Hi Harold, Harold Grovesteen wrote:
While not much has been shared publicly on the topic of virtualization of OpenSolaris on System z by the participants (and it could be argued as off topic), what little has been shared seems to get posted here. There are clearly some opinions about what Sun's perspectives might be. In light of the fact that you appear to have a blog at Sun, can you post to this community a clarification of Sun's perspective on the virtualization of OpenSolaris on System z?
As long as we don't spend too much ink on this topic, I don't think we'll be yelled at for being off-topic. Nobody's shy - they'll tell us. So (and purely my opinion, usual disclaimers apply): Sun thinks Solaris is an outstanding modern OS (in mixed company I'll avoid superlatives like "*the* outstanding etcetera"), and welcomes innovations from open sourcing that increase its value and the size of its community. That includes porting it to other platforms we would not invest in (or even think of) porting to ourselves. For a quote from a Sun executive, see the November 20 post from http://blogs.sun.com/marchamilton/ which I think is a good summary (I +have+ to be nice here, I work for the guy!), and is very polite and friendly towards IBM and SNA. For that matter, I introduced Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos to Neale Ferguson (Neale called in; I was in Greg's office) which led to my helping arrange the loan of the SPARC Solaris workstation SNA uses for development and building to this day. I made other introductions for David as long ago as 2005. I can't take credit for decisions Neale surely would have made anyway, but I strongly encouraged him to go with a pure 64-bit model (31-bit is so last-century), target for deployment under VM (bare metal is harder and less useful) and exploit what the youngsters call "paravirtualization" provided by z/VM. I am currently doing a very long upload to a z/VM system... That said, I don't think one should look to Sun Microsystems for great enthusiasm about OpenSolaris on System z as a commercial product or as an attractive venue for running Solaris. Without being partisan - this list is simply not the place for it - let's just observe that people who think IBM mainframes are superior tend to be concentrated at IBM, IBM customers and IBM partners. People working at other system vendors or buying their products tend to hold other opinions, and should be expected to prefer and advocate the platforms that they create or purchase, which they think are superior. I don't think I can word it any less adversarially than that.
For my own curiosity, I would like to understand how such virtualization might relate to Sun's objectives to target customers for whom computing is a competitive advantage. I personally do not see virtualziation as inconsistent with that strategy, but am curious to understand Sun's perspective.
Virtualization is a key topic for Sun, as with *every* vendor. The massive change in the marketplace is that every systems vendor has one or more virtualization technologies. Today there's VMware, Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron, KVM Hyper-V, HP vPARS, dLPARs, WPARs and several more I can't think of now. From Sun: Solaris Containers (a scalable, lightweight virtualization available for some 3 years now), Logical Domains, VirtualBox, and (soon) Sun xVM Server (x86 hypervisor leveraging Xen). So, virtualization is well accepted and exceptionally important. I don't even mention network and storage virtualization, which we also do (but I know very little about, so please don't ask!). My day job, in fact, is mostly about Sun's virtualization technology. It's nice how my prior life experience helps out here :-). And you hit on an important point: for some customers, computing is just a necessary evil, but for other customers, computing is competitive advantage and they want to do more of it (growing faster than GDP ever can). We plan to serve those customers. I hope this is a helpful response. Apologies in advance to anyone who thinks this is too long (I know I ramble on), too OT, wrong religion, whatever. regards, Jeff -- Jeff Savit Principal Engineer Sun Microsystems, Inc. Phone: 732-537-3451 (x63451) 400 Atrium Drive Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Somerset, NJ 08873 http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
