Innovating @Sun recently featured an interview on Sun xVM - a slice of Virtualization with a side of Management with Mike Wookey, CTO and distinguished engineer for xVM at Sun. Host Hal Stern and Wokey discuss the technology innovations behind Sun's new xVM Virtualization Portfolio, and how Sun is revolutionizing the software market...again.

Topics discussed in the interview include:

• Leveraging innovative aspects of Sun software such as ZFS, OpenSolaris, and D-Trace in the product set
• Optimization of IO throughput for enhanced performance
• Cross instances and migration in Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0
• Policy driven vs. instance driven thinking and how that relates to capacity planning and management
• Looking ahead: applying eco-friendly policies to the datacenter

xVM, Wookey explains, demarcates the intersection of virtualization and management, key to Sun's strategy. In this sphere, the issue has been maintaining separation of the compute and storage tiers.

A feature of OpenSolaris that especially pleases Wookey is the application packaging system and its ability, through IPS, to perform an update into an empty snapshot that it then transfers to a safe ZFS partition, allowing the user to consider whether everything is as it should be prior to performing the actual update itself. It was a prudent move, Wookey notes, to create "an all-graphical user interface install," especially in that it is easy to use and does not involve the command line.

In seeking to differentiate Sun's virtualization offerings from the competition, Wookey says that it has been necessary to "optimize for IOs maximally and to ensure that, as our hardware scales up from a multi processor and memory capability, we can scale ours as close to linear as we can and avoid issues where some of our competitors get into."

Responding to a question from Hal Stern on migration and high availability, Wookey said Sun's answer was the virtualization pool, "a container for a number of xVM servers that share the same networking characteristics, ... the same storage environment, and essentially once you have that configured, and Ops Center understands all of these things, and can perform all of the configuration checks and all of the validity checks to make sure that migrations happen, you can essentially have confidence that migration will work within a pool."

Utilizing the capability of setting policies onto such a pool and the consequent ability of the system to allocate the best xVM server to add that guest into as determined by resource policy. This results in a great deal of finesse in resource allocation, Wookey said. In future releases of Ops Center, it will be possible to reduce power states in less utilized systems, and even to migrate tasks off these systems and power them down.

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