Late last week Steve Wilson blogged about our upcoming xVM Server EA and posted a bunch of information including many screen shots. Today, Coté from RedMonk posted a video of a live xVM Server demo Steve did for him. Very cool! Check out interview with Steve and the xVM Server demo.
Interview
xVM Server Demo
It is truly exciting to see the product and all our plans come together as we rapidly approach launch time.
The question about Sun's support of our own middleware offerings within virtualized environments comes up from time to time. The good news is we now have a stake in the ground with respect to this support. Christopher Kampmeier's blog entry nicely details our current position complete with a mini-faq. For your convenience a pointer to the the support statement is here or if you'd like a pdf - click on the image below.
The uptake of xVM VirtualBox has been nothing short of amazing! Then again is it really a that much of a surprise? I mean this is truly a fully featured, highly performant hypervisor with support for all major Operating Systems packaged into one incredibly small 17Mb footprint...and to top it all off.. its open and free!! 5M downloads is certainly a nice milestone but I think we're just getting started here. We have so many more who are just finding out about xVM VirtualBox. If you are one of them and haven't had a chance to take a tour of VirtualBox or haven't figured out how it fits into the whole Sun story...allow me :-) Check out the clips below including a demo from my interview with Mr. Coté from Redmonk at JavaOne.
It has been a while since I made an entry. I'll spare you the excuses. While I have been dormant on the blog front we continue to furiously work towards delivering key pieces of the xVM platform such as xVM Server and the next rev of xVM Ops Center this summer. Meanwhile, we recently put out version 1.6 of xVM VirtualBox - the high performance, small footprint, host-based hypervisor with support for Mac OS, Windows, Linux and Solaris. It has been getting some rave reviews. Jason Perlow's review on zdnet was especially cool. Check out whats new in xVM VirtualBox 1.6 here and download a copy for yourself here.
Speaking of dormant...have you checked out the economy lately? In addition to all the talk about recession, the news has been rife with coverage about rising gas prices and dropping SUV sales. Oil rose above $130 and consequently truck and SUV sales dropped about 17%. Cause and effect. I see the effects on the road myself. The Prius parade in the diamond lane is getting longer. I see a lot of small cars like the Toyota Yaris and the Honda Fit on the roads here in the Bay Area now.
On a related topic, I've been on the lookout for data that directly ties the recession and rising energy costs to recent datacenter spending trends. The anecdotal evidence is there but I'd like to see some current data that ties the two. I'm sure we'll see some soon. Meanwhile, I'll leave you some interesting data from an article worth reading from the Business Week a couple months ago titled - "It's Too Darn Hot -The huge cost of powering—and cooling—data centers has the tech industry scrambling for energy efficiency" :
I am not a big fan of being away from home over weekends for business but made the exception this time around :-) so that I could be at VMworld 2008 in Cannes after my press and analyst meetings in Vienna and London last week. I've been mostly spending the time quietly - catching up on work, ruminating and taking small excursions nearby. It would have been a lot more fun with company. I was hoping to meet up with my cousin who was to train in from Italy but that got canceled at the last minute.
I've been to France a few times before but mostly in and around Paris. I like France. Actually, I understand and speak some French (very little) as a result of having spent some four years studying it at the Alliance Française for fun a few years ago. This time in France was a different experience for me though. For one thing I had to deal with driving here. This was the first time I have driven outside the US. I am a big fan of public transportation while in Europe. So the first day here was quite an experience as I had no idea where I was going after renting my car at the airport in Nice. Nice is the nearest major airport to Cannes. My hotel is between Nice and Cannes about 15 miles from the airport. The traffic circles, narrow streets and the crazy parking situation all make for an interesting driving experience. It hasn't been too bad after I figured it out. I actually drove to Monaco on Saturday. The drive was simply spectacular. It was sort of cloudy and gray. I can only imagine how drop-dead beautiful this place must be on a nice sunny summer day. Monaco was beautiful but the drive from Nice through the little town of Eze Bord de Mer was the highlight for me.
