The latest company entering the consumer virtualization market, innotek, is demonstrating once again some interesting progresses: its open souce virtualization platform for desktops, VirtualBox, is now available as beta product for OpenSolaris (64bit architectures only).
Already available for Windows and Linux, with a version for Mac OS in the work (the 3rd beta is launched today), VirtualBox is the first product with a commercial support available for the Sun operating system.
Sun itself is working on a server class hypervisor called xVM Server, but so far the company didn’t reveal any plan to adopt the technology also for desktop usage.
If the product will be released fast enough, innotek may experience the same populary that Parallels was able to obtain launching its Desktop product on the empty Apple market. With the major difference that the average Solaris user is an experienced system administrator, and he may influence its company opinion on future server-grade products from the virtualization vendor (like the hyperkernel hypervisor).
Download the beta here.