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PC Virtualization Provider Innotek Snapped Up by Sun
Published: February 20, 2008
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sun Microsystems has been working to organize a coherent virtualization strategy on its server products, which span the Sparc and X64 architectures and which include a mix of LDom virtual machine partitions (on Sparc T1 and T2 chips), Solaris container virtual private servers and dynamic hardware partitions UltraSparc and Sparc64 processors, and Xen virtual machine partitions and Solaris containers on X64 iron.
Now, with the acquisition last week of Innotek, a maker of a desktop virtualization product called VirtualBox, Sun is taking its xVM strategy to the desktop, and quite possibly, is considering another virtualization option on servers, too.
You probably have not heard of Innotek, which is a German software company that launched a virtual machine hypervisor for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X desktops and laptops in January 2007. Innotek was founded to create virtualization products for IBM's and Microsoft's jointly developed OS/2 operating system, but last year the company moved out into the desktop virtualization space to take on VMware, Parallels, and others in the virtualizing of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X environments on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 machinery.
VirtualBox allows desktop and laptop machines to support guest operating systems, including Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista; DOS, Windows 3.X, and OS/2; various Linuxes using the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels; and OpenBSD Unix and Solaris 10. There are a bunch of platforms that sorta work as guests, too, and a bunch that do not, such as the latest three releases of Ubuntu Linux, NetWare 6.5, Red Hat 7, PC-BSD 1.3, and BeOS 5.
Since launching a little more than a year ago, the open source VirtualBox program has been downloaded more than 4 million times, and only this week Innotek announced that it had delivered support for VirtualBox running atop the OpenSolaris development distribution of Sun's Solaris Unix. A day later, on Tuesday, Sun announced that it had acquired Innotek for an undisclosed sum. Sun expects to close the deal in its fiscal third quarter, which ends in March.
You may recall Innotek from an announcement that Novell made in October, when it said that it would distribute the VirtualBox 1.5 hypervisor as part of its openSUSE 10.3 development distribution.
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