Virtualization Daily

Sun is doing a lot of interesting work with Solaris to provide options for partitioning servers. This article on ZDnet provides a brief overview of a number of new technologies they’ll be introducing over the next year or so.

First up is a new virtualization mechanism for UltraSparc T1 based systems.

The technology, called logical domains, or LDoms, is the latest move in a race to make servers as flexible and efficient as possible through a general technology called virtualization. Customers using the technology will require the 11/06 update to Solaris 10, due in November, and either new hardware due in January or a firmware update to existing Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, said Pradeep Parmar, product manager of business strategy for Sun’s server group.

For the Opteron based systems they’re planning to add a Xen based hypervisor into Solaris X86.

Sun also is working on building equivalent technology for its x86 servers, which use Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron processor. There, Sun will use the Xen virtualization software, due to arrive in a Solaris update scheduled to show up in the first half of 2007, said Larry Wake, group manager for Solaris marketing.

Finally, they’re looking to update their existing Solaris containers with new technology that will allow running Linux software within a container.

And in the update to Solaris due in the first half of 2007, Sun also plans to release its Brand Z technology, which lets Solaris run Linux software in a Solaris container. The technology originally was called Janus and was scheduled to arrive in 2005, but customers kicked it back so Sun could build in the containers support.

That last feature sounds like they’re also going to generally enable running linux binaries under Solaris.

I used to be a big fan of Sun and Solaris, but my interest had waned over the last few years. Now however, Sun is doing a lot interesting things. I think their X86 servers have maybe the best price/performance ratio on the market right now and we just bought a couple Sun X2200 M2 servers because of that. I’m also getting more and more interested in some of the new technologies being added to Solaris. Those mentioned here are interesting as is ZFS. We’re running Linux on our X2200s, but ZFS is compelling enough that I could definitely see us putting a Solaris VM up for our storage systems.