Today Sun formally presented (video recording) its upcoming Xen-based hypervisor called xVM Server, but instead of announcing the immediate availability as many had hoped, the company said that the product won’t be available for at least another two months.
On his corporate blog Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM products family, reported a short Q&A detailing the current roadmap: within 30 days the Early Access build will be open to general public and within 60 days we’ll have the release candidate.
There’s a major, positive news anyway: the large majority of xVM Server will be released with a GPL3 license at no cost.
Few components will be available at no cost as well but through different licenses that Sun didn’t clarify yet.
The product will be manageable through a web console, a full set of web management APIs, or through the xVM Ops Center 2.0 that Sun plans to release with the hypervisor.
Additionally, in time for the general availability, there will be paravirtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes, something easy to do thanks to the current interoperability agreement with Microsoft.
Sun wants to cash in with the support subscriptions but offers them at a very aggressive price: $500 / year per physical machine (up to 4 CPU sockets, no matter how many cores).
While waiting at least for the beta code, users can check a bunch of new screenshots of the management console and the architecture diagram of the hypervisor.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.