14 DAY TRIAL // Sun Microsystems has just announced that it has acquired German desktop virtualization vendor Innotek GmbH. The deal is the first step in a Sun's developing its own xVM server virtualization platform. Virtualization seems to be more than a buzzword and is constantly gaining popularity with businesses, as it offers lower costs and better performance, while providing extensive control over the virtualized environment.
Innotek is a Stutgart-based company whose products include an open-source virtualization tool called VirtualBox. The piece of software was released in January 2007 and Sun claims that it has been downloaded more than four million times ever since. Steve Wilson, Sun's xVM team leader claims that the VirtualBox technology will give the xVM product line a boost and will increase interest among the technology developers.
The server vendor is very committed to the open-source community and is currently funding both hardware and software projects. The OpenOffice.org word processing and spreadsheet suite is funded by Sun Microsystems and developed and maintained by the Open Source communities worldwide. The hardware aspect is also covered: Sun has open-sourced its latest processor, called the SPARC2 (also known as Niagara), in order to get viable code implementations from the open source community.
Sun executives rely on the fact that developers who actively support the VirtualBox technology will advise their friends or customers to switch to "xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine". The xVM Server acts like a hypervisor that is installed directly on the hardware, rather than on an operating system. On the other hand, VirtualBox is a software application that runs on top of an operating system, but does not provide support for, say, live migration of data.
VirtualBox can run on top of about any operating system, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh and Solaris. Last week, Innotek released an updated beta-test version of VirtualBox for the Mac OS X operating system. The application is available on multiple platforms, which makes it the ideal tool for a software developer. "You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multitier or cross-platform applications - all on a single box," claims Wilson.
Sun refused to detail about the amount of money it paid for Innotek, but managed to state that the purchase won't represent a financial challenge for the company's short-term income.