Solaris Support for Xen Possible!!!
10 May '05 - 17:49 by benrMr. Tim Marsland has suggested that Solaris might have Xen support in its future! I've seen some references to Xen here and there in the Sun blogs but never a hint strong enough to get excited about. I've been a fan of Xen for some time and am really excited about the possibilities.
If your new to Xen, heres the cuddletech version of the lowdown: Xen is a project by the fine folks at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Its a "virtual machine monitor", but recently its gone by a diffrent marketish name, a "Hypervisor". A hypervisor is a small scaled down OS that runs on your machine, under it runs other operating systems that are that Xen-aware, thus you can't just run anything, you need Xen kernel support. Xen is currently built on Linux, and support exists for Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Plan 9, and even at one point there was a rouge WindowsXP Beta with Xen support. The idea of a partitioning scheme to run multiple OS's on a single system has been in the enterprise space for some time, however typically it runs in firmware on the system controller of a big(ish) system such as the Sun V1280, Sun Midgrange line and Sun Starfire line. IBM and HP have had their own methods for some time as well, but by utilizing Linux we can push the Hypervisor functionality out of firmware and install it just like a normal OS, which means any box, whether a Dell or a Sun v20z, can utilize the functionality, making it very attractive for making traditionally high-end functionality avalible in the low end market. In the coming year or two your gonna be seeing that term, hypervisor, more and more and more, so get ready if your not already a believer.
Just one thing to note, please don't get a true hypervisor confused with emulators or other system virtualization methods out there such as VMware Workstation, User Mode Linux, or even Linux VServers, those are quite diffrent and in a diffrent league all together, Linux VServers comes close but stops short and is Linux only in nature.
Personally, I'd just sleep better knowing that Solaris was the base of my hypervisor. Linux is kool, but I just trust Solaris so much more, especially for something so crucial. However, don't misunderstand, thats not gonna happen, at least any time soon, right now we're only talking about Solaris support to run underneight the Xen Hypervisor. In fact, we're not even talking, really, just a hint, but who cares, I'm excited. :)
(Now if we could only get OpenMOSIX implemented on Solaris we'd be in heaven!)
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