long gone are the days when “sun Microsystems” meant only Solaris on SPARC. peTeR BaeR gaLvin Sun is pushing hard to be a platform pro- vider for multiple operating systems, as well as a provider of their own Solaris operat- Pete’s all things Sun: ing system. In some ways this column is a VMware vSphere 4 vs. continuation of my April column (;login: Microsoft Hyper-V R2 April 2009, Volume 34, Number 2), which contained a virtualization guide. That col- Peter Baer Galvin is the chief technolo- umn discussed the virtualization offerings gist for Corporate Technologies, a premier created by Sun. This column explores the systems integrator and VAR (www.cptech. com). Before that, Peter was the systems rich, controversial, and important terrain manager for Brown University’s Computer Science Department. He has written articles of two of the market leaders in virtualiza- and columns for many publications and is tion, VMware and Microsoft. The topic is not co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts Sun-specific but is probably of interest to textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter teaches tutorials and gives talks on security many Sun customers. The Sun x86 servers and system administration worldwide. Peter are certified to run VMware and Windows, blogs at http://www.galvin.info and twit- ters as “PeterGalvin.” as well as Solaris and Linux. In my experi-
[email protected] ence, Sun x86 servers, especially the x4600 with its eight sockets and quad-core CPUs, make excellent virtualization servers. The question then becomes, which virtualiza- tion technology to run? OpenSolaris has Xen built in, but many sites want mainstream and well-tested solutions.