Joyent and Sun have announced a highly tuned MySQL Accelerator that claims 2x-4x better performance than EC2 (but see comments). Joyent focuses on "Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing", with offerings on Public Cloud and the Private Cloud, plus a new Smart Platform in beta (tutorial). Joyent's Cloud is Based on OpenSolaris and they are the largest OpenSolaris installation in the world.

Joyent and Sun have a long collaboration on Software and Hardware ([1], [2], [3]). One of the containers supported in Joyent's Accelerators is GlassFish; see [4], [5], [6], and the MySQL Appliance, plus the Zeus Accelerator (built using ZXTM's Extensible Traffic Manager) and GlassFish make a very good Java Stack. We had covered Joyent's hosting in earlier posts (@TA, @MtR).

BTW, while checking on this piece, I see that Joyent has Sold Strongspace and BingoDisk to ExpandDrive so they can "... focus on Joyent Accelerators and Joyent Smart".

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).

Today, at CommunityOne East, Sun unveiled more details of its Cloud initiative: A world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open and compatible. The initiative enables the definition and deployment of Virtual Data Centers, leveraging q-Layer, xVM and VirtualBox and components like OpenSolaris, MySQL, GlassFish and Web Stack. For more details, check Cloud@Sun, the Launch Event and this Overview. I also enjoyed reading/watching about the SuperNat center and TheRegister ran an Overview White Paper.

Also check the personal perspectives from Craig and Tim, who were directly involved in defining the RESTful API for manipulating the cloud. The APIS are under Creative Commons license (see Opening APIs) and are available at Kenai, see API home and Hello Cloud project.

Sun has published a new White Paper showing how to combine the GlassFish Server with Solaris 10 Containers on Sun Fire T2000 servers to implement high available solutions under different topologies. The benefits of this arrangement includes benefits from the open source of GF as well as the manageability and price/performance and power-consumption/performance of Containers/CMT. The White Paper is free but requires registration. The authors are from the core HA group at Sun.

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.

I recently installed VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro and so far it runs very nicely. I think VB is going to become a very interesting solution and I already know of several people putting together useful images, so stay tuned on that front. In the meantime, a couple of recent news: yesterday there was a new VB 1.6.2 release that is mostly a bug fixing release (downloads, change log). VirtualBox works with Many Guest and Host OS; and, from the perspective of Sun, OpenSolaris is particularly interesting to Sun, and here is an article on OpenSolaris on VB.

Added Most BSC entries related to VirtualBox can be found through the virtualbox tag.

Chris is helping spread awareness of Sun's wide-ranging support for Virtualization. In a nutshell, the policy is: If you intend to deploy Sun middleware products within system virtualized environments, Sun will support such use as long as the OS platform and architecture are supported by the Sun product and the underlying layers of the deployment stack are supported by their respective owners. More details in the relevant document: HTML, PDF.

Virtualization is important to everyone and developers are no exception. Sun has announced today the agreement to acquire innotek, the makers of VirtualBox, an Open Source virtualization software very well suited for desktop usage. Never heard of VirtualBox? Wondering what the relationship is with Sun's xVM hypervisor? answers it best on his blogSteve "Virtual" Wilson and Tim Marsland probably answer both questions the best.

This probably sounds compelling to developers given VirtualBox' open source nature and its ability to handle just about any hosts and guests (listed here) you may require for your Java and Web 2.0 developments.

You're 17MB away from using the software and the website is www.virtualbox.org and is unrelated to this ;-)

Virtualization is really hot now. We recently mentioned about Using LDOMs to partition a T2-based system. This week's annoncement of Solaris 10 8/07 includes New Zones Features including BrandZ Zones. The first BrandZ (lX) allows Running Linux Apps on Solaris (see earlier news). A new announcement is Project Etude which enables Solaris 8 Apps running as guests on a Solaris 10 host; see Marc's Business Overview and Dan's Technical Overview. Also see these reviews at Dr. Dobb's, The Register and EnterpriseLinux.

Added: Also see the announcement about Windows and Solaris virtualization.

If there was any doubt about how hot Virtualization is, check this Bloomberg Report on the initial offering for VMWare for US$ 957M.

Virtualization is happening at multiple layers in the hardware/software stack. At the bottom we have things like the Sun's ldoms - see this screencast of how to boot 64 Solaris domains on the recently launched UltraSPARC T2. Higher up we have things like Xen and VMWare.

Virtualization is a complex landscape; I'll ask Tim for a pointer to a good short description comparing and contrasting the solutions, the wikipedia entry is particularly unhelpful.