Feature Story

By Chip Brookshaw

September 19, 2007 - IT managers tasked with consolidating datacenter environments and reducing costs recommend virtualization as an ideal solution. Virtualization technology allows you to consolidate multiple environments onto a much lower number of physical servers, which translates into greater manageability, better use of resources, and tremendous savings—often millions of dollars per year.

Sun Microsystems is the only systems vendor to offer end-to-end virtualization--including software, workstations, servers, storage, and networking--to help maximize system utilization, overcome power and space constraints, and reduce costs. Sun's holistic approach leverages hardware and software technologies, services, and strategic partnerships to help enterprises be agile and flexible enough to respond to changing business needs.

"Sun has been a leader in virtualization for nearly a decade, beginning with the Solaris Operating System," says Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing for Sun's Systems Group. "We continue to expand our lineup of virtualization solutions to help customers reduce costs and improve system utilization, which is a huge issue for enterprise datacenters right now."

Over the past few weeks Sun has announced several new products and an alliance with Microsoft that provide a higher level of support for datacenters undergoing virtualization projects. Read about them below or visit the Virtualization and Consolidation pages to learn about Sun's complete portfolio of offerings.

The Best OS for Virtualization

Virtualization is built into the Solaris OS at no additional cost to customers, saving the expense of third-party virtualization software. Several enhancements in the latest update (Solaris 10 8/07) extend Solaris' virtualization benefits even further.

The latest version enhances the Solaris Containers virtualization technology with resource capping, a capability that lets administrators define maximum usage levels for CPU and memory within application zones.

Resource capping is particularly useful in environments with intermittently high loads. It also prevents low priority applications from swamping more critical ones. In both cases, it helps make the most of precious data center resources.

Solaris 10 8/07 also now includes Solaris Containers for Linux Applications, which allows Solaris on x86 systems to run Linux applications without modification. Solaris Containers for Linux Applications deliver the benefits of virtualization while smoothing cross-platform development and providing greater flexibility during migration to Solaris.

Solaris 10 8/07 also includes IP Instances, the capability to run multiple network stacks on a single system. The IP Instances capability lays the foundation for better virtualization control and observability.

The Virtualized Desktop

Untouched for more than half the day, the desktop system is the most underutilized resource in the enterprise. Fortunately, server virtualization is paving the way toward the adoption of virtualized desktop models. By centralizing resources, virtualized desktops avoid the inefficiency and overhead of fat client environments.

The new Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 1.0 (Sun VDI)--the latest offering in the Sun Virtual Desktop Solutions portfolio--provides a bridge between traditional desktops such as Windows and Mac OS X PCs, Sun Ray clients, and thin clients from other vendors. IT staff can consolidate desktops onto servers in the data center, with each user enjoying a dedicated, customized, and isolated virtual machine.

This means that IT staff can create virtual desktops for users, workgroups, or departments as needed in minutes. Other management tasks, such as updates and upgrades, are also centralized. Administrators manage a few servers instead of thousands of desktops. Virtualization also makes valuable data less susceptible to loss or theft.

"Sun VDI Software reduces the costs of a traditional distributed desktop model by consolidating management in the data center," says Marc Hamilton, Sun vice president of Solaris marketing. "It's the latest way Sun is extending the benefits of virtualization from the server to the desktop."

Sun and Microsoft

Last week Sun and Microsoft expanded their strategic alliance to give customers more choice and add value to their existing technology investments.

Among other announcements, Sun and Microsoft are joining forces to create the best virtualization experience for customers. The companies will work together to ensure that Solaris runs well as a guest on Microsoft virtualization technologies and that Windows Server runs well as a guest on Sun's virtualization technologies.

Sun and Microsoft will also work together to support customers who are using these virtualization solutions. This joint commitment ensures that Solaris and Windows will provide a world-class virtualization experience.

New Virtualization-Ready Hardware

Also last week, Sun introduced two Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems that will further enhance Sun virtualization solutions: the Sun Blade X8440 Server Module and a next-generation four-socket, 2U Quad-Core Server due later this year.

These systems are ideal options for data center consolidation. They are performance powerhouses that integrate smoothly with Sun's software-based virtualization solutions.

End-to-End Solutions

New products and an expanded alliance are only the latest Sun offerings that enable datacenter consolidation through virtualization. Learn more about Sun's virtualization initiatives.

Join the virtualization wave, and start reducing datacenter costs today.