Today, i.e Sunday I mostly spent time in my hotel and around the beach near my hotel. It started out gray but turned out to be a gorgeous day. I worked on my mail a bit and then ate lunch by the beach. In the afternoon, I took a drive to Cannes to check out the convention center in preparation for tomorrow. The drive was supposed to be about 20 minutes but the traffic was just crazy and ended up taking twice that time. The road by the beach front in Cannes was just packed. I guess everyone was out enjoying the nice day.
Today's highlight was the Crêpe au Chocolat avec Chantilly which I throughly enjoyed. I thought it was just a snack. Stuffed me up. No dinner tonight. That was pretty much the excitement for today.
Here is the promised update on my meetings in London - a few days late nonetheless. In the morning I attended a Sun xVM presentation given by Martin Mayhead to the local Solaris User Group. Martin is one of our architects on the xVM Ops Center team. The audience comprised of many customers from the financial sector. So as Martin went over our roadmap in detail and it was interesting to hear the feedback. Broad topics of interest included Disaster recovery, HA support as well as questions around our integration plans with other management frameworks and command line support. I'll try to put together a blog post to address some of the issues and requests raised as I find more time. The good news is that they were generally receptive to Sun's plans to deliver an enterprise-grade virtualization and management solution.
The analyst and press meetings in the afternoon went great as well. Our plans for VirtualBox figured high on the list of questions. I've already blogged about this and will continue to add more detail there. Other topics included Security and Virtual Appliance support. Security is a strong focus for Sun xVM and one that we will be differentiating ourselves on. Interesting to see VMware starting to message this as well with their new VMsafe initiative to be announced at VMworld Europe. I'm sure we'll see more on this going into next week.
Overall, its been a great week here in Europe talking to press and analysts. I am also happy to see Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0 GA. We did some demos to press which were really well received. For the rest of you who'd like to see the product let me leave you for now with the cool commercial for Sun xVM Ops center that the team put together. Click here to view.
I am presently in Vienna, Austria on a Sun xVM chalk talk tour for European press and analysts. I arrived last night while my luggage arrived today - about 30 minutes before my talk at Sun's offices in Vienna. At least it wasn't as bad as my visit to China a couple of years ago when my luggage didn't show for 2-3 days and I had to shop for a complete set of replacements in the meanwhile. That was an experience. Anyway I digress.
My presentation to Austrian press went quite well. For one thing, there is definitely a growing interest in learning about what Sun is up to these days and that was reflected in the number of publications represented in my audience - especially considering the short notice. It was heartening to see a couple of articles show up right after the talks. The Der Standard and Pressetext articles are here and here.
Overall, what I am personally excited about from this and other Press and Analyst interactions is that there is palpable sense that Sun seems to be headed down the right track with crisper story. I know that we have to follow that up with execution and delivery. I am confident that that will happen as well as I can personally see how Sun is moving much faster in terms of making investments/commitments, driving alignment and executing. Anyway, my next stop is London tomorrow and I understand that the interest there has been great as well. I look forward to it and will let you know how it goes.
Wow what a week! Last week, Sun announced the intent to acquire innotek the developers of VirtualBox. The news has been been received extremely well internally and externally. If you missed the coverage then click here to see a listing on Steve's Wilson's blog of all the coverage. Steve's blog last week also did a good job of covering the significance of the acquisition. Still, there is fair bit of confusion about how it relates to the rest of our Sun xVM family etc. So let me take the opportunity to detail what Sun xVM is and how the various pieces including VirtualBox fit in.
Lets start at the top - Sun xVM is our software platform for virtualization and management and comprises a suite of products and virtualization technologies designed specifically with heterogeneous IT infrastructure in mind. This means that the Sun xVM software can enable and manage virtualization of environments that consist of Sun as well as non-Sun hardware, software and operating systems. Just as an example Sun xVM will enable Windows or Linux workloads to run on even on non-Sun x86 hardware. Why would we do this? Well, Sun has over the years developed many innovations and competencies as part of our software and operating systems portfolio such as Predictive Self-Healing, Advanced Networking, ZFS etc. These technologies and features were previously only available to Sun customers. Now thanks to the growing interest in hypervisor technology especially on x86, we are exposing these features to all guests including Windows and Linux.
