Vijay Sarathy's Blog Veritable Vijay

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?