innotek's open source VirtualBox product is on its way to becoming a part of Sun's product line as the company announced this week a stock purchase agreement to buy the Germany-based software company. The deal is expected to be completed during the third quarter of Sun's 2008 fiscal year. The purchase price of the privately-held innotek was not disclosed, but Sun says the acquisition is not material to its short-term earnings.

Since 2001, innotek has been at the forefront of PC virtualization technology. Based in Stuttgart, Germany with offices in Dresden, Berlin, and the Russian Federation, innotek currently employs Europe's largest and most experienced team of PC software virtualization experts with numerous Fortune 500 and government customers, Sun reports.

innotek's premiere product, VirtualBox, is a developer desktop virtualization platform enabling desktop or laptop PCs to run multiple and different operating systems side-by-side such as Windows, Linux, Mac, or the Solaris Operating System.

"VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently announced Sun xVM Server product," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Sun Software. "Where Sun xVM Server is designed to enable dynamic IT at the heart of the datacenter, VirtualBox is ideal for any laptop or desktop environment and will align perfectly with Sun's other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects, enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next generation of applications."

With VirtualBox, software developers are able to more easily build multi-tier or cross-platform applications. Additionally, applications that may not be available on a user's base operating system are now accessible with this PC virtualization technology.

Sun VP of xVM Steve Wilson identifies the differences between Sun xVM server and VirtualBox in his blog stating:

"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," he explains. "...the way I look at it, VirtualBox really fills out Sun's virtualization suite. Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Except, of course, that VirtualBox supports more host platforms than any of these products, and is open source and free!"

Addressing the question of paying for a product that is going to be given away, Wilson states developer influence is key. "We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine," Wilson explains. "Beyond that, I think there is a huge opportunity to link with Sun's other developer-related assets like NetBeans, Glassfish and (soon) MySQL. Imagine the virtual software appliances we can create using these assets, and developers will be able to start using them instantly, making it way easier to install and configure these things."

There are over four million VirtualBox downloads, which take less than 20 megabytes and are easily installed on any modern, x86 architecture laptop or desktop system running Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris OS, in just minutes. Supported guest operating systems include all versions of Windows from 3.1 to Vista, Linux 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, Solaris x86, OS/2, Netware and DOS.

The download is available from www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org.

Glance at some of the recent headlines on Sun\'s New VirtualBox that Jim Grisanzio has collected. [...read more...]

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