Along with its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server, Sun is preparing to launch the third version of its connection broker: xVM VDI 3.0.
The Early Access program will be open within the end of this month.
The strange thing is that instead of supporting the upcoming bare-metal virtualization platform, Sun decides to introduce support for xVM Virtual Box, the hosted virtualization product for the consumer market that the company acquired from innotek in February 2008.
It’s unclear why a customer may want to use a hosted platform (which is definitively slower compared to a hypervisor) to run a resource-consuming VDI environment.
Hopefully Sun will share some performance comparisons to understand how many virtual desktops can fit inside a VirtualBox host.
Even stranger is the fact that Sun seems to be absolutely sure that xVM Server must be not supported.
The company is developing its hypervisor since a very long time: the virtualization engine was already in the work when Sun VDI reached version 2.0, ten months ago.
Considering the Sun had more than one year to integrate xVM Server 1.0 with xVM VDI 3.0 and didn’t.
The support for ESX instead is still there, as it’s now clear how Sun bets on VMware solutions much more than on its own.