Sun rises on xVM stategy

Sun Microsystems' xVM virtualisation efforts are getting louder and louder.

Sun's xVM is its Solaris based version of the Xen open source hypervisor project. Sun's xVM aims to allow x86 servers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer, in a move toward increased flexibility and datacentre efficiency. xVM also relies on Sun's Solaris operating system, while Xen primarily uses Linux.

Last September, Sun named its Xen-based virtualisation project xVM.

Then in October, Sun executives toured the world, talking up xVM. The topic: Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM Ops Centre, designed to serve as soup to nuts software for virtualising and managing the datacentre.

Earlier this month, Sun released OpenSolaris Developer Preview for download. The beta included such features as xVM and is scheduled for release in the spring as OpenSolaris 3/08.

Sun's chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, is scheduled to discuss Sun's virtualisation strategy and roadmap at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday, as well as some of its partners for the free, open source datacentre virtualisation and management platform. MySQL and Quest Software, for example, have signed aboard as xVM partners.

Providing further context around Schwartz's pending keynote was Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software.

"Virtualisation is just beginning, as evidenced by VMware's rollout in the market," Green said. "We look at VM as a wide range of technologies. In the next five years, it's hard to imagine any IT company that would deploy their architecture without VM."

He added that the challenge is how a guest operating system views the data centre. And the hypervisor is the window through which applications view the entire datacentre.

"The key is getting the most out of the datacentre," Green noted.