Just recently it was announced that Sun would be investing over a Billion dollars in mysql, as reported in x86Virtualization post: “Brighter Days for MySQL, The Sun Rises Over MySQL“, now less a few weeks later Sun has struck again, and is purchasing Innotek the makers of the very popular Virtualization product: “Virtualbox“.
x86Virtualization reported on Virtualbox back on April 20, 2007 with the post “VirtualBox, Everything You Need To Know“, I’m happy to announce, under recent testing the mouse issue has been resolved in Windows 3.11 (yeah not a big deal for most people, but I like 3.11 for testing virtualization products.)
If you are curious about what else Sun has purchased in the past check out their complete (but not up to date) history: Sun Facts - Acquisitions History
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday it would buy Swedish open-source developer MySQL AB for about $1 billion to expand into the $15 billion database market, and that preliminary quarterly results showed no impact from the slowing U.S. economy.
“But the biggest news of the day is… we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you’re an industry insider, you’ll know what that means - we’re acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database.” (source)
“Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.” (source)
Hyper-V requires an x64-based processor, hardware-assisted virtualization, and hardware data execution protection. The following hardware has been tested extensively and is suitable for use with Hyper-V. Some of the hardware requires an update to the BIOS, as noted. This list does not imply support of the platform for Hyper-V by the respective vendors.
New and Improved Virtualization Videos Section Powered by Youtube.com
Now with better organization, more videos and details descriptions of each video.
After having the video section in disarray since the beginning it was time to look into the page and clean it up and add more content. The previous page had fewer then 10 videos on it, now with well organized categories we are able to display dozens of videos without confusion.
Check out the videos in the following categories, more to be added soon:
x86 virtualization has always been a fan of the rarely mentioned Sun “Project Blackbox”. The idea of having a fully virtualized portable datacenter is awesome. Being able to pull up to a work site, plug in electrical, cooling and data and it is up and running.
There are many posts in the past, and now it is time for a new one, with Video.
Sun does a full 6.7 earthquake on a running blackbox. The box survives, with minimal damage. A few loose screws and some dented fixtures. Not bad for an initial test.
For anyone not familiar with the project here is a video overview:
I have started to look into the Virtualization Industry and think that getting a certification may allow me to get a jump start. I have created a Ven Diagram, to illustrate the different certifications as I come across them and decide how they fall into 3 different categories. These catagories are: Operating System, Networking, and Virtualization. The certifications I’m considering are the following:
Here is the diagram, arranging the exams into the three circles.
This is a visual representation of the exams and certification. The reality is that most exams require a solid understanding of computers and networking as a whole, with focus as the core of the exam. They are often debated and usually overpriced but I think with a focus of Virtualization there is a need for this some proof of experience.
This is been a huge Public Relations time for Intel, 3 huge companies have announced switching to and or back to Intel CPU’s over the past year.
So, the question is why. The magic number is 4. Both AMD and Intel are pushing their quad core cpu’s. AMD’s Barcelona is consider a true quad core cpu. Intel’s quad core is argued that it isn’t a true quad core, because it is technically 2 duo cores on the same die.
Lets look at the count:
Companies switching to or including AMD:
1. Dell, site:www.dell.com
Companies switching to or including Intel:
1. Google, site:www.google.com
2. Apple, site:www.apple.com
3. Sun Microsystems, site:www.sun.com
What does this mean? AMD has made announcements about their chips being faster for virtualization. According to ZDNet: (Read Complete Article)
Barcelona has specific features to deal with some of those performance issues, Ben Sander, a principal member of AMD’s technical design staff, said in a speech on Tuesday at the Fall Processor Forum.
AMD and Intel are vying for share in the x86 server market. Intel’s Xeon chips were the first to provide some hardware support of virtualisation, but AMD’s newest processors now also support it.
SPEC has welcomed SWSoft into the virtual server performance rating group. SPEC is a organization for benchmark standards in high performance computing. Other players in the group include: AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VMware (listed in alphabetical order). All of these companies have taken a slightly different approach to virtualization and have huge potential market growth as virtualization expands in the future.
My Take:
SWSoft, using their variation of paravirtualization, will probably fight for server tests to show off their best features. Which isn’t wrong, all the companies are going to push their best features. But what should the virtualization standard be based on? There are a few different flavors of virtualization, mainly paravirtualization, operating system virtualization, and native virtualization. I feel that there will be two standards, full native virtualization with off the shelf software, and then full optimized os virtualization.
Looking back over the years of reading computer reviews of standard desktop computers, back to the day of the 486 and low end Pentium’s, I remember how I used to test a new computer, Solitaire. It was free, fun, and included with every version of windows. When you win at Solitaire the cards drop, the speed the cards drop is directly related to the speed of the computer. It runs faster on a Pentium then it did on my first 386. I have tried it inside of Virtual Server 2k5, with Windows 3.11 and i fill post my findings later on that. Full Native should be the first rating, how fast can 1 box run X number of VM’s with full server installs running standard stress tests. Scores could be reported as 5×800 score or 10×569 or 20×340 etc.
