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Industry Moves: Sun Microsystems Desktop Virtualization Expert Jefferi Holland Joins Systems Alliance

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Systems Alliance, a regional systems integrator providing high-value IT and business consulting services, today announced Jefferi V. Holland, formerly a senior desktop virtualization specialist and senior pre-sales engineer with Sun Microsystems, has joined the company as a senior technical architect.

With nearly 25 years of experience, Holland will lead the expansion of Systems Alliance’s consulting practice focused on desktop virtualization and thin-client computing.

Before joining Systems Alliance, Holland was an 11-year employee of Sun Microsystems, where for the past five years he was a senior technical specialist for the US Software Practice, responsible for architecting, recommending and deploying Sun’s virtual desktop technology. In this role, Holland developed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions for commercial and public-sector clients including United Airlines, Detroit Water and Sewage and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.

Prior to Sun, Holland was manager of engineering computer services at the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Engineering, a systems engineer for Bundy Corporation, and an engineer at General Dynamics Land Systems Division Vehicle Systems Laboratory. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Detroit Mercy.

Oracle Gets Sun xVM, Solaris Zones and Virtualbox

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When Oracle announced that it will be acquiring Sun it didn’t just impact the database market. It’s not just the question of what will happen with MySQL, OpenOffice and Java. The impact on the virtualization market is big as well.

At the moment Sun has a very confusing virtualization offering: they have different flavours, different tools and, depending on which Sun representative you talk to, another technology is their next big thing. They indeed cover the 3 big areas: with Solaris Zones they have a nice OS virtualization alternative, with xVM they have a powerful Xen-based Bare metal virtualization technology based on paravirtualization, and with VirtualBox they have a Type II hypervisor ready to tackle the deskop market. A nice set of features indeed.

Oracle on the other hand was really focussing on Xen, and probably will continue to do so, so what will the future hold for Solaris Zones and VirtualBox hold.
Some people already mentioned that VirtualBox could merge up with Hosted Xen .

Now what was Oracle’s Cloud offering again? Sun already has a strategy here, and with the acquisition of Qlayer earlier this year they also have got a solid product line.

Xen just got another really strong vendor backing it’s technology, with both Citrix and Oracle behind it now. We’ll probaly find out soon.

Sun Releases VirtualBox 2.2, Comes With OVF Support

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Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun VirtualBox 2.2, the latest release of its free and open source virtualization software. VirtualBox 2.2 introduces support for the new Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, as well as significant performance enhancements and updates.

OVF is a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standard that enables virtual machines or appliances to be imported and exported. Virtual appliances are one or more virtual machines that are pre-installed and configured so they can be shared, published and distributed. VirtualBox 2.2 software enables users to build virtual machines or appliances and effortlessly export them from a development environment and import them into a production environment. Support for OVF also helps to ensure VirtualBox 2.2 software is interoperable with other technologies that follow the standard.

A key component of Sun’s industry-leading desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio, VirtualBox software has been rapidly growing in popularity, surpassing 11 million downloads worldwide, 3.5 million registrations since October 2007, with in excess of 25,000 downloads a day. A mere 50 megabyte download, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in less than five minutes.

Additional features of VirtualBox 2.2 software include:

  • Hypervisor optimizations to make this the fastest VirtualBox release available to date
  • 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications using OpenGL, allowing a whole new class of applications to run in a virtual machine
  • Support for Snow Leopard, Apple’s forthcoming 64 bit platform
  • Increased maximum memory size of guests to 16Gb RAM
  • New host-interface networking mode, which makes it easier than ever before to run server applications in virtual machines

VirtualBox software is free of charge for personal use. For wider deployments within an organisation Enterprise subscriptions are also available, starting at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 premium support from Sun’s technical team. Discounts are available based on volume.

IBM Walks Away From Talks Over Potential Sun Acquisition

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IBM has withdrawn its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems today (Sunday), reports the NY Times, who confirmed the collapse of the talks based on a statement from an unnamed source while several other media, including the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet, were still speculating. The New York Times correctly points out this leaves Sun free to pursue other opportunities for selling itself.

Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers.

In their talks, I.B.M. and Sun had a contract to deal with each other exclusively. Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers.

It will be interesting to watch the market react to this on Monday morning.

Sun Microsystems Releases Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3

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Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3, which provides new enhancements and features to help companies maximize their IT infrastructure utilization and improve manageability of desktop deployments. Sun VDI Software 3 offers VDI storage economics, built-in virtualization capabilities, and support for a wide variety of virtual desktop operating systems.

The open architecture of Sun VDI Software 3 now gives users access to a broader choice of client devices and virtualization hosts — increasing flexibility, management efficiency and data security. Sun VDI Software 3 is available for purchase immediately and a free trial of the software can be downloaded here.

Sun VDI Software 3 represents a seamless solution, leveraging core open source technologies including Sun’s Open Storage, OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL. With Sun VDI Software 3, customers can deploy a number of virtual desktop operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu, and access these operating systems from a variety of client devices — such as traditional PCs or Macs, energy-efficient Sun Ray thin clients, or thin clients from other vendors. In addition, to host virtual desktop environments, IT architects can opt to use the improved integration with VMware Infrastructure, leverage Sun built-in virtualization, or use a mixture of the two.

Sun VDI Software 3 has exceptional management capabilities, resulting in lower equipment costs, less energy consumption, reduced system cooling requirements, simplified system administration and reduced e-waste. Since desktops are centrally hosted, only the display is sent to the client device; critical data never leaves the corporate network and can be managed and backed up by IT. Moreover, built-in Sun Ray technology support takes advantage of the excellent performance and inherent security features of Sun Ray thin clients, which contain no resident operating system or applications — making them virtually immune to client-side viruses.

Sun VDI Software 3 is available today and offers subscription-based pricing starting from $40 per user/per year, as a discounted price off the U.S. list price for pre-pay and multi-year purchases.

Video: Sun Open Cloud Announcement

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or if you’ve been completely distracted by the speculation about an impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM, you know Sun yesterday announced its Open Cloud Platform. In the 8-minute video below, found on DataCenterKnowledge, Lew Tucker (CTO Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms at Sun) outlines some of the details: