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Sun Bare Metal Hypervisors Now GPLv3

Posted by kdawson on from the make-it-up-in-volume dept.

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)."

4 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Re:cheap by spydum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. not a milk cow by michalk0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    vmware does not make its money on bare metal hypervisor. It makes a fortune, and is actually doing pretty good, on enterprise products like vmware infrastructure or virtual desktop environment.
    Actually their bare metal hypervisor - ESXi comes for free as well (although not GPLed, but we're not talking about ideology here are we)

  3. view the code - not run it by Anonymous Coward · · 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

  4. Re:cheap by twiddlingbits · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thats not the full costs. I just looked at this the other day for my company. There are a lot of other costs involved if you want support and a 100% Sun solution guaranteed to work. I've also seen no benchmarks versus VMWare.
    Pricing Information
    Sun offers standalone subscriptions for Sun xVM Server software and Sun xVM Ops Center, as well as additional options that offer the combined benefits of the two products, allowing customers to virtualize and manage at Internet scale. Commercial subscriptions are priced annually in four-socket increments and provide premium 24X7 support, access to the latest, up-to-the-minute patches and updates, as well as installation and training. Available pricing options include:
    * Sun xVM Server software: Priced at $500/year per physical server.
    * Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription: Priced at $2000 per physical server per year, the enterprise subscription is designed to simplify the management of large scale virtualized environments and includes advanced features, such as management of live migration and of multiple network storage libraries.
    * Sun xVM Infrastructure Datacenter Subscription: Priced at $3000 per server per year, this option includes all the features in the Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription in addition to physical server monitoring, management and advanced software lifecycle management capabilities.
    * Sun xVM Ops Center: Available from $100 per managed server up to $350 a year, depending on customer selected features, along with a required $10,000 Satellite Server annual subscription for Sun xVM Ops Center.

    There are some significant technical restrictions as well if you dig deep you'll find
    Disk on which xVM server is installed
    * SATA or SAS (serial SCSI) * Fiber Channel to a JBOD * IDE disks are not supported
    Attached storage
    * NFS/TCP/IP/ethernet remote storage * CIFS remote storage
    Networking
    * Ethernet-based NICs supporting the Solaris GLDv3 driver specification * only MTUs of 1500 bytes are supported
    * For Windows guests, customers wanting full Microsoft support should run xVM Server on Windows Server 2008 logo certified hardware.