Sun Joins the Open Source VM Game

      by Dusty Schnabel

Sun announced today that it is open sourcing its bare-metal hyper visor VM technology xVM.  This comes on the heels of the release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V for free, reported last week on What a N00b. 

xVM is comes out of of the Xen project which was acquired in 2007 by Citrix.  Although still available as an open source project, XenSource wraps a nice set of Windows based management tools around Xen improving management, and increasing the cost ofcourse.

It will be interesting to see what the management tools will look like when xVM is released, as it’s $500 per server price point (for support) is intriguing as it would be an efficiently priced, commercially supported option for server visualization.  Also, with Sun’s support of multiple platforms, it will be interesting to see how cross platform the management tools will be as many tools are Windows only or only partially function on other operating systems.

Additional features of xVM include support for SPARC and x86 processors, multiple guest OS’s, live migrations, and a Java / browser based KVM. Currently, xVM is available via source code.  The rest of us mere mortals will have to wait for the binary release.

Sun has also received good reviews of its desktop virtualization product, VirtualBox.  MacWorld recently posted a video reviewing the product.

Related Posts Related Websites

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Sep 15th, 2008

Leave a Reply