Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Every major IT provider has “a virtualization strategy” these days. It’s both mandatory and desirable. Virtualized, on-demand IT is what customers want. Indeed, I don’t think there’s ever been as rapid or aggressive a technology uptake as with virtualization. The only real contender might be the World Wide Web, but that was as much about individuals and consumers as back-end infrastructures. Broad, deep rewrites of how (historically conservative) datacenters are planned, organized, and operated? It’s just unheard-of. Yet the virtualization wave has overtaken almost all of IT in a few short years.

In the high-volume x86 world, VMware, Microsoft, and (post acquisition of XenSource) Citrix come first to mind as platform providers. Major OEMs such as IBM and HP have oodles of home-grown virtualization technology, but much of it focused on their larger systems architectures. They rely on VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and so on for x86 virtualization at about the same level that Dell (a company without any appreciable in-house virtualization IP) does.

“Odd man out” in this picture is Sun Microsystems. Like HP and IBM, it has its own home-baked goodies such as Dynamic System Domains, LDOMs, and Solaris containers/zones. But it also aspires to put its xVM suite on the list of first-tier, general virtualization suites. Thus xVM is not Solaris- or SPARC-focused; it runs Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris, or whatever you want to run. xVM Server (a Xen-based hypervisor platform) and xVM Ops Center (a virtual/physical management console) are now in early availability. (Sun also has a separate but related raft of “virtual desktop” tools, as do HP, IBM, and the virtualization ISVs.)

Even odder, Sun has its own workstation virtualization product. It acquired innotek earlier this year, yielding the Sun xVM VirtualBox. Unlike xVM Server, VMware ESX, and similar “bare metal” hypervisors, VirtualBox runs atop some other operating systems—Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris. The use case is identical to VMware Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC: Software developers, IT administrators, and other power users can run multiple operating system images on their local development systems (often for test and evaluation purposes).

Most x86 OEMs are satisfied to leave essentially all the software that runs on clients to horizontal ISVs like Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and VMware. But Sun has a broader purview; it blends the server-side view with a strong developer focus. If you believe that virtualization is soon to be ubiquitous—just the way most systems are configured and most applications run—having a workstation virtualizer makes sense. Think of it as an IDE for virtual machines—the thing that lets developers and other pros tinker before going live. If you further believe that the future will be filled with computing Clouds (whether housed within corporate firewalls or located at fee-per-use service providers)—and that many of those infrastructures will run VMs as their atomic units—then the rationale for having a virtualization IDE and launching pad is even stronger.

VirtualBox 1.x was already a nice little tool—simple, reasonably functional, mostly Open Source, and free. Nice touches include easy file sharing with the host OS, I especially like that it has built-in remote desktop support, via RDP. Version 2.0 makes some nice improvements, including support for 64-bit OSs, better performance and networking, and better integration with Mac OS X and Solaris. In quick hands-on testing, it took me a few minutes to download and install, then about 9 minutes to configure and fire up an OpenSolaris release (200805) from the ISO image. An Ubuntu Linux image (8.04 LTS Desktop Edition) took about the same.

Even upgraded, VirtualBox 2.0 is not going to rival VMware Workstation 6 for functionality. Nor is it (yet) integrated into QA management systems or virtual appliance catalogs (advantage VMware Lab Manager and VAM respectively). On the other hand, VirtualBox runs multiple OSs and VMs nicely, is appealingly simple, and the price is definitely right. For IT pros, it’s a nice addition to the toolbox; for Sun, it’s an effective on-ramp to the broader xVM suite as it unfolds.