Sun expanding its virtualization portfolio with xVM Server

If you are at VMworld this week, make sure you check out Sun Microsystems’ booth. Yes, I said Sun. The company is going to be showcasing its complete virtualization portfolio from the desktop to the datacenter.

The company recently made an announcement around the availability of its Sun xVM Server software and its Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0 management product — both key components in expanding out the company’s comprehensive virtualization strategy.

The company first started talking about its Xen-based hypervisor technology last year, and now they’re making good on it, joining the likes of Citrix, Oracle, and Virtual Iron in the Xen arena.

Unlike other Xen-based platforms, Sun has chosen to follow the VMware disk format (VMDK) for its Sun xVM product rather than the Microsoft virtual hard disk format (VHD). According to Steve Wilson, Sun’s vice president of xVM, this will allow Sun xVM to interoperate with VMware and allow users to easily move workloads between VMware ESX and Sun xVM Server software. It also opens up the ability to leverage an extensive VMware Virtual Appliance library.

Wilson also said that the product was going to be manageable via a Web console, a full set of management APIs, and by using the company’s latest management software platform that it will make available with the hypervisor: xVM Ops Center 2.0.

The Sun xVM platform targets the mainstream commodity x86/SPARC operating systems — Windows, Linux and Solaris –- and leverages a variety of enterprise-class technologies already powering Fortune 500 companies.

With Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0, the company is providing integrated management of both virtual and physical environments. Adding the ability to manage the physical and the virtual from the same management interface is becoming more and more important to many end-users. Sun xVM Ops Center’s lifecycle management simplifies and accelerates the discovery, provisioning, updating, monitoring, and reporting of physical and virtual assets, as well as compliance reporting via one unified browser-based interface.

Sun is aggressively going after the virtualization market and is creating its own pricing mechanism to go along with it. They announced standalone subscriptions for Sun xVM Server software and Sun xVM Ops Center, as well as additional options that offer the combined benefits of the two products, allowing customers to virtualize and manage at Internet scale.

According to Sun, commercial subscriptions are priced annually in four-socket increments and provide premium 24×7 support; access to the latest, up-to-the-minute patches and updates; as well as installation and training. Available pricing options include the following:

• Sun xVM Server software: Priced at $500/year per physical server.
• Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription: Priced at $2000 per physical server per year, the enterprise subscription is designed to simplify the management of large-scale virtualized environments and includes advanced features, such as management of live migration and of multiple network storage libraries.
• Sun xVM Infrastructure Datacenter Subscription: Priced at $3000 per server per year, this option includes all the features in the Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription in addition to physical server monitoring, management, and advanced software lifecycle management capabilities.
• Sun xVM Ops Center: Available from $100 per managed server up to $350 a year, depending on customer-selected features, along with a required $10,000 Satellite Server annual subscription for Sun xVM Ops Center.

In addition to the announcement around its hypervisor and management platform, Sun also launched xVMserver.org, its new open-source community where developers can download the first source code bundle for Sun xVM Server software and contribute to the direction and development of the product.