Sun xVM Server Future VMware Killer????

If you look at some of the articles on my blog you see that I work a great deal with Virtual hosts on a day to day basis. VM's are by far not a magic bullet in all cases but are great for making the best use of available resources. So far the leader in the game has been VMware with their bare metal hypervisor offering ESX and ESXi. With a really mature easy to use product they have been an industry leader that has been hard to compete with. That is until now.

Sun has been working on their new product xVM Server which is also a bare metal hypervisor that will be open source. Using a similar model to VMmware ESXi the hypervisor itself will be open source and free and the more enterprise add on features will be pay for play. Being open source I see this really having the potential to take off for Sun. If you have used VMware ESXi for any production systems you know a lot of the "gotchas" that you run into with ESXi that were engineered in to push users to the paid version. Looking at some of the screen shots on http://xvmserver.org/ it appears that Sun's product will be fully managable from a web page making it more attractive to enviroments that are not windows centric.

You can read more about Sun's xVM server product at the following URL. While it has not yet been "fully" released yet its a very exciting product. http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvmserver/index.xml

While xVM server has not yet been released Virtualbox has. I have been working with it on my Macbook and have been amazed at its speed. It blows the doors off of VMware Fusion and its a free product unlike the $79.99 that VMware wants for their product. You can download it here. http://www.sun.com/software/products/virtualbox/get.jsp

Update: This product was killed right after the Oracle purchase of Sun. More information here. RIP Sun xVM Server.

Open Solaris........ Hmmmmm......

I have been a big fan of the Solaris OS for many years now. A rock solid operating system combined with rock solid hardware is always a winning combination.

Being an ex SGI employee I have seen what a "disruptive" technology Open Source has been. IRIX SGI's rather well developed OS was killed in 2006 when the company dropped support for MIPS processors and started using Linux on their machines. The company that created OpenGL fell on its own sword financially killed mostly by "cheap" commodity hardware and the Linux OS. Why shell out big bucks on an Origin 3000 supercomputer when you can just link a bunch of cheap Linux boxes together? If your a bean counter your not going to be able to get past the free part in comparison to the outlay for a high end system.

While SGI did some work "embracing" Open Source they did not do a good enough job at it. Sun is taking a much more open and different approach that seems to be working well for them. Solaris has at least since 5.8 been a free download on the Sun Site for all versions (you need a licence for the OS if your going to use it commercially). A far cry from the $500 IRIX CD kit from SGI if you had a system you were willing to buy a service contract for.

Enter now the Open Solaris OS. Several of my Sun friends have suggested I check it out and I have resisted until recently. If you want a "preview" of what the next version of Solaris is going to be like this is probably where your going to see it. The new package manager pkg can download and install packages like apt-get or yum on a Linux system. A far cry from manually downloading (or wget if your lucky enough to have it installed) and then doing a pkgadd -d to the package and crossing your fingers not to run into dependency hell. While not "everything" is open source you do get some rather powerful toys such as ZFS and dtrace.

I am still in my evaluation process and the jury is still out if Open Solaris will see its way outside the Virtual Machine on my Macbook. It does however make me look forward to the Sun Solaris 11 release rather than look at it as another possibly painful event because of the "change for changes sake" that is so popular with the Open Source community.