After Sun Microsystems announced several virtualization packages including Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX Server, we asked the company why it did not launch packages including its own hypervisor, xVM Server. After all, Sun Formally launched xVM Server in September and the software should have been available at the end of 2008.
last Week, Sun Microsystems finally provided us with a set of candid answers about its xVM Server roadmap. It appears that Sun’s virtualization platform is still in development and hasn’t been released yet. xVM Server Early Access 3, the fourth and latest beta was released on November 12th 2008. According to Sun, this version has been downloaded and used by almost 900 individual customers.
Sun is finalizing an Early Access 4 release that will be available by the end of january 2009. The release should hopefully solve a number of bugs and installation issues that early beta-testers have been complaining about. According to Sun, customers should expect another Release Candidate before the final product release now expected for Q2 2009 (around JavaOne ?).
xVM Server is Sun’s answer to Microsoft’s Hyper-V, VMWare’s ESX Server and Citrix’s XenServer. It is an implementation of the Xen Hypervisor on top of the Solaris Kernel. The software requires servers equipped with processors supporting AMD or Intel’s virtualization technologies (AMD-V and VT). It utilizes the ZFS file system for local storage and supports both CIFS and NFS for remote storage of libraries. Sun is expected to add support for FC-SAN and iSCSI in a subsequent release scheduled for the second half of 2009.
More on this subject :
Sun publishes xVM Server Early Access on the web
Sun delays xVM Server till November
Sun to launch xVM Server on September 10
xVM Server on Sun’s Project Kenai
Références externes
- reference #1
Sun publishes xVM Server Early Access on the web - reference #2
http://kenai.com/projects/xvmserver - reference #3
http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvmserver/index.xml
