Sun just released a new major version of its desktop virtualization product, VirtualBox 2.0, but doesn’t seem happy enough.
The French news magazine LeMagIT reported that Sun will unveil its new hypervisor, xVM Server, on September 10.
The bare-metal VMM is powered by Xen but Sun replaced the Linux kernel running in DomU with Solaris.
The company worked on this product for more than one year and last month finally started an Early Adoption program to approach the first customers.
Sun is one of the most interesting virtualization player to look at in the coming months.
It has a unique position as it will be the only vendor on the market able to offer a complete computing stack for virtualization: the physical hardware (both servers and storage), the hypervisor, the management layer and the VDI connection broker.
This implies less issues with support and licensing and new platforms specifically tailored for virtualization.
To further consolidate its position and fill up the holes in the current feature-set, Sun may proceed in acquiring multiple companies.
Any startup developing capacity planning, virtual lab automation (Sun seems smarter than Microsoft here, and it’s already pushing virtualization to its immense JAVA developers community) or VM lifecycle management products can be an acquisition target.
If the news will be confirmed, this Q4 2008 is expected to be one of the hottest period ever for hardware virtualization.
Update: Sun officially confirms the upcoming launch and puts online a placeholder.
A live webcast is scheduled for Sep. 10 @ 9am PST.