Yesterday in London, Boston, and San Francisco, Sun executives held a series of press and analyst chalk talks to preview the company's upcoming virtualization server and manageability software. Sun xVM, which stands for the intersection of virtualization and management, will represent Sun's strategy for universal virtualization and management of business applications and data stretching across the entire IT infrastructure.

The end-to-end software for virtualizing and managing the datacenter will consist of Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM Ops Center.

Sun xVM Server is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor and is an open, cross-platform, high-efficiency, open-source hypervisor family of servers capable of hosting Windows, Linux, and Solaris OS guest instances. For the first time, Windows guests will be able to benefit from Sun technologies like predictive self-healing and ZFS that are built into the product.

Sun xVM Ops Center will be the management component--a complete, highly scalable, management environment for the provisioning of thousands of physical and virtual machines running across multi-vendor x64/86 and SPARC systems.

A Family of Technologies

"Sun xVM is a complete software solution for virtualization and management," says Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris marketing. "It's a family of technologies that will range from desktops and servers to storage, appliances, and networks. And it's the only solution that will cover the full technology stack, including hardware, hypervisor, virtual machines and host and guest operating systems."

Sun's virtualization strategy, products, and technologies comes at a time when networks – and network complexity – are growing by leaps and bounds, fueled by increasing amounts of content and spiraling numbers of users, devices, and services. In spite of this massive growth, networks still need to support more data and applications and at the same time provide more services.

Sun xVM points the way for customers to leverage Sun's design innovation and open-source technologies to improve utilization, simplify management, mask complexity, and increase business agility.

Combining Physical and Virtual Machines

With Sun xVM, the company is previewing a cross-platform virtualization and datacenter-on-demand management platform that for the first time unifies the virtual and physical layers and solves the problems associated with managing physical and virtual machines in a truly virtualized environment.

"We focused on the management issue," explains Tim Marsland, vice president, software CTO, and Sun fellow. "How do these technologies play together in a way that allows people to actually use them and benefit from them?"

Marsland points out that most virtualization-management tools focus on either the physical layer or the virtual layer, leaving it to the customer to figure out how to make them work. But with Sun xVM, the management stack is aware of both physical and virtual machines, enabling seamless management from a single console using a single syntax.

Sun xVM Roadmap

Sun plans to roll out the Sun xVM Ops Center later this year, followed by previews of the Sun xVM Server. When asked about the future of Sun xVM, Hamilton grinned and said, "Stay tuned." He pointed out that Sun has a number of different virtualization technologies, and more products could be announced in the future under the Sun xVM banner.

Learn more about Sun's solutions for virtualization.

You can read the original article from Robert Baty for Sun, here.