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Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek

Started by El Vato, 2008.02.15, 02:14:34

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El Vato

http://www.os2world.com/content/view/16967/1/
QuotePosted by Kim Haverblad - Tuesday, 12 February 2008


SANTA CLA. .. .

For those who, like me, were wondering why Sun Microsystems --that already had a Xen-based virtualization offering-- but decided to buy a lighter, less robust, virtualization alternative, here is the scoop:

"Sun xVM Server is a bare-metal hypervisor.  This means it installs directly on the hardware, not on top of an existing operating system.  It's a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT.  It includes high-end, data center features like live VM migration and dynamic self-healing.  This is datacenter grade virtualization.  Along with Sun xVM Ops Center, xVM Server will become the engine that drives a dynamic data center."

"VirtualBox is what is technically referred to as a type-2 hypervisor.  It's an application that installs on top of an existing operating system.  VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris hosts, which means you can use it with your laptop no matter what OS you choose for your "native" environment.  This makes VirtualBox a software developer's dream.  You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multi-tier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box!  VirtualBox doesn't have xVM Server's data center features, like live migration, but it's incredibly light-weight.  I installed it this weekend.  The download was only 17 MB and the install took only minutes.  In less than 15 minutes from when I started the download until I was ready to start installing guests."

http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2008/02/sun_expands_to.html?source=NLC-VIRTUALIZATION&cgd=2008-02-14
http://blogs.sun.com/stevewilson/entry/this_isn_t_your_dad

In other words, VirtualBox lighter duty (desktop) offering purportedly will complements Sun's Xen-based heavy duty artillery (datacenter) --that Sun calls xVM.  Odd ...or different than other approaches, I think.

REASON:
The different Linux distros offer a Xen modified kernel/support on the bare metal installation so as to execute any supported guest operating system.  And other proprietary vendors that acquired OSS entities, notably Citrix in their acquisition of XenSource, will embed Xen in desktop as well as datacenter uses/applications.

Possibly Sun's offering of Solaris (as oppossed to OpenSolaris) will remain closed source and VirtualBox would be more adequate to maintain that strategy ...???

Enjoy!