Sun xVM Server and Ops Center details emerge

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Sun continues to be terribly in late with the release of its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server 1.0, and the related enterprise management platform, xVM Ops Center 2.0.

Nonetheless the company continues to tease with bits of information. Today part of the documentation for the two products appeared online.

The corporate wiki reveals some useful information, like the amount of virtual CPUs supported per virtual machine (two at maximum), the availability of Live Migration and resource pools, or the list of supported guest operating systems:

  • Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris and Solaris Express)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2
  • Microsoft Windows XP
  • Microsoft Windows 2003

As declared everywhere in the site, the documentation is still a work in progress and the content must be verified for technical accuracy.
Hopefully somebody forgot to add Windows Server 2008 to the list above. If not Sun will start in a very bad way.

Update: It seems that Sun reconsidered the idea of publishing the documentation before the release time frame. With a bittersweet note Owen Allen informs:

So, earlier this week, Laura and I and the rest of the team were really excited about opening up the docs. It seems that not everyone shares our excitement. Our orders are that we restrict access until the actual GA release, which should be soon but isn’t here yet. We’re slightly grumpy about this…

It’s a pity because the early exposure of the xVM Server and Ops Center documentation demonstrated how concrete the products are and how many features will be available at their first release.
Knowing this information as soon as possible is critical these days to make a strategic decision on which virtualization platform to embrace.
Going back to stealth mode will just push potential customers somewhere else.