Vijay Sarathy's Blog Veritable Vijay

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

1. Sun xVM Server (hypervisor)
2. Sun xVM Ops Center for management

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?

It has already been 5+ weeks back at Sun in my new role helping lead the Sun xVM Marketing effort. Time sure flies when you are having fun!

For those of you who don't know what Sun xVM is - it is Sun's new Virtualization and Management Infrastructure. A lot more about that is certain to follow in my blog entries here but first, let me address the obvious questions I am getting from people I know i.e. "Why did you choose to go back to Sun?" and "Why Virtualization after RFID?" Let me address the latter question first.

For those of you who don't know me, my previous role at Sun was helping lead the Sun Marketing effort around its RFID and EPC (Electronic Product Code) solutions. Subsequently, I had left Sun in early 2006 to help found a company (AssetPulse) focused entirely on delivering RFID solutions for Asset Tracking. One of the primary target markets for this company's solutions was IT datacenters. As a consequence, I got first hand experience of many of the issues faced by datacenter IT managers. It was apparent that with the proliferation of x86 servers and blades, datacenters were getting bigger and denser. Consequently, IT managers seemed to be having a hard time keeping track of their physical assets. In their mind RFID was the solution. I was happy to help and in the process gained an appreciation of the various other problems in datacenters. This lead me to keep an eye on virtualization and the overall management problem within virtualized datacenters. I would be lying if I said that the VMware IPO had nothing to do with piquing my interest as well. However, it also struck me that if IT Managers were having such a hard time tracking physical assets - and these are things that they can literally see, then imagine the problem they are likely to face with having to track the exploding number of virtual servers which they cannot eyeball. After a few such minor a-ha moments I decided that Virtualization was the next space to be in.

As I explored the Virtualization landscape, I talked to many people and companies. To be frank, Sun was not a place I was considering coming back to at all. I mean with the stock hovering under $5 and the incessant pessimistic analyst and press coverage it sure doesn't jump out at you. But as I listened to the initial Sun xVM chalk talks and put the various pieces together in my head I began to realize the unique opportunity at hand for Sun with all its assets including Hardware, Storage, Networking & Software. Of course no one underestimates the depth and breadth of Sun's technology portfolio in the space. It is widely regarded that the cure to Sun's present predicament lies in its ability to execute and monetize that portfolio. After talking to some very passionate people, I became convinced of desire within Sun to execute and the mandate for change. And then something funny happened - I *wanted* to come back to Sun!

So here I am. I am truly excited about the overall opportunity and my new role at Sun. I believe that Virtualization is probably the most transformative technology with respect to datacenters and that Sun is in my opinion the best positioned company to deliver the most comprehensive set of virtualization solutions to enable the next generation of datacenters.