c0t0d0s0.org

There were many reports about the announcement of xVM today. I won´t repeat all the stuff said about this suite of products. The blog of Steve Wilson is a good starting point for this and you will find a further introduction to the topic on the website of Sun. Furthermore as we will opensource xVM Server, the website openvxm.org will be a very important one in the future of xVM Server and xVM Virtualbox

But i want to link to an article i wrote one year ago about xVM. My opinion is still valid. The advantages of xVM are systemic ones ... xVM is just a hypervisor ...but with Solaris it get very special strengths: xVM isn´t just Xen

When you ask "Why should I use xVM Server" the answer is "Because of Solaris". And with xVM OpCenter we have a really good management interface for it, too. (This is important, as most people don´t care for the VMware hypervisor for example but they really like the GUI.)

Detlef Drewanz hat seine Erfahrungen mit Sun xVM in einem sehr interessanten Artikel über die Vorbereitung einer Demoumgebung fuer die CeBIT zusammengefasst.

Michael Haines writes in this blog article about yet another reason to think about the usage of xVM as soon it´s available: DTrace! We implemented a DTrace provider in xVM to trace the interaction between Dom0 the hypervisor.

Jonathan gives some good insights to the Solaris deal with Dell and the future impact of xVM in his blog:

Dell's now advantaged in the marketplace, as well, and alongside Intel and IBM, can better serve customers wanting a single hand to shake (throat to choke isn't the experience either of us are seeking). Reciprocally, Solaris is clearly advantaged by association with Dell, the company that invented volume success in the IT marketplace. The relationship broadens the market for the both of us.

PS: As usual, the url of his blog entry is interesting to:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/yes_it_s_true

Opensolaris Build 75 was released yesterday. You can download it from the opensolaris.org website. It´s a particular important release, as it´s the first release of Opensolaris with xVM (aka XEN) integrated into the source tree.

Marc Hamilton wrote about the preview of xVM, our virtualisation technology, in his blog. I wan´t to add some thoughts to it. I´ve talked with some customers about xVM in the last few days about our upcoming virtualisation. And one comment was "Hey, you´ve just ported Xen to Solaris. This isn´t a big thing". And while Xen in Opensolaris is a technical archievement, it isn´t exactly an unique selling point. So why should you use Xen on Opensolaris: Well, as usual the reason lies in the complete system called Solaris/Opensolaris.

The point behind virtualisation with Solaris is the interaction with other features integrated deeply in Solaris. For example: There is something called "Fault Management Architecture" in the operating environment. It tracks all faults in the system (for example corrected memory errors or similar early warning for imminent faults). When the amount of failures for an component reaches an threshold, the operating system deactivates it (for example, evacuates and retires a memory bank). An failing memory chip can´t destabilize the system when there are no accesses to it (okay, except really spectacular electrical faults like burning memory chips ). The point: The virtualization can leverage this function, you can even think about an auto-evacuation by live migration when the probability of an fatal error reaches a certain amoun (i wrote about this idea at several ocassions like the windows desktop virtualisation with XEN) .The same with ZFS: Think about virtual disks based on sparse provisioned emulated volumes. Get a checksum protected NTFS and circumvent the need to grow the filesystem by thin provisioning.

The advantages of xVM are systemic ones. xVM isn´t just Xen, it´s the Not the feature itself, the integration into the operating system gives the reasons to use it instead Xen on Linux or even VMware.