Joost Pronk Van Hoogeveen, Solaris Virtualisation Product Manager presented. He had one rather excellent slide, showing Sun’s technologies as a spectrum, from Dynamic System Domains, though a Hypervisor solution, to Containers and then the Resource Manager.
While this misses the aggregation dimension of virtualisation (and I know he understands this), placing these technologies as a spectrum and making the deployment decision accountable to the applications’ non functional qualities is very powerful. It allows better evaluation of technology choice and hopefully deprecates the “I’m only using one virtualisation technology” view and encourages people to use requirements driven design. It may also enable a richer solution design capability to solve the heterogeneity question; data centre managers need to implement a “Real Time Infrastructure” delivering multiple APIs i.e. windows, J2EE, Oracle, Solaris & Linux etc. If performing architecture on the virtualisation question forces the explicit statement of an applications non-functional qualities, then a service will have been performed.
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, originally entitled, “Virtualising the Data Centre”, and republished here in March 2016, with the picture restored. I have retitled the article, because this is an illustration of how close Sun came to rescuing itself, but referring to the server solutions as “Data Centre” was a piece of misplaced hubris and not having a hypervisor (nor an intel offering) was part of what killed Sun. The slide is a piece of misdirection, “why choose a hypervisor, when you can have four?”.