What does the future hold for Sun xVM Server?

Many have been waiting for the release of yet another free and open source hypervisor technology to come to market. Sun Microsystems has been working toward bringing xVM Server to market, but with the recent acquisition news by Oracle, questions around the future of Sun xVM Server quickly surfaced.

Over at Sun’s corporate blog, Steve Wilson, VP of xVM and connected systems at Sun, said things have been very busy since the company announced the xVM portfolio last September during VMworld 2008. The company has released numerous versions of VirtualBox, and it updated its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution to a 3.0 release. But people have been asking about the server virtualization platform, xVM Server. What’s happening with it, and where does it stand?

Wilson writes that in October the company amped up its Early Access program with xVM Server EA2, then opened it up further with EA3 adding even more user testing to the mix. However, with that product feedback, the company learned that some product issues needed to be addressed, causing Sun to rethink part of its strategy. Issues such as:

• Participants requested a “hands off” installation process that could be used to deploy the hypervisor to many servers quickly. The single-system install was “klunky” and not suited to an enterprise datacenter.
• Participants requested migration capability for guests between hypervisor instances. Multihost management was not an add-on option — it was a requirement for serious use.
• Participants requested more access to the underlying OpenSolaris instance to allow for more customization. While people appreciated having a wrapper “appliance” around the core Solaris instance, it was a problem having a totally custom OpenSolaris distro for xVM Server.
• Customers are now for more interested in larger “cloud” type deployments than smaller consolidation projects

It sounds as if the product will yet again be delayed in order to solve these issues. With companies like VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix racing to get hypervisor product out the door, Sun doesn’t seem to be too worried about these product delays. How long is the delay? No clear timeline has been established yet, just the conclusion that a general purpose, multinode solution is required. And so now Sun is refocusing its efforts around use-cases and building Ops Center as the focal point of the line. And Wilson also said that xVM Server and OpenSolaris will converge so the same codebase is used for both.

Wilson did say that Sun released an updated version of xVM Ops Center 2.1, which includes:

• Power Management and new power-related reports
• Hands-off provisioning of the xVM Server hypervisor onto bare metal servers
• Creation of VM guests and provisioning of images to those guests
• Guest snapshots and backups
• Support for VMware VMDK disk format and import capabilities of VMware Virtual Appliances
• Live migration of guests from one host to another
• Virtual Pool constructs for policy automation across hosts based on load and automatic failover recovery

And even though the company has stated that xVM Server has to be redesigned in order to meet customer feedback, the company is still bundling xVM Server beta with Ops Center 2.1 — a bit confusing, I suppose. How different will the redesigned version of xVM get from this included beta?

Even with this fairly informative update, do we really know where Sun stands with xVM Server? And what about the elephant in the room: What happens to xVM Server after the Oracle acquisition? Without a clear understanding of where things are headed with the acquisition, I don’t know if too many people are going to place their bets on this hypervisor technology with everything else that is happening in this market. Stay tuned.

Were you part of the EA2 or EA3 group testing xVM? How was it?