinating several of the GlassFish Porfolio outreach activities, and he has been providing updates on the latest white papers and webcasts ([1], [2]). Summarizing from there, the new entries are:

All GlassFish Portfolio resources are listed in the resource page although Harpreet said some of the entries above won't be there until next week. Also note that you will need to register (it is free) to access the resources.

Several pieces of good news on Sun's OpenStorage products. Earlier this week the product line was refreshed, both the 7110 and the 7210 offerings. At the same time the SS7000 Simulator has been updated and is now available as an OVF format and can run on the latest VirtualBox (2.2.2). Overall, the product line is doing very well and is the "fastest ramping new product in Sun's storage portfolio ever". Check the Product WebSite for more resources and links.

OpenStorage is an example of the benefits of a Systems Approach to products that leverages both hardware and software, and, on that general topic, check out this Interview with Larry Ellison (available from Oracle.com/sun).

From the Gold Sponsor section of EclipseCon's front page... Spotted by Don Smith.

The Sun GlassFish Portfolio includes many products, leveraging the recently released GlassFish v2.1 Server. To explain these, I'm going to host a set of short (10') presentations today, at 11am PT, reusing the slot we had for GFv2.1. Full details at TheAquarium Online. The presenters are the engineering leads for the different products in the portfolio. Slides, other material and, later, recordings, will be posted to the Wiki Page; each presentation will have Q&A opportunity via the associated chat room.

Today was the launch of our new Sun Storage 7000 Family, the first result of our OpenStorage initiative. The release comes with a large number of formal and informal documents (over 50 blogs tagged SunStorage7000 so far!); key entry points are the Fishworks Blog Site, and the personal blogs of Mike, Bryan and Adam. Also check the introductions by Joerg, Josh and Bob, the Product Site, the Storage Simulator and the Master Blog Aggregator.

Mike's summarizes the architectural approach behind the new systems this way: There are three things that will be at the core of everything we do: a true software architecture for Flash, the Hybrid Storage Pool; users empowered with real-time Analytics so you can finally understand what your box is doing and how to make it better; and an open, industry-standard architecture: open on-disk formats, open protocols, and a compute and i/o architecture with volume economics behind it that doubles in speed and capacity every 12-18 months.

The initial Press Coverage press coverage is very positive. I believe that despite, or perhaps because of?, the worldwide financial situation, these systems will have a deep impact in the market; try it out, and tell us what you think!

Yesterday was the launch of Sun's xVM portfolio. This is a big deal for Sun and I think it will also have an impact in the industry; it is nice to see all these pieces starting to fall in place. I'll just provide a bit of context and let you follow the links.

There are 4 pieces to the portfolio: xVM Server, a bare-metal hypervisor that is easy to manage, xVM Ops Center, an "internet-scale" (i.e. oogles of machines) management product for it, xVM VirtualBox, virtualization on your desktop/laptop, and xVM VDI, virtualization of Desktops. The Launch Site does a good job; it includes the customary interviews with execs (but not just Sun, also Microsoft, Intel and CSC Financial Services), plus demos and overviews of all the key pieces. Also see SDN News.

Sun and MS are working together again - like they did with Metro - and they have agreed to interoperability between their Virtualization offerings - see the xVMBlog and reports at OStatic and BusinessWire. The press has done a pretty good coverage of the general launch, see InternetNews, VNUnet, TheWhir, TradingMarkets.

There are many other blogs on this at BSC, hopefully all tagged as xVM.

Added - Reflections and thank-yous Steve; the HPC watercooler folks Do a Recap that points to the community site at OpenxVM.ORG; and Marc writes about the Implications of xVM for HPC; the VirtualBox folks do a Summary.

Sun has just released the Preview of the JavaFX SDK. This release targets developers and scripters, is available for Windows and Mac and has the following content:

• The JavaFX compiler and runtime (2D graphics, media libraries)
• Command-line tools (javafx, javafxc and javafxdoc)
• NetBeans plugin (build, preview, debug)
• Project Nile: add-on to Adobe tools to product JavaFX
• Documentation, tutorial, samples

This is all available in an all-in-one download and provides more content than the community openjfx.com site.

The relationship to server-side computing is in the way JavaFX clients can interact with Java-based back-ends (including with client-side dependency injection for things like web services or EJB references). Get previous coverage on JavaFX by following the javafx tag.

To celebrate the announcement of OpenSSO Express, here is an updated list of Sun products that build directly on GlassFish Server - let me know if I'm missing any.

• Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server, (GlassFish For Business, HADB) • SJS MQ (OpenMQ) • SJS Mobile Enterprise Platform (MEP at TA) • SailFin (Sailfin at TA, PR) • Web Synergy • ESB Suite (Open ESB), Sun MDM Suite (Mural) and Java CAPS • Federated Access Manager (OpenSSO)

I just bumped into the Sun BluePrints Wiki and I think it is worth a visit. It is a companion to the BluePrints Blog and part of the move towards Self-Published Content at Sun, which increases agility and responsiveness to user's needs.

The Recent Content page lists chronologically the latest changes. The more recent entries are created in Wiki format, while the earlier ones are PDF attachments.

Some of the documents that caught my attention include:

• Hadoop Primer • Optimizing MySQL Server on x64 Servers and Storage • Configure J4000 and ZFS in 10 Minutes • Modularity in Data Center Design • Using SSD instead of HDD • V12N Entries: Solaris HW, LDOMs & CMT, LDOMs & IO, xVM Hypervisor.

One more nation for the Startup Essentials Program. Sweden joins the US and 7 other nations in the program that makes hardware and software available at very discounted prices for startups. GlassFish support (GFB) is included in SSE - see this earlier TA entry. According to OnTheRecord, there have been over 2,300 applications to SSE.

Dalibor is joining Sun to work as a Java F/OSS Ambassado, helping projects like the OpenJDK. This is excellent news! Welcome aboard, Dalibor! Check out Dalibor's Announcement and Comments and Barton's Welcome.