Sun acquires innotek

I just read the notice that Sun had acquired innotek, the creators of Virtualbox, a virtual machine software product. Before I had a chance to really look into this move, I wondered why Sun would acquire another virtual machine software product when it had a program to integrate the Xen open source project into it's product portfolio (see the previous post Sun xVM - Foundation for a dynamic datacenter?). After looking into the matter a bit more, I see what Sun's team is driving at, the creation of a more flexible, multiplatform development and deployment environment for developers.

Here's how Sun's Steve Wilson describes this acquisition

I've taken the liberty of presenting a snippet of a post Steve Wilson put up about this move. If you'd like to read more, here's a pointer to his blog http://blogs.sun.com/stevewilson/ .

VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed. Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to "host" any arbitrary collection of operating system instances. Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit. In fact, these days there are several pieces of software that offer some of this functionality, but VirtualBox is unique because it's completely free and open source, and supports almost every OS known to man. It's no wonder that it's been downloaded over four million times in just over a year.

Now, as cool as VirtualBox sounds, some folks may be thinking that this sounds awfully similar to the xVM Server product we announced back in November. Is this redundant? Certainly xVM Server and VirtualBox both offer a computer the ability to run multiple operating systems. However, xVM Server and VirtualBox are products targeted at radically different markets. Here's how I look at these.

Sun xVM Server is a bare-metal hypervisor. This means it installs directly on the hardware, not on top of an existing operating system. It's a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. It includes high-end, data center features like live VM migration and dynamic self-healing. This is datacenter grade virtualization. Along with Sun xVM Ops Center, xVM Server will become the engine that drives a dynamic data center.

VirtualBox is what is technically referred to as a type-2 hypervisor. It's an application that installs on top of an existing operating system. VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris hosts, which means you can use it with your laptop no matter what OS you choose for your "native" environment. This makes VirtualBox a software developer's dream. You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multi-tier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box! VirtualBox doesn't have xVM Server's data center features, like live migration, but it's incredibly light-weight. I installed it this weekend. The download was only 17 MB and the install took only minutes. In less than 15 minutes from when I started the download until I was ready to start installing guests.

So, the way I look at it, VirtualBox really fills out Sun's virtualization suite. Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Except of course, that VirtualBox supports more host platforms than any of these products, and is open source and free!

Snapshot analysis

I must admit that my first take on this move was that Sun was so into virtualization technology that it had to have "one of each" to flesh out its virtual environment story. At this point, I was recalling the garage of some friends in my local motorcycle association. These friends had an ATV, a scooter, a dirt bike, a street bike and a large touring motorcycle. Their cars had been forced out into the street by all of these other vehicles.

As I got to know more, I began to see that Sun's view was that their Xen-based products were for servers and that they needed something else for desktop virtualization. After all, Xen is a standard part of Linux operating systems, could be included in a desktop version of Solaris without much difficulty but, were not standard parts of either Windows or MacOS. If the company was going to make it possible for everyone to come to the Sun party, they needed something that could work just about anywhere. Acquiring this technology would be far easier than developing their own entry into this branch of the virtual machine software market.

Although Steve Wilson pointed out the obvious, that this software could make the lives of developers easier, he didn't mention that this, along with other Sun technology, could become a very powerful application virtualization environment that would be adaptable to just about any client device. I could easily envision versions for the Blackberry, Symbian devices, Windows Mobile devices and just about anything that the industry could throw at the market. When viewed from this vantage point, it could be thought of as another incarnation of the thinking behind the original Java virtual machine.

As I see it, this was a really shrewd move and opens up quite a number of possibilities for Sun.