Sun Shifts Virtual Target

Almost a year after the Sun first discussed its virtualization strategy, the vendor beefed up its xVM technologythis week and revealed plans to add storage to the virtual mix.

It seems that there is no place that virtualization won’t be, moving forward,” said Rich Green, Sun’s executive vice president for software, during a webcast earlier today. “Everybody is aware of the core capabilities of virtualization.”

The vendor is now pushing server virtualization to the forefront of its strategy, announcing the availability of its xVM Server software today.

Aimed at x86 and SPARC machines, Sun is touting xVM and its open-source Xen hypervisor as a way for users to virtualize workloads running on Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

xVM Server also works with VMware, according to the exec on this morning’s webcast, and Sun claims users can shift virtual workloads between VMware’s ESX Server and its own technology.Sun, which targeted desktops with its VirtualBox and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offerings earlier this year, also expanded its virtualization management strategy today.

Last year the vendor unveiled the first version of its Ops Center software, which is essentially the management nerve-center of its different virtual offerings.

With the launch of xVM Ops Center 2.0 today, the vendor is now pushing its ability to manage not just virtual servers, but also physical machines from a host of vendors, including HP, IBM, and Dell.

"As we see people move to the virtual world, the number of entities you have to manage is just getting larger,” said Steve Wilson, Sun’s vice president of xVM, during the webcast, adding that one customer has already virtualized some 50,000 server cores.

Ops Center also fulfills the role of a data repository for Sun’s desktop and server virtualization software, according to Wilson.“Part of what we do manage on the Ops Center is storage,” he says, explaining that Ops Center holds virtual machine images, different versions of system firmware, and operating system upgrades. “What this drives is the ability to manage the data center.”

Despite recent moves from rival vendors VMware and Citrix to tie server and storage virtualization more closely together, Sun execs largely avoided this topic during their Webcast, although the issue is clearly on the vendor’s roadmap.

“We’re working on storage integration to manage the storage servers [but] it’s not in this version, though,” wrote a Sun exec during a "live chat" discussion that accompanied the Web cast. The exec, however, did not respond to questions about whether this would be achieved through the SMI-S protocol and whether this will let users provision a LUN through their VMs.

Licensing for xVM Server starts at $500 per physical server per year. Pricing for xVM Ops Center starts at $100 per managed server per year, rising to $350 per year, depending on the features selected.

With VMware’s annual VMworld event taking place in Las Vegas next week, a number of storage vendors have already started banging their virtualization drums.This morning, for example, Dell announced a raft of virtualization offerings, including its EqualLogic PS5500E, which is targeted at VMware environments.

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