Sun Inks OEM Deal with VMware for Virtualization

Published: March 6, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization juggernaut VMware held its VMware Europe conference in Cannes, France, last week, and among the many announcements that the company made was one relating to Sun Microsystems and its X86 and X64 variant of the Solaris operating system.

As you are well aware, Solaris is the only Unix variant among the big three that runs on X86 and X64 iron; you can't get IBM's AIX or Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix variants on Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and the few other X86 clones out there in the market. VMware's ESX Server hypervisor only runs on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 processors, but there is talk about possibly supporting the Itanium architecture at some point. While Sun might have big aspirations in the server and workstation virtualization area, with its xVM product family, which the company started talking about late last year, VMware is still the volume leader and the industry standard and will remain so in enterprises until the Xen hypervisor now controlled by Citrix Systems gets more traction in the data center. (And it will.) But in the meantime, Sun has to make VMware's ESX Server hypervisor part of the xVM story.

xVM, you will remember, is a product that Sun will roll out gradually this year, and includes LDom logical domain partitioning on Sparc T1 and T2 multicore servers as well as on future "Rock" UltraSparc RK processors and a variant of the Xen hypervisor that is currently part of the OpenSolaris development version of Solaris, which is working on the next-generation "Nevada" update to Solaris 10. Corporations that want rock-solid software in their data centers cannot deploy OpenSolaris--or rather, they can, but it is not smart--and Sun is not yet ready with the commercial variant of Xen that will come from the project and that will be part of the independently sold xVM software later this year. (Sun hopes to get xVM Server 1.0 and the next iteration of the management tool for it, xVM Ops Center 2.0, out the door in the second quarter.)

That means Sun is left peddling VMware's products, which have supported Solaris on X86 and X64 iron for a little more than a year. Last week at the VMware Europe event, Sun and VMware said that Sun is now an authorized reseller of the VMware ESX Server hypervisor and the related VMware Infrastructure 3 stack of related management and high availability tools. Sun is also an authorized reseller of support for the VMware products, and that means Sun shops can virtualize their Solaris, Linux, and Windows instances all on Sun "Galaxy" server iron and buy the whole shebang, including support, from Sun. The company also said that it is bundling a 60-day free trial of the VMware products on selected machines in its Galaxy line.

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