Sun xVM was a product line from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

that addressed virtualization technology on

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

platforms. One component was discontinued before the

Oracle acquisition of Sun The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. After the acquisition was completed, Oracle, only a software vendor prior to the merger, owned Sun's hardware product lines, such as SPARC Enterprise, ...

; the remaining two continue under Oracle branding.

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 Oracle VM VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and Innotek VirtualBox) is a type-2 hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox was originally created by Innotek GmbH, which was acquired by S ...

'', 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''.

Products

Sun xVM hypervisor

The ''Sun xVM hypervisor'' was a component of

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

based on work that was being done in the

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around th ...

Xen Xen (pronounced ) is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory an ...

community. 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

-based systems.

Sun xVM Server

Sun xVM Server was based on the xVM hypervisor project. Sun planned to support

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Linux Linux ( or ) 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 as a Linux distribution, which ...

, and

as guest

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s. Various features from Sun's

OS underlay the guest OS as part of the hypervisor environment, including Predictive Self Healing,

ZFS ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...

DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally 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 ...

, advanced network bandwidth management (from the OpenSolaris

Crossbow A crossbow is a ranged weapon using an elastic launching device consisting of a bow-like assembly called a ''prod'', mounted horizontally on a main frame called a ''tiller'', which is hand-held in a similar fashion to the stock of a long fi ...

project) as well as security enhancements. Instead of having its own disk image format, Sun xVM Server was intended to import/export

VMDK VMDK (short for Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox. Initially developed by VMware for its proprietary virtual applia ...

and VHD images to facilitate interoperation with

VMware ESX Server VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); ...

and Microsoft's

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release 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 Win ...

. In early May 2009, th
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. Sun VP Steve Wilson said that xVM hypervisor support would not be part of commercial Solaris.

References

External links

Sun xVM blog
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20071030165340/http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen/ Xen at OpenSolaris.orgbr>Understanding the Sun xVM Hypervisor Architecture

Sun XVM Hypervisor Overview
at BigAdmin {{DEFAULTSORT:Sun Xvm Sun Microsystems software Virtualization software