Sun xVM was a product line from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

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 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

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, a ...

; 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'', 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 is the Latin word for sun. It 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 ** ''Sol ...

based on work that was being done in the

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system for SPARC and x86 based systems, created by Sun Microsystems and based on Solaris. Its development began in the mid 2000s and ended in 2010. OpenSolaris was developed as ...

Xen 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 Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, and

as guest

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

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 manager, volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris (operating system), Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, includin ...

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 un ...

, advanced network bandwidth management (from the OpenSolaris

Crossbow A crossbow is a ranged weapon using an Elasticity (physics), elastic launching device consisting of a Bow and arrow, bow-like assembly called a ''prod'', mounted horizontally on a main frame called a ''tiller'', which is hand-held in a similar f ...

project) as well as security enhancements. Instead of having its own disk image format, Sun xVM Server was intended to import/export VMDK and VHD images to facilitate interoperation with VMware ESX Server and Microsoft's

Hyper-V Hyper-V is a native hypervisor developed by Microsoft; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. It is included in Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows (since Windows 8) as an optional feature to be manually enabled. A ...

. 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 2007 software