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Sun Sticks to Virtualization Roadmap
Despite accusations of 'schizophrenic marketing,' Sun is determined to follow its own virtual star
June 4, 2008
2 Min Read
When Sun announced its $2 billion virtualization plans late last year, there were many questions.
Why was Sun trying to get into this market by creating its own infrastructure? And why, when it already had virtualization within Solaris via Solaris Containers and Zones, would Sun seemingly undermine that effort with a competing product?
One user even accused Sun of "institutional schizophrenia."
Undeterred, Sun earlier this year began putting out products in its xVM lineup, and followed up last week with an update. Here's a timeline:
February 2008: Sun ships xVM Ops Center, a management solution for virtual environments. Priced from $10,000 for an annual subscription, plus $100 per managed server per year, a second release with a single, Web-based browser to manage heterogeneous physical and virtual machines is due out later this summer.Sun has been reticent on when Ops Center will directly support Zones and/or Solaris Containers. A spokesman says only that it is on the roadmap and will be included in a future version.
Later in February, Sun acquires Innotek, which makes a virtual desktop hypervisor called VirtualBox.
March 2008: Sun releases Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 2.0, a product that assigns and controls virtual desktops using VMware. The package can implement and control Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and other operating systems in virtual desktops. Note: It is not a virtual desktop hypervisor. Pricing is $149 per concurrent user.
May 2008: Sun releases VirtualBox 1.6, a virtual desktop hypervisor based on the Innotek product. Available free of charge as an open source edition under Gnu General Public License v2, VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and OpenSolaris hosts and supports Windows (all kinds, old and new), Linux, and OpenBSD guests, among others.
Summer 2008: Besides xVM Ops Center 2.0, Sun plans to ship Sun xVM Server, an x86 bare-metal hypervisor based on Xen community work. Sun has promised to include Solaris-specific features in this product.
Sun's clearly investing heavily in xVM and has its sights set on creating its own virtual universe -- as well as working with the leading hypervisor vendors, including VMware and Microsoft.
This emphasis seems reasonable, given Sun's recent performance in storage and the widespread view that Sun is more likely to succeed in software than hardware.
At any rate, if the company stays on schedule with xVM, it should be worth watching.
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