A simple test sequence of:
Local Hard Drive Access (file copy test to VHD)
Local Memory Access (Intensive Memory read write test)
Lan Access (file transfer testing across a physical network)
Local File Transfer (file transfer between virtual machines)
CPU Power Tests ( transaction processing, I always enjoy Towers of Hanoi to max out my CPU’s)
Now the advantage of running this or similar test sequence on a host system, each virtual machine will be at the same sequance in the series at the same time. So any automatic optimization to move resources between virtual machines will not pay off. When one machine needs the ram, they will all need it, when one needs the bandwidth, they all need the bandwidth.
Intel® Xeon® processors power Sun’s hardware and software solutions
Sun will deliver a comprehensive set of Intel® technology-based systems, with plans for single, dual, and multi-processor based enterprise servers, telecommunication servers and workstations supporting Solaris*, Windows* and Linux. Sun intends to announce the first Intel Xeon processor-based systems in the first half of 2007. With the Intel and Sun Microsystems strategic alliance, IT customers can deploy the Solaris OS - an enterprise class, mission critical UNIX Operating System - on Intel Xeon processor-based servers. The scope spans Solaris, Java, Intel Xeon processors and other Intel enterprise-class technologies over a multi-year period collaboration agreement.
Solaris* optimized for Intel® Xeon® processors
In the coming months, Sun and Intel will combine the breakthrough performance, scalability, and reliability of the Quad-Core and Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processor-based server systems with the Sun Solaris OS. The Solaris platform is supported by over 2000 ISVs on hundreds of platforms that deliver the scaling, functionality and security capable of handling explosive network growth. This combination will provide IT with enhanced OS performance and reliability.
Sun will launch the first of these systems for dual and quad-core processor-based servers in the first half of 2007. In addition, Sun and Intel will extend the collaboration to greater than four Intel Xeon processor scale-up systems and optimize those systems for the mission critical, enterprise class Solaris OS.
This is a great news. Partnerships will help both parties. The next 3 years is going to be some huge shake ups in the server marketplace. With virtualization allowing for software and hardware to mix easily, in a true open market, the best will survive. When a company can buy a server from sun, cpu’s from Intel, OS from Red hat, and load on VMware virtualization software, then load Virtual Machines from any provider, linux, windows, bsd, maybe even Apple.
On a side note:
Wondering about what inside information means, read this sentence and wonder (read complete article):
Sun Microsystems has had one partner in the low-end server market–Advanced Micro Devices. That appears to be changing, according to a research note from Bank of America Securities analyst Sumit Dhanda.
In the report published Friday, Dhanda writes:
“Our checks indicate that Sun Microsystems will begin using Intel’s Xeon processors (previously dubbed Woodcrest) for its fast growing x86/x64 server product lines. Having used exclusively AMD’s Opteron solution for the past 2-3 years due to its performance advantage vs. older Intel’s Xeon products, we believe that Sun has put the wheels in motion to rekindle the relationship it once had with Intel on x86 servers.”
Notice the bold word: Our Checks, now the guy works at Bank of America, sounds like he is watching who Sun is paying. This sounds like a scary idea, If I was a massive corporation, I wouldn’t want some stock broker researching my company based on where the money flow goes before announced in corporate reports. This isn’t a big deal for this deal, but with a company like Apple, who is very secretive about their wheeling and dealings, imagine if the checks they sent to Intel got announced well before Apple even had a working prototype. This is a scary idea for stock traders who are associated with BOA.
The cat is out of the bag, and Apple Inc, will probably not buy parallels. Since it is owned by SWSoft. This is a major announcement for the industry because now we have an idea where each of these companies will focus the effort. This announcement creates a virtualization powerhouse. Possibly the first company to make Sun, Apple, and Microsoft shake in their shoes. Think, this company has the most complete range of Virtualization technology, and with that power they can support or deny virtualization host and vms for any major operating system and the industry will follow. If Parallelsoft chooses to not support Vista, or OSX or Red Hat, then the industry will probably be ok with that, and those companies will loose huge licensing contracts due to lack of virtual environment support.
Here is a quote from the orignal announcement. (read complete article in fortune)
This announcement makes a lot of sense for us, and for you. With the combined strengths of SWsoft and Parallels out in the open, we’ve got your virtualization needs covered top to bottom. In short, you can now hit us as a “one-stop shop” to outfit your organization with industry-leading hardware and OS-level virtualization that fits your server and desktop setup, regardless of what combination of Mac, Windows and Linux you may be running.
What will the future bring? SWsoft has the potential to develop a universal host operating system where you can run Mac OS, Windows or linux on any x86 hardware. I would love to see a real slick lean linux Virtualization friendly kernel, that boots, and then loads your choice of virtual hard drives. The licensing of virtual environments is where Microsoft will make their money, Apple will make it from the hardware, same with Sun and Intel, SW ParallelSoft will make it from the host virtualization software. This could be a great matchup and I hope to see many new and amazing ground breaking applications in the future.
There is 1 major issue, the current VHD used by Plesk/ Virtuozzo and Parallels can’t be interchanged. Parallels uses Hardware virtualization, where as Virtuozzo uses paravirtualization.
