Application Development Trends writes on Sun and Microsoft being Virtualization partners.
Green extolled the virtues of its partner relationships in the virtualization space, which includes Microsoft. He was joined briefly by Microsoft's General Manager of Virtualization Mike Neil, who declared, "Microsoft and Sun share the same vision of virtualization from the desktop to the cloud." Sun recently became a member of Microsoft's server certification program; the certification ensures that Sun's xVM products will integrate and interoperate with Microsoft's offerings.
In a post press-conference interview, Neil told this site that that shared vision included a conviction that that virtualization will become ubiquitous across the data center and even the desktop.
"We're in a unique situation," he said. "The fact that both Microsoft and Sun are operating system vendors allows us to work together to bring a new capability to the customer. The customer is living in a different environment today. In the past he would have bought a machine with a Sun operating system or one with a Windows OS. With virtualization, you have the opportunity to run those disparate systems on one piece of hardware. And both companies believe that management of that capability needs to go from the physical layer to the virtual machines and the applications. Where we're all headed in the future is the cloud."
Sun, the inveterate sloganeer responsible for "Write Once, Run Anywhere" and "the Network is the Computer," offered a new buzz phrase: "Virtualize Everything, Manage Anywhere."
Unfortunately, Virtualization is getting more confusing with all the choices.
On the eve of VMware's VMworld Conference in Las Vegas, the virtualization announcements are coming fast and furious. Microsoft just held the first of its "Get Virtual Now" event series a few days ago. A month ago, Oracle launched its VM Template virtual machines for Oracle apps and Linux. Xen.org, which manages the open-source Xen hypervisor project on which xVM is based, announced the 3.3 version last month. Linux distro Red Hat just acquired a virtualization company (Qumranet) with technology based on another open source hypervisor (KVM). And Hewlett-Packard is expected to make new products at the upcoming VMworld conference.
"VMware is in a tough situation," Neil said, "because they're not an operating system provider. All the operating system providers -- Red Hat, Novell, Sun, Microsoft -- are providing virtualization solutions as part of their offerings. There's no real magic here; everyone is going to have that capability."