Developer(s) | Sun Microsystems |
---|---|
Operating system | Solaris |
Type | Virtual machine monitor |
Sun xVM was a product line from Sun Microsystems that addressed virtualization technology on x86 platforms. One component was discontinued before the Oracle acquisition of Sun; the remaining two continue under Oracle branding.
Sun originally announced the xVM product family in October 2007. The brand at one time encompassed Sun xVM Server, Sun xVM Ops Center, and Sun xVM VirtualBox, but the latter two products abandoned the "xVM" branding in late 2009, and are now called Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center and Oracle VM VirtualBox.
The Sun xVM hypervisor was a component of Solaris based on work that was being done in the OpenSolaris Xen community. It was integrated into the OpenSolaris source base, and was available in OpenSolaris OS distributions, providing the standard features of a Xen-based hypervisor on x86-based systems.
Sun xVM Server was based on the xVM hypervisor project. Sun planned to support Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris as guest operating systems.
Various features from Sun's OpenSolaris OS underlay the guest OS as part of the hypervisor environment, including Predictive Self Healing, ZFS, DTrace, advanced network bandwidth management (from the OpenSolaris Crossbow project) as well as security enhancements.
Instead of having its own disk image format, Sun xVM Server was intended to import/export VMDK and VHD images to facilitate interoperation with VMware ESX Server and Microsoft's Hyper-V.