Sun is one of the latest big vendor entering the x86 hardware virtualization market (but one of the first in other areas with Solaris Containers and LDOMs) but it’s working hard to recover the time lost so far.
In February 2008 the company acquired the German innotek, and included their desktop virtualization product, VirtualBox, in its portfolio, offering it free of charge and open source.
The first rebranded version of VirtualBox was released just three monts later, and Sun claimed over 5 million downloads just one month after.
Now the company announces a series of OEM agreements, Avanquest Software, Q-layer and Zenith InfoTech Ltd., to further spread the product all over the place.
It will be interesting to see the long-term strategy that Sun has to make this product more interesting than its more popular competitors like VMware Workstation and Parallels Workstation.