Sun Makes Virtualization Push, Plans Closer Xen Ties

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Making a big push into server virtualization, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday introduced new virtualization technology based on its Solaris 10 operating system.

The technology make better use of Solaris 10's virtual partitions, which Sun calls Solaris Containers. The Santa Clara, Calif., company also unveiled new servers designed to leverage the new virtualization technology. Sun, too, outlined plans to better support Linux and Xen virtualization with Solaris.

Solution providers welcomed the virtualization move as a way to improve Sun's competitiveness with IBM.

Kip Lindberg, vice president of enterprise sales at Ncell Systems, a Minnetonka, Minn.-based solution provider that works with Sun and IBM, said IBM has held the technology lead in servers for two to three years thanks to the virtualization capabilities of its Series p server line.

Because traditional server technology typically has a single server being used to run a single application, customers on the average use only part their server capacity. Virtualization offers a huge total cost of ownership advantage in that multiple applications can be run on one server.

For instance, Lindberg said, customers using virtualization can have an application running in production mode in one partition and the same application running in another partition for test purposes. A patch can be tested and, if found suitable, rolled into the production partition.

Solaris Containers, however, offer that level of flexibility, according to Lindberg. For example, he said, if a patch is applied to one Container, that patch is automatically applied to all of them.

"With the new Solaris 10 technology, Sun is definitely catching up with IBM," Lindberg said. "This is critical. We're seeing a big move to using multiple partitions on one server. IBM uses that as a sales point against Sun."

Sun on Tuesday unveiled five new virtualization offerings. The first is LDoms, short for Logical Domains, which is virtualization technology for the Sun Fire UltraSPARC T1 CoolThread servers. LDoms allow customers to run multiple operating systems within Solaris 10 Solaris Containers, said Pradeep Parmar, x64 product line business driver at Sun.

Using LDoms, customers can run up to 32 virtualized environments per Niagara processor, Parmar said.

Larry Wake, group manager for Solaris, said support for LDoms will come in the next update of Solaris 10, expected "November 35," which he called the gray area between late November and early December.

Sun this week also started shipping upgraded Galaxy Sun Fire X4000 servers based on AMD Opteron processors, Parmar said. The products include the Sun Fire X4600 M2, a 16-way, 4U server that can be used to consolidate applications that have been running on more than 50 legacy x86 servers. It runs on four or eight AMD Opteron 8000 dual-core processors. Also released were the Sun Fire X4200 M2 and X4100 M2, which have up to two Opteron 2000 processors. Using VMware, up to 22 servers can be virtualized on a single X4200 M2 or X4100 M2.

All of the new Sun Fire servers run applications on Solaris 10, Red Hat, SUSE Linux, Windows Server and VMware, and the servers can be used with VMware, Xen and Microsoft Virtual Server virtualization technology.

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