Sun Bare Metal Hypervisors Now GPLv3

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)."

Comments

cheap

[gEvil (beta)]

$500 bucks a year per physical server is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. Basically, you can try out and use it for free as you set the server(s) up, but when you go live, you can have the assurance that proper support brings. Or not. Your choice. Good move on Sun's part.

Re:cheap

[spydum]

I don't think it will be as successful as they hoped. Sun is far too late to this x86 virtualization game. LDOM's and Containers, and Xen are great technologies, but they just haven't been nearly as flexible as VMWare's offering. Management of the environments (LDOM/Containers/Xen guests) has been very kludgy. This is where VMWare has really gained dominance, and I suspect will retain it. They are years ahead in virtualization management.

Re:cheap

[tji]

> 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.

Slightly OT , but can someone explain...

[Viol8]

... why a VM has to "support" a given OS such as Vista or Solaris or Linux?

FTA: "Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris..."

Surely if these VMs truly are PCs emulated in software with standard emulated devices then surely any OS than runs on the PC architecture and has drivers for these devices will install and run on these VMs regardless?

Linus' licencing inflexibility will hurt us all

[FreeUser]

Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.

It was foolish and short-sighted for Linus to release Linux under the GPL v2 only, and not GPL v2 or later, as recommended by the Free Software Foundation. Now it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to relicense the kernel under another license (the missing "or later" part), as there have been far too many contributors, some of whom are dead, in prison, or have otherwise vanished from the Community.

Sun prefers GPL v 3 as it does a better job of keeping the code free, particularly with respect to software patents, which, while not a problem for those of us lucky enough to be in Europe (not a problem for the moment, anyway), are certainly a concern in the US and other nations the US has bullied into adopting similar legislation.

As a result, technologies like ZFS are unlikely to ever make it into the Linux kernel. In the coming decades, as more and more technologies come along like this, Linus' inflexible licensing choice is likely to relegate the kernel to a historical footnote, where other kernels, licensed under either the "or later" clause (or other more permissive licenses) will continue. It's a pity, and I say that as one who has been using Linux since 1993, and will continue using it for the foreseeable future.

Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could

[kscguru]

The FUD machine is in full swing today!

So... disclaimer. I'm a VMware employee, so I do know all about both these benchmarks (even if I had nothing to do with them). Agree the first VMware benchmark was quite skewed, looking at Xen instead of XenSource. The XenSource benchmark showed up, it showed Xen ahead in system-call microbenchmarks (hardware virtualization does well there, but lots of system calls with no I/O isn't representative of the real world) and more or less even on everything else. VMware approved XenSource's whitepaper for publication about two weeks later (which, BTW, is no longer on Citrix's website and not visible on Google). The comparison was not apples-to-apples - XenSource switched from Xen 3.0 to Xen 3.2 in the comparison, and didn't make any software-virtualization/hardware-virtualization tweaks. In other words, XenSource's benchmark was just as skewed as VMware's. And everybody who knows anything about benchmarking knows it.

The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison. They never cared about a performance comparison - it was all a PR stunt to get a great big /REDACTED/ document posted to news sites / blogs.

VMware does not forbid negative benchmarks; they do forbid stupid benchmarks. Usually, some amateur runs Passmark 2D, which is a system-call microbenchmark that doesn't even keep time correctly in a virtual machine. Every single person complaining about that EULA has never bothered submitting results - almost all submissions get approved.