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Oracle has updated their page on Oracle and Sun and it now includes a PDF entitled "Oracle and Sun Overview and FAQ". Check it out for comments on many topics covering Sun's Hardware (SPARC, Storage, x86) and Software offerings, including NetBeans, OpenOffice, MySQL, xVM OpsCenter, OpenSource, VirtualBox and GlassFish. |
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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? :-) |
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The
VirtualBox The Web Console relies on services in the latest maintenance-release of VirtualBox: VBox 3.0.6 (ChangeLog, Download, Download). Our best wishes to the new project; we will track its evolution here. |
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As expected, after last week's big VirtualBox 3.0 Release we now have a 3.0.2 maintenance release. See the Changelog and get it from the Download sites. In the meantime, adoption of VirtualBox continues to grow (Google Trends, VBox Buzz). |
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VirtualBox 3.0, is now available for download. This is a major release (PR), most notable is support for guest SMP support - up to 32 vCPUs. Also included is support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests and experimental support for Direct3D 8/9 on Windows guests. Check the Changelog Details and then go to download page. |
Andy has a nice Overview and Podcast; Jeff has an overview focused on Virtual SMP Support. Other Sun reviews come from Rudolf and Homer. Non-Sun reviews include Softpedia, Virtualization Review and an early mention in InfoWeek.
The ZDnet/CNet folks have several reviews on VirtualBox and seem increasingly positive about it - see Jason Perlow's Very Positive Review (earlier last year he had written a V12N Comparison based on VBox 1.6) and Dan Kusnetzky Review; also see their Screenshot Gallery. On the CNetTV, check Tom Merritt's story on Installing Windows 7 RC on VBox.
Finally, this is a very interesting release and I believe it will make a big difference in applicability of VirtualBox, but all major releases "push the envelope" a bit. I'm not in the VirtualBox team but, based on their Release History I'd expect follow-up maintenance releases "soon".
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I have uploaded the recordings rom last Friday's Special Webinar on VirtualBox. This includes FlashVideo, MP3 and also SlideCast, which allows you to skim through the slides and listen to the recording for the sections you are specially interested. In this webinar, s7 talks about how RDP is used in VBox; s10 on how 21K VBox images will be used during JavaOne; s11 on the VBox release cycle (s11); s12/s13 shows adoption indicators, and s25ff talks about the VBox Networking modes. |
I'm planning to provide SlideCast versions of all future recording, and also convert some of the previous ones.
We have 3 webinars this week - one in our normal time slot, the other two in new slots to squeeze the topics before JavaOne. The topics are very interesting, I hope you can join us.
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The first webinar is on The presentation is on Tuesday, May 19th, 10am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page. |
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POSTPONED - This webinar has been postponed until after JavaOne. The second webinar is in our normal slot when Chris Kampemeier will present on Software Appliances. Chris, Rudolf, Gabor and others have been working on this some GlassFish-based appliances on a Solaris JeOS and will be discussing the topic, but the exact abstract is still TBD.
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The third webinar will be by Andy Hall on VirtualBox, the popular type-2 virtualization solution. The presentation is on Friday, May 22th, 9am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page. |
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.
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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...
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Several pieces of good news on Sun's
OpenStorage 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).
Sun released VirtualBox 2.2.0 on the 8th, two weeks ago and I started playing with it right then but only now I've had the time to write an entry now. This is a major release that includes support for OVF and performance and usability improvements; full details are available in the ChangeLog. This release has had Extensive Coverage; check out Andy's Overview and his Radio Show on the topic (Slides).
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VirtualBox is gaining adoption very fast - check the Google Trends (archive). VBox claims 11M d/ls, with more than 25K/day (somewhat less than GF) and 3.5M registrations (that's outstanding). VBox 2.2 is only 50MB and easy to get started, so download it and take it for a test drive.
I'm trying to arrange a presentation for our
GlassFish TV Webinars
where we can explore the synergies between the projects;
in the meantime see the
VBox Documentation Wiki,
the
User Manual
and many
Blogs at BSC |
One last launch recap before the holiday break; this one will be far shorter than the OpenSolaris 2008.11 recap as I'm about to turn into a pumkin.
