Sun Expands to the Desktop with Innotek Virtualization Acquisition
By David Marshall
February 13, 2008
Sun Microsystems announced that it will acquire German desktop virtualization vendor Innotek GmbH, the maker of VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization product that has been growing in popularity. The announcement comes on the heels of Sun's $1 billion acquisition announcement of open source database developer MySQL. Terms of the Innotek deal haven't been disclosed.
Innotek has been growing in popularity with end users and developers because of its open source nature. The product was first made available in January of last year, and it already has more than 4 million downloads to its name. VirtualBox runs on top of Windows and Linux today, and the company already has a Mac OS X version in Beta. And only two days ago, the company announced its first Beta version for Open Solaris, the open source version of Sun's Unix operating system.
According to Sun, acquiring Innotek will help strengthen Sun's leadership in the virtualization market by extending the company's xVM platform with a desktop virtualization solution. Steve Wilson, who heads Sun's xVM team, posted on his blog that he believes that the VirtualBox technology will help broaden interest among developers in Sun's xVM product line.
Wilson explains on his blog that the two products, VirtualBox and Sun's xVM, may sound familiar at first, however they are targeted at radically different markets. Wilson writes:
"Sun xVM Server is a bare-metal hypervisor. This means it installs directly on the hardware, not on top of an existing operating system. It's a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. It includes high-end, data center features like live VM migration and dynamic self-healing. This is datacenter grade virtualization. Along with Sun xVM Ops Center, xVM Server will become the engine that drives a dynamic data center.
VirtualBox is what is technically referred to as a type-2 hypervisor. It's an application that installs on top of an existing operating system. VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris hosts, which means you can use it with your laptop no matter what OS you choose for your 'native' environment. This makes VirtualBox a software developer's dream. You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multi-tier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box! VirtualBox doesn't have xVM Server's data center features, like live migration, but it's incredibly light-weight."
Wilson compares xVM Server to something like VMware's ESX Server platform and VirtualBox as more of a comparable platform to VMware's Workstation or Fusion product or Parallels Desktop for Mac. And because of that, VirtualBox seems to fit in nicely with Sun's plans for a virtualization suite offering.
Right now, VirtualBox is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and can be downloaded on virtualbox.org. Sun plans on continuing to make VirtualBox freely available to users, and it hopes that its open source nature can continue to win over support from the developer community.
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