Sun Microsystems this week matured a bit as an x86 server vendor by kicking off a broad partnership with VMware that will see the companies team on engineering and sales efforts. Of most immediate help to customers is the support of VMware’s highest-end partitioning product – ESX Server – with Sun’s line of Opteron-based hardware.
This is certainly good news. I haven’t been able to get the latest version of openSolaris (version 11, Nevada) to boot off of VMWare.
Why didn’t they use Xen? It’s much faster (near native speed most times) than the (slow) VMware products.
They are working on it:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm?anchor=hello_world_from_solari…
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/chrisra?anchor=xen_and_the_art_of
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm?anchor=the_xen_summit
Whilst I support the Xen idea, I’d hardly call VMWare slow, in my experience of Workstation I’d say v5 is near native speed now too – easily 90%.
Like WINE, it is not really an emulator (except for the hardware such as NIC/disk).
Cool…
But i see this as more like VMware trying to make sure they dont loose any market share to Xen and the other virtualization layers. It plays right into all the other PR i’ve been seeing on VMware trying to justify its price. The have a race to compete in.. Thats all this shows. It could have been apple for all its worth.
Sun is allowing Solaris on a lot of platforms that weren’t possible in the 90s. There’s Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86, of course, but there’s also Xen and VMWare support in the works along with Containers for varying levels of virtualization. This will give people a ton of flexibility in how they use Solaris.
It appears Sun is really pushing for adoption among developers (where things like VMWare are essential) and general users (where things like VMWare can allow trying a product without buying or re-configuring disks or whole computers).
Hopefully they will add support for Solaris as the host system. I like vmware, but can’t use it at work. I know my boss would buy a license for our work if we could run it on Solaris workstations.
VMWare supports OpenSource-projects by giving them licenses cost-free:
http://www.winehq.com/?issue=279#VMWare%20Licenses
Thats nice. 🙂