There were a lot of good questions asked at the xVM Roadshow last week, and a number of good answers given. I figured that some of you might have the same questions in mind. If not, you'll find this post pretty boring, except perhaps for my own bit of news.
Question: Within the Sun xVM Portfolio, what's going to be open-source, and what will cost money?
Answer: Sun xVM VirtualBox and Sun xVM Server will be open-sourced. Some features, though, such as guest migration, are part of Sun xVM Ops Center. Also, service contracts can be purchased for any part of the Sun xVM Portfolio.
Question: What Operating Systems are part of the Sun xVM Ops Center knowledge base? (The knowledge base covers patching information.)
Answer: Currently, Solaris and some forms of Linux (Red Hat and Suse, at least) are part of the knowledge base. Windows support is not in 2.0 but is planned for the future. Windows is supported as a guest operating system, though.
Question: Will Sun xVM Server support native Xen formats?
Answer: We don't, as there weren't a lot of requests for it.
Question: Can you move guests back and forth between Sun xVM Server and similar VMware solutions?
Answer (edited): In theory, but it would be tricky. Sun xVM Server and VMware both use the VMDK format, but we haven't done much interoperability testing, so we can't really guarantee that you could take a guest from Sun xVM Server and move it to VMware. Sun xVM Server can definitely import virtual appliances from VMware, though.
Question: What's the difference between hardware-assisted virtualization and paravirtualization? Can you have both kinds of guests on a Sun xVM Server?
Answer: Hardware-assisted virtualization uses normal operating systems, while paravirtualization requires OSes with modified drivers. Paravirtualization typically offers superior performance. A single Sun xVM Server can support both kinds of guests simultaneously.
So, some interesting questions, but I'm sure there are more out there. (Ask them, by all means.) There are also some questions that have been asked on the blog here that I haven't answered yet - in some cases because engineering is figuring out what features will go into our future releases.
It'll be a little while before I'll get to those questions, though. I'll be out for the next two weeks, as I am getting married. In the meantime, you will get a guest blogger or two, and I'll get to your questions when I return.
An the most important question:
When is the GA date for xVM Server?
Posted by Mika on October 24, 2008 at 04:05 PM MDT #
Does xVM Server support PCI Passthru?
Xen does support that but nobody else as far as i know.
Posted by Bernhard Fröhlich on October 25, 2008 at 03:34 AM MDT #
Hi,
yes there are question
- Will Sun VDI move from Vmware to xVM?
- Which languages will the BUI have? English only?
- Will the installation process be Opensolaris-like (Caiman) or Solaris 10-like?
- Will the Windows PV drivers be open-source or at least free download?
- Is there an easy way to migrate an existing physical machine into xVM Server?
Thank you
Posted by Dennis on October 25, 2008 at 03:41 AM MDT #
Do you have tools for migrating physcial
- Windows
- Linux
- Solaris x86 machines?
and transferring - VirtualBox machines to xVM Server?
Posted by Per on October 27, 2008 at 07:33 AM MDT #
Posted by Cinetica Blog on October 29, 2008 at 10:26 AM MDT #
At least a couple of official Sun press releases (and also some unofficial blogs) have mentioned xVM Ops Center also being open-sourced. Lately, I get the feeling that Sun may be backing off of that, e.g. your answer to the first question. What's the real story on this? Thanks!
Posted by Tom on October 30, 2008 at 09:20 PM MDT #