Sunny Talks Tech Blog

A friend attending Oracle Open World told me about xVM, Sun's Virtualization platform. I have to say, I hadn't heard of it before, so I went on to look for some resources and this post is what I've found about xVM Server.

Sun has a new virtualization server based on Xen hypervisor. It currently supports virtualization of operating systems like Linux, Windows and Solaris. I have been using Xen with openSuSE which is bundled on the DVD of openSuSE 10.3 and I think it's among the best virtualization software available. So I asked what was different about Sun xVM and is it just plain packaging that Sun will be doing. Going to their website, I found that xVM server has a few scoring points to it.

1. It brings Sun's very efficient and cool ZFS filesystem with the xVM Server.
2. Sun will provide xVM for free but would provide support (at some cost) for the xVM server.
3. DTrace and Self Healing (FMA) will be available with xVM
4. Another Sun open-source, Crossbow for network virtualization will also be bundled with xVM

SunxVM server is open source and is working through a few different communities. All of those can be found at http://www.openxvm.org . VMware which is the market leader for virtualization products only has 9% of the market share. This just goes to show how much the virtualization market is scattered and everyone wants a piece of the market. Sun's product is bundled with some nice tools and good administration GUI as well.

Prof. Ian Pratt of Cambridge who originally developed the Xen hypervisor, must be quite happy with the development that Xen has gone through. The success of xVM Server largely depends on how much the market believes in the value proposition that Sun has bundled with Xen.

• Product Review: openSUSE 10.3