Sun Bare Metal Hypervisors Now GPLv3 154
ruphus13 writes with some more news for people foretelling the death of VMware. Sun has open sourced their xVM server, their bare-metal hypervisor virtualization solution. What used to once be the cash cow for VMware is now coming under increased threat, and Sun is once again turning to the Open Source community as a weapon. "Sun xVM Server is an outgrowth of the Xen project — which raises the question of why a company would go with Sun's version rather than the Xen one. Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris (as well as other chips and operating systems), Sun is also building a services and sales organization around a commercial version of xVM server... If you want to kick the tires or cut your costs, you can hop over to xVMServer.org, download the source (GPL 3) and join the community. But Sun is betting that, as deployments move from an initial testing phase to active usage, large organizations will be willing to pay for guaranteed support (starting at $500 per year per physical server)."
view the code - not run it (Score:5, Interesting)
http://kenai.com/projects/xvmserver/forums/120-Announcements/topics/59-First-open-source-release-of-xVM-Server?
This release is designed to allow interested parties to view the code - not run it. It will be some time in the future before we have all of the pieces available for you to compile and run your own copy of xVM Server.
But stay tuned, we're getting there :-)
scott
Re:Features (Score:1, Interesting)
o it's not just hardware and OS support, it's ease of management -- which is VMWare's strength (though you pay for it).
As an IT decision maker, I agree. VMWARE currently leads the management features and reduces the amount of techie time I have to pay for. Human time is far more precious and valuable than licensing, especially after midnight. Since we're a 24x7 shop, simpler management leads to lower operational costs. The hypervisor just needs to be "good enough" and then it's all about the management capabilities.
Some other interesting Sun stuff (Score:1, Interesting)
Speaking of Sun, here are some pics of the company's factory [silicon.com] in Scotland. If you like servers it's one to check out...
Virtual or Paravirtual? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tried it already -- couldn't make it work (Score:2, Interesting)
The installation of xVM itself on my late-model Dell desktop running a fully updated Windows XP OS but I could never get Ubuntu to install and/or run on three separate attempts. The first time, the Ubuntu install process froze. The second time, it completed but when shutting down to reboot post-install, I got hit with an near-endless stream of error messages and the OS never rebooted. The third attempt also apparently installed but wouldn't boot.
They do claim to support Ubuntu as a guest OS but my experience was a bit different. Your mileage may vary. In any case, I uninstalled it and chalked it up to simply not being ready for prime time.
Why I'm evaluating this... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been tracking xVM for a while now, along with the other major VM players, for my home VM setup. I've downloaded and evaluated ESXi, XenServer Express and Hyper-V. The one difference that xVM will have that the others don't is a web interface for administrating the VMs. All the others require a Windows application, which in turn requires Windows (I haven't tried using Wine). xVM Server can be administered from any platform running a decent web browser.
The other difference between xVM and other Xen-based hypervisors is the base on which it's built. Citrix XenServer is built around CentOS which is used for the Dom0 (the administrative domain). Sun have built xVM around Solaris, so benefits from the FMA (Fault Management Architecture AKA self-healing), Crossbow (virtualised network stack), Dtrace and ZFS.
There is a lot of cool technology in xVM Server and it's certainly worth a look.
Re:Slightly OT , but can someone explain... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is long precedent in the meat world of hardware requirements for operating systems. There are physical "PC architectures" than can't run some OSes. An extreme example, an IBM PS/2 isn't going to be able to run Vista. Less extreme - clever people can get OS X running on some non-Apple hardware, but not all.
A VM is just like another set of hardware - that may or may not satisfy the requirements of the OS and/or work as advertised.
I'm frankly impressed that they work so well! Even after years of using virtual machines, I still think it is fun to see a BIOS screen in a window on my desktop.
Re:cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ZFS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
> Xen is a paravirtualization technology, whereas VMWare is a straight-up virtualization technology.
That may have been true at some point. But, Xen has long ago supported full hardware virtualization (allowing it to run an unmodified OS, such as Windows). And, VMware now supports paravirtualization via "VMI" which they got included in the standard Linux kernel.
In any case, the more important issue is their management capabilities. Xen has struggled in the past because its management was weak compared to VMware. If Sun can put their resources into improving the management side of things, they could make an impact.
Xen's primary strength, however, is paravirtualization. Anything else on top of that is what you make of it.
Also, there's a nice Virtual Machine management console available in the newer Linux distributions (libvirtd-based). Not perfect, but a step in the right direction for those of us which require paravirtualization.
Re:Is Sun astroturfing a product? (Score:3, Interesting)
and while not one of the heralded 4-digit user ID's, an 6-digit id starting '159' would seem to indicate he's been aware of /. for sometime as well...
Xen in seconds.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I can create/destroy a new Xen VM in a matter of seconds, derived from some simple rules.
The management software in my case is a preview of an update to an IBM cluster management project, listing Xen support in the changelog:
http://xcat.wiki.sourceforge.net/xCAT+2.1+Changes
Creating 10 new VMs in my evaluation setup once configured was along the lines of
nodeadd v1-v10 groups=vm
rpower v1-v10 on
rinstall v1-v10
The VMs were off and installing my image within 30 seconds. It was kinda cool.