Sun delays xVM Server till November

Par Christophe Bardy le 14/09/2008 (lu 1945 fois, 1 fois aujourd'hui)

Retrouvez la version française de cet article sur LeMagIT.fr

Sun’s virtualization software for servers has once again been delayed. XVM Server and its management umbrella, xVM Ops Center are now expected in November. In its first beta customer deployments, Sun is experiencing performance problems and bugs that it want to iron out before launching the product.

What seems to be a sound engineering decision has not stopped the company to launch xVM with much fanfare on September 10. Let’s sum up : Sun’s software marketing Honcho, Rich Green, in a curious balancing act has officially launched a product that won’t be available for at least two months, so great was the temptation to announce the product a few days before the opening of VMworld, the annual mass of virtualization professionalsin Las Vegas.

Free and open source software, paying suppport for enterprises.

Although it’s still impossible to “touch” the product, this “virtual launch” tells us more about Sun’s pricing and distribution model. According to Steve Wilson, Sun’s virtualization VP, whole sections of XVM Server, among them the admin GUI will be available under GPL3, while other parts are likely to remain under Sun CDDL (Most Solaris components are published under CDDL).

Whatever the license, the good news is that XVM Server will be free and open source. Support is an other story. Sun will charge $500 to support xVM Server on a quad-socket server, regardless of the number of cores, which is a pretty aggressive price. Annual support for XVM Infrastructure Enterprise (which includes the hypervisor and xVM Ops Center for managing virtual environments) will cost $ 2000 per server, while support for XVM Infrastructure Datacenter (Xvm Ops Center for managing virtual machines and physical servers) will cost $ 3000.

We expect to have more information on the subject on Tuesday after our meeting with Steve Wilson at VMworld. So stay tuned…