On his corporate blog Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, published a new post about the recently acquired VirtualBox, this time focusing on how virtualization can simplify the software development lifecycle.
The article is pretty generic but contains two key informations.
First of all the included slide implies that VirtualBox virtual machines will be importable in the upcoming Sun hypervisor xVM Server.
Secondarily, the fact that Wilson put so much emphasis on the topic today means that Sun already recognized a big opportunity to leverage virtualization for its JAVA developers communities. And this implies that Sun may be looking for virtualization companies focused on the so called Virtual Lab Automation segment.
The only companies in this space are VMware (after the Akimbi acquisition), Surgient, VMLogix and the newcomers StackSafe and Skytap.
StackSafe is the only one in this list that supports Xen at the moment (despite VMLogix is coming) and since xVM Server is based on Xen it may be an interesting target.
In any case this interest is very positive: besides Microsoft, which is wasting the MSDN opportunity since a long time, Sun is the only other major vendor which has enough influence on the developers to successfully sell virtualization for software development lifecycle.