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I was talking with some colleagues about Sun xVM over dinner. We’d met up at the Langham to see how we’re all getting on, it’s easy to loose track of each other and I try to avoid that. Mike works for a bank in Canary Wharf and uses VMWare. Bill works for a bank in the city which is using VMWare and Stan works for an enterprise which is interested in virtualization and looking at the alternatives. I’ve deliberately removed any references to the places where they work and thank them for the dinner and the conversation.

The conversation was the usual thing about work, what we were all up to and I mentioned I’d been to a Sun talk about Virtualization, I tried to take notes as the conversation developed and here goes.

“What you mean that Solaris Container stuff? Looked at it I think, but I don’t think the unix bod’s have played with it yet.” (Said Mike).

“No, they’re launching a new hypervisor based on the Xen platform using Solaris as the base element, bringing Solaris features into virtualization, it does look cool.” I replied.

“But VMWare already do virtualization, I don’t quite see why we need another version of Xen.” replied Mike.

“I don’t know, it could be interesting” said Bill, “Mike think about the debates you told me you had about who owned the VMWare bit, wasn’t it you guys (windows server team) debating with the unix team? Wont the fact that Sun make their own hypervisor mean all the unix guys will be able to work it out the box without the learning curve? My only concern would be the cost.”

“VMware isn’t that difficult and ownership is only a thing, if you let it be one.” Replied Mike.

“Virtualization on any of the platforms isn’t going to be that cheap – we’re not looking to save cost, we’re looking to resolve those issues with provisioning and support, as well as be more efficient with the hardware” I said.

“What operating systems can it do then?” Asked Stan.

“Windows, Linux and Solaris, which to some might appeal, especially if you’re a mixed platform environment” I replied.

“Well I still like VMWare, we’ve invested too much in it to think about switching hypervisors” said Mike, “and what about migrating virtual machines as well as managing everything – VMWare still seem to be good in that respect – I love VMotion.”

“They’re launching it with a management tool so that everything is meant to be out of the box.”  I replied.

“Do I have to buy that Sun servers? We’re a HP house, I don’t want to start having to buy new servers for my virtualization project” said Stan.

“It’s meant to work on any x86 server, which will be interesting.” I replied.

The reception seemed to differ dependent on the engineer, Mike’s been working with VMWare for the last 18 months and loves it, Stan and Bill though were quite interested in what the Sun offering could bring. It will be interesting to see what the reception and uptake of the Sun xVM product is, the more choice we offer the consumer, the better chance there is that they will find something that suits them and their business.

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