VM /ETC

A lot more will be known about the open source, bare metal installed xVM Server after Sun’s scheduled event today, but for now some quick pre release screen shots and general information is available at xvmserver.org. xVM Server promises to be a free virtualization platform alternative based on Xen and Solaris technologies that can be managed via a web interface. Judging by the growing popularity of Sun’s desktop virtualization product, xVM Virtualbox, the availability of xVM Server should be an exciting new option for administrators looking to consolidate physical data centers today.

Taken directly from the xvmserver.org site, the following is some quick information:

xVM Server is a data-center grade, bare-metal virtualization engine that provides hypervisor life-cycle management for servers. It is designed to be a cross-platform, high efficiency, open source hypervisor capable of hosting multiple guest operating systems (including Solaris, Windows, and Linux), with advanced CPU and memory handling capabilities. The server is being built using technology from the Xen open source project as well as Sun™ Logical Domains (LDOMS). xVM Server turns the computer into a dedicated virtualization Software Appliance with a top-of-the-line, easy-to-use interface you attach to over a standard https connection. The data model is exposed as public programming interfaces via WS-MAN allowing direct web-service access to the public APIs from any WS-MAN client.

Design Principles

• Existing applications and binaries must run unmodified
• Support for multi-process, multi-application application environments
  • Permit complex server configurations to be virtualized within a single guest OS instance
• Paravirtualization (PV) enables high performance and strong isolation between domains
  • Particularly on uncooperative architectures (x86)
• Live migration of VM instances between servers

The image in this post is the xVM Server main page. Click it for a larger view. More screen shots are available here.

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