With that context, let me introduce the various components in the Sun xVM family. Broadly, there are two key pieces
On the Sun xVM server side we offer solutions for both the x86 as well as the SPARC worlds. Lets start with our x86 offerings. For the enterprise-grade datacenter applications we have Sun xVM Server. Sun xVM Server is a bare-metal hypervisor and based on the opensource Xen technology. It offers the same interoperability and migration features in Xen but has been enhanced with many advanced features including Predictive Self-Healing, Advanced Network Bandwidth management as well as Security enhancements. What is really cool is that Sun xVM server will natively import/export VMDK and VHD images to facilitate interoperation with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. So thats our enterprise-grade x86 offering.
Sun xVM VirtualBox on the other hand is perfect of developers because it allows multiple different operating systems to run on top of an existing operating system that they may have on their desktop. Sun xVM VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris hosts. VirtualBox does not have the enterprise class features such as live migration but is ideal for developers who can now use this to setup multiple virtual machines to develop and test their multi-tier or cross-platforms applications - all on a single laptop or desktop. Best of all its freely downloadable without any registration or license keys and is extremely compact at under 20 MB and easy to install and use in minutes.
For the SPARC architecture, Sun is known for its virtualization technologies such as LDOMs and containers which will continue to be offered and enhanced as part of the Sun xVM portfolio.
Now on the Management Side of the Sun xVM portfolio, we have the Sun xVM Ops Center. Once again Ops center is being designed for the management of heterogeneous infrastructure. Sun xVM Ops Center provides a single console for the management of both the physical and virtual infrastructure in a virtualized environment. Ops Center allows you to discover any existing infrastructure including hardware that has just been unpacked and plugged in but that has not been switched on. It can power everything up and then provision this hardware with firmware or operating systems and other software as required. Once operational, it can ensure that all the servers both physical and virtualized can be updated and patched using its best-in-class patch management capabilities. Finally, it enables all kinds of custom reports to be generated for operational as well as compliance purposes. So in summary with Sun xVM Ops Center, you can discover, inventory, manage and update your Sun assets from one simple interface.
Hopefully that gives you a quick overview of the Sun xVM virtualization and management platform. Visit sun.com/xvm for additional detail.
I spent the first part of this past week at the Sun Analyst Summit (SAS) 2008 meeting and talking with analysts broadly about Sun's virtualization strategy and about our Sun xVM plans in particular. For an overview, you might want to listen to Steve Wilson and Aisling Macrunnels break-out session on Sun's virtualization plans.
In my own meetings with analysts, the key message I was trying to get across was that we are committed to delivering Sun xVM - our virtualization and management platform and strategy for heterogeneous environments. The challenge we have is that the analysts - and actually just about everyone else, is having a hard time getting used to the concept that Sun is truly serious about the whole heterogeneous thing. I've been fielding the "Are you truly serious about Windows/Microsoft support?" and "Why should we believe you?" questions ever since I got here. I understand the skepticism given Sun's history and know that it will take consistent messaging and action over a long period of time to change such latent perceptions. So I was really happy to see that in the aftermath of the Sun Analyst Summit we seem to have made some progress. Consistent messages from the top and across the company do help. For example, in one of my breakfast meetings with RedMonk, James Governor was incessant about our lack of focused and concerted effort wrt the Microsoft relationship. I told him about what we are doing there from my perspective and afterwards I was not sure that I swayed him. I guess after hearing the same thing consistently from across the company his sentiment has changed a bit. See his blog post after SAS for the section titled - Microsoft and Sun get it on (at last).
For my part, let me reiterate that Sun xVM is indeed a heterogeneous play for Sun. We are committed to the strategy and let there be no doubt that Sun is serious about ensuring that "..we are the best place to run Windows Apps" - per James' verbatim suggestion.
Theres a lot of talk these days about how the Hypervisor is becoming a commodity. I disagree with this notion. A commodity is defined as something that has lost its differentiation across suppliers offerings. One look at this chart shows that there are numerous differentiated hypervisor offerings out there today for a variety of platforms. This doesn't look like a commodity to me.
