Sun xVM

Last updated
Sun xVM
Developer(s) Sun Microsystems
Operating system Solaris
Type Virtual machine monitor

Sun xVM was a product line from Sun Microsystems that addressed virtualization technology on x86 platforms. [1] One component was discontinued before the Oracle acquisition of Sun; the remaining two continue under Oracle branding.

Sun Microsystems Defunct American computer hardware and software company

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

x86 type of instruction set architecture

x86 is a family of instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486 processors.

Contents

History

Sun originally announced the xVM product family in October 2007. The brand at one time encompassed Sun xVM Server, Sun xVM Ops Center , and Sun xVM VirtualBox , [2] but the latter two products abandoned the "xVM" branding in late 2009, and are now called Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center and Oracle VM VirtualBox. [1]

Products

Sun xVM hypervisor

The Sun xVM hypervisor was a component of Solaris based on work that was being done in the OpenSolaris Xen community. [1] It was integrated into the OpenSolaris source base, and was available in OpenSolaris OS distributions, providing the standard features of a Xen-based hypervisor on x86-based systems. [3]

Solaris (operating system) Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems

Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. In 2010, after the Sun acquisition by Oracle, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.

OpenSolaris Open source operating system from Sun Microsystems based on Solaris

OpenSolaris is a discontinued, open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the core software, and replaced the OpenSolaris distribution model with the proprietary Solaris Express.

Xen Hypervisor

Xen Project is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was developed by the University of Cambridge and is now being developed by the Linux Foundation with support from Intel.

Sun xVM Server

Sun xVM Server was based on the xVM hypervisor project. Sun planned to support Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris as guest operating systems.

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Microsoft Windows families include Windows NT and Windows IoT; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Server or Windows Embedded Compact. Defunct Microsoft Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.

Linux Family of free and open-source software operating systems based on the Linux kernel

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution.

Operating system Software that manages computer hardware resources

An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.

Various features from Sun's OpenSolaris OS underlay the guest OS as part of the hypervisor environment, including Predictive Self Healing, ZFS, DTrace, advanced network bandwidth management (from the OpenSolaris Crossbow project) as well as security enhancements. [4]

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, efficient data compression, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z, native NFSv4 ACLs, and can be very precisely configured. The two main implementations, by Oracle and by the OpenZFS project, are extremely similar, making ZFS widely available within Unix-like systems.

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in OpenSolaris and its descendant illumos, and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.

Instead of having its own disk image format, Sun xVM Server was intended to import/export VMDK and VHD images to facilitate interoperation with VMware ESX Server and Microsoft's Hyper-V. [5]

VMDK is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.

VHD is a file format which represents a virtual hard disk drive (HDD). It may contain what is found on a physical HDD, such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain files and folders. It is typically used as the hard disk of a virtual machine.

Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT. A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks.

In early May 2009, the Xen community at OpenSolaris.org announced that separate xVM Server development would be discontinued as such, with the Xen/OpenSolaris project filling its role and the team that previously worked on xVM Server refocusing on Ops Center as the principal means of managing multiple hypervisors on multiple physical machines from a single point of control.[ citation needed ] Sun VP Steve Wilson said that xVM hypervisor support would not be part of commercial Solaris. [6]

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Sun's Announcement on Sun xVM hypervisor". Sun Microsystems. October 5, 2007. Archived from the original on 2012-09-08.
  2. ↑ "Sun Previews its Approach to Server Virtualization & Management". Sun Microsystems. October 5, 2007. Archived from the original on 2010-01-04. Retrieved 2007-12-09.
  3. ↑ "OpenSolaris Xen Community". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on 2013-03-15. Retrieved 2010-01-12.
  4. ↑ "VirtualBox and Sun xVM : Veritable Vijay". Archived from the original on 2015-11-16. Retrieved 2015-11-12.
  5. ↑ Sun xVM Virtualization Portfolio: Virtualizing the Dynamic Datacenter [ dead link ]
  6. ↑ Alex Barrett (May 15, 2009). "RIP Sun xVM Server, Virtual Iron; long live Oracle VM?". TechTarget. Retrieved 2015-11-12.
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