Virtual Box, xVM Server, LDoms, Zones, Xen, and such...
Author writes, "Like the commercial xVM Server was supposed to be in relation to commercial Solaris 10. And before you send comments to El Reg, I know that xVM has been embedded in the latter releases of OpenSolaris and that technically you can get tech support for OpenSolaris."
OpenSolaris is the production operating system shipped in Sun's Open Storage appliances. If people are happy with compiling & running Linux in their production environments, OpenSolaris should be OK. For companies that don't run Linux, I agree that waiting for xVM Server to be released in Solaris 11 may be a reasonable plan. Nearly everyone is running Linux, though - not sure who really need to wait until Solaris 11.
Author writes, "Does the world need another bare metal hypervisor? IBM certainly needs one for the X64 platforms it sells, and so does Hewlett-Packard, which has software aspirations. Dell doesn't seem to want a software business, but having its own low-cost (or free) hypervisor and services to sell might be an attractive idea."
If IBM, HP, and Dell want to compete in the commercial market place for Intel/AMD based proprietary servers on price point, then yes, they may be interested in their own bare metal hypervisors. Without bare metal hypervisors, their prices start to rise when comparing their systems to competitors.
Xen is free, not sure what they need with the exception of a few resources on the sub-continent or in the far-east. They could always bundle OpenSolaris with xVM.
Author writes, "Novell needs a free-standing and open source hypervisor that is not Xen or KVM. Maybe Oracle can sell it for a few bucks?"
Sun Virtual box is free - not certain why Novell would want to buy the product group. Not sure what they need with the exception of a marketing engine. Kind of like how Sun OpenOffice, Sun Java, and Sun MySQL is just about everywhere in the Open Source world. Sun is doing the heavy lifting for their competitors, right now.
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I am really surprised that people have not realized the benefits of a hypervisor running under [Open]Solaris yet.
The benefits of xVM Server on OpenSolaris are absolutely astounding in comparison to the competition - ZFS support for unparalleled virtual machine cloning speed, ZFS snapshort for unparalleled (try doing on-line hourly backups for a couple of years) virtual machine backups, ZFS with flash support for terrific disk performance, ZFS & COMSTAR for no-cost (and no additional management software) replication of the entire environment to another standby system with internal disks, DTrace for superb resource debugging on production over-laying operating system support, no-cost acquisition for initial experimentation, paid support for production deployment.
Running VirtualBox on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris gives most of the same capabilities as Sun xVM Server - perhaps the supported disk sizing is capabilities are different between VB and xVM, I am curious about the performance differences.
LDom's and Zones in conjunction with Sun OpsCenter seems fairly nice. Automatic load balancing of applications across clusters using pools of LDom's is very nice, it would be nice to see xVM Server support in the future. I was unaware of how extensive the cross-platform integrations possible with third-party vendors with OpsCenter until I read:
http://blogs.sun.com/barrettblog/entry/oracle_openworld_2009