I do understand that the sentiment about commoditization has arisen mostly in the context of the x86/x64 space where the entrenched player suddenly faces competition notably from numerous Xen-based open source offerings including Sun xVM Server. Even so it is incorrect to say that this market segment is headed towards commoditization. Perhaps the potential for common standards and interoperability (e.g. OVF, Xen etc) is being confused with commoditization. In my mind the situation is somewhat analagous to the automobile industry. Just because we have so many car manufacturers with similar offerings you can't say that the car is a commodity. Sure the car has evolved around some standards e.g. the brake is always to the left of the accelerator and every car typically has a dashboard with a speedometer. Nevertheless, numerous vendors still thrive by offering cars with differentiations that appeal to a wide range of customer needs e.g. the need for basic transportation, the need for speed, the need for safety, the need for transporting entire families comfortably etc.
As market for virtualization evolves and moves beyond today's predominantly SMB oriented test/development and server consolidation deployments, enterprise datacenter managers will look for solutions that address their specific scalability, availability, manageability and security requirements. In this context, I envision that there will be more than one virtualization platform to choose from with differentiation built-in at the Hypervisor level. For example the Sun xVM Server is a hypervisor that will leverage the opensource Xen platform for x86/x64 and incorporate many enterprise-grade features e.g Predictive Self-Healing, Network Bandwidth Management and Security, to offer a truly differentiated hypervisor offering for the enterprise.
In summary, I think the Hypervisor is far from being a commodity play. Then again if you somehow think any less of being in a commodity business, I suggest you take a look at the energy market outlook this year :-)
This week Microsoft announced its vision and strategy to accelerate virtualization adoption. Over the course of the past week, I was asked to respond with my thoughts. My take is that these are still early days for the overall virtualization market. This is in line with what Microsoft themselves are saying. By many accounts, the percentage of servers and desktops that are being virtualized today is still in the single digits. That said, there is a rapidly growing interest and appetite for virtualization. The industry as a whole has an obligation to respond to that growing customer demand. To that end it is good to see Microsoft expressing its plans to respond to the market's needs.
From my perspective, choice is a good thing for customers and for the industry at large. What I am leery about is the sentiment out there that somehow this is a zero-sum game where one player has to dominate at the expense of others. On the contrary, virtualization is a vast and complex paradigm that encompasses so many aspects of computing including hardware, hypervisors, operating system software, management infrastructure, applications, storage and networks. Customers are just barely getting a sense of what the combination of all these elements will mean to them beyond the well understood application of virtualization today in server consolidation. It is going to take an entire eco-system of solutions that interoperate to address the needs of the nascent market as it grows up.
This is where I am excited about what Sun can bring to the table for customers given the scope and breadth of its capabilities that include hardware, software, management, storage, desktops and the network. Somehow people forget that Sun has a long history of innovation in virtualization dating back to 1985 - starting with NFS which is essentially one of the first storage virtualization technologies. More recently the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is the most successful VM with over 5 Million copies actively in use today. Just for comparision, analysts estimate that there are approximately 500,000 server VMs online today.
Sun xVM represents our vision to offer customers best-of-breed, interoperable and open solutions in the virtualization space. Sun xVM is designed from the ground up for heterogeneous infrastructure - not just Sun. It is designed to expose the advantages that have long been part of Solaris to the Windows and Linux worlds. Sun xVM will not only run Windows, Linux and Solaris workloads, it will do so on non-Sun hardware while also interoperating with other virtualization software platforms. For example it will work seamlessly with Microsoft and VMware through its support for VHD and VMDK. This interoperability is powerful. What this means is customers will have more options to put together a best-of-breed solution for their particular needs without having to worry about vendor lock-in. Additionally, Sun xVM will provide the ability to manage all their heterogeneous infrastructure at both the physical and virtual levels through Sun xVM Ops Center. Finally, Sun will make all of the source code for this platform available to the opensource community through OpenxVM.org.
How does that sound for a commitment to helping foster a still nascent industry?
My wife and I picked up a very pretty looking vegetable at the farmers market over the weekend.
It is apparently a type of Broccoflower (see wikipedia entry) called the Romanesco Broccoli or Fractal Broccoli. I have never seen one of these before and was totally captivated by it. The fractal arrangement of the buds is simply mesmerizing. I've posted a couple of pictures I took on flickr. I think I am just going to end up admiring this vegetable rather than eating it.