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JavaFX - We released JavaFX on Dec 4th, a couple of days later than originally scheduled. The launch was preceded by the release of the new JavaFX Script Language Reference and a few blog entries, but the bulk of the posts happened after. Danny has done a couple of nice recaps - check top 10 things and then a very complete News Recap. After the launch, the team took the show to Devoxx (nee Javopolis); Danny gave one of the keynotes in day one (see his Show Report), and Mark did the same for Day 2 - modularity being key to delivering Java on a multiplicity of platforms, see Mark's notes on the Modular Java Platform and Jigsaw. Danny provided a summary of JavaFX in Devoxx; judged by the whiteboards (caveat emptor and all of that), JavaFX was pretty well received - see the "ultra-cool" section in the Java Cool Wall. Ah!... And Mr. Jeet now has his Own Blog; welcome to the blogosphere! :-)
VirtualBox 2.1 -
The last recap is for
VirtualBox 2.1,
released on Nov 17th.
This is yet another strong release from the VirtualBox team;
they are turning releases very quickly
(see earlier reports tagged
VirtualBox Two summaries of the functionality are from Joerg and TheFatBloke. The release includes support for hardware features, improved ease of use and interoperability. It all looks very good, and I really want to host a webinar set at TheAquarium Online on the VirtualBox; the calendar is pretty crowded but we added an extra optional slot per week to cover cases like this. The VB team records over 8M d/ls of VB - which is very good; if you want to try it out, you can check the latest ChangeLog and then go to the Download page. |
A compilation of today's news of interest:
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Masoud is ahead of us! Check out his One-Pager on GlassFish v3 Prelude. The actual release of GFv3 Prelude will be split into two parts: the bits will go out this week but the special webinar is not until next week, on November 6th. Packt Publishing is looking for an author to write a new book focused on the administration features in GlassFish server to complement their Java EE5 Development using GlassFish Application Server. Check out the Authors info, and contact Kshipra Singh (kshipras at packtpub dot com) if interested. Carla writes about Logging features in GlassFish v3 Prelude. Overall, logging in GFv3 will now use the JDK logging facility but not all features are implemented yet, so check on Carla's writup to see the details and plans. Shoal is getting close to the 1.1 release, as part of the preparations for GFv2.1 and Sailfin. Check out Changelog, Shreedhar's Summary Note, and Download Page. VirtualBox is now available for retail purchase at Amazon.uk (not in the US store, though). It's not yet a best seller; as of this writing, it is ranked 15,244 - let's see how if it goes up... Plenty of Microsoft news aligned with PDC 2008. There is now a pre-Beta Windows 7 that includes plenty of consumer-friendly features like improved navigation and taskbars and multi-touch gestures, as well as lightweight, web-friendly versions of Office products. They have also announced their Cloud offering, Azure, but I've not had much time to check it except to note that Yousef is involved. On a more techie side, Rajeev reports that MS will add SAML 2 Support, which is good news for OpenSSO et al. |
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.
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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.
A compilation of today's news of interest:
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From Rajeev, a report on an OpenSSO WebStart Prototype done through embedding GlassFish v3. Just click and go! A big change from a couple of years ago when installing and starting Sun's Access Manager was such a big task! And, from SuperPat a report on OpenSSO Integration with JIRA, done by Alexey. From Arun, trip reports on the RailsConf Europe 2008 at Berlin, Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3. The VirtualBox team has been very busy and they have Released VirtualBox 2.0 (Press Release). Check the Changelog and Download it. A change in this release is that, as with the strategy followed by the rest of our Open Source portfolio, VB 2.0 now has enterprise support. On the Storage side, a Press Release reporting that Sun's market share growth the last quarter grew almost 30% Y-to-Y (top in the industry). And this is w/o the OpenStorage systems getting readied, see ComputerWorld and NYTimes. And a very warm welcome back to Lew Tucker. Lew was in the original JavaSoft group and we overlapped briefly there. Sun has quite an open door policy to people who left (and bring back fresh experiences from outside). We even have coined a term for them: Boomerangs :-). |
A compilation of today's interesting news:
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From JetBrains team - the release of the first Milestone of IntelliJ IDEA 8.0; including GlassFish Server support (of course); it claims to be a substantial revamp from 7.0. Arun shows how to Access Metro from MS Silverlight. I'll come clean - I am using Silverlight to watch the Badminton Games from the Beijing Olympics. OpenSSO is now available in the First Express Build - b5. Sun's Press Release on OEM Deals around VirtualBox; OEM is one more way to monetize Open Source investment - we are seeing similar opportunities around our middleware OSS offerings. Barton reports from DebCon in Mar del Plata; it looks like there is a good chance of OpenJDK being included in Lenny; keep fingers crossed. Steve (Wilson) demoes xVM Server to redmonk's Cote. |
