Sun's xVM Virtual Box Passes 5 Million Downloads - Page 2

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Sun VDI 2.0 is "the only virtual desktop infrastructure solution that offers a choice of Linux, Windows or Solaris remote desktops," Sarathy said.

VDI 2.0 also offers role-based provisioning capabilities, and lets users access their full desktop environment from nearly any client device without installing software.

Another Point of View

With Virtual Box, Sun "wanted to be able to offer something in every category and that's the hole Virtual Box fills," Roger Klorese, senior director of product marketing for Citrix XenServer and the Citrix virtualization and management division, told InternetNews.com.

"They had containers in Solaris, and recently announced the Xen-based xVM Server in the bare metal space but didn't have anything of their own in the hosted virtualization space that's easy to adopt and put on your desktop."

Virtual Box was an open source development from scratch. The software employs one of three methods of virtualization: hosted; operating systems virtualization (which Sun offers in its Solaris containers) and bare metal implementations, which is where Citrix plays.

Citrix is not currently looking at running virtualization locally on the desktop because "we use Xen and that's a bare metal technology; we focus on the delivered virtualized desktop from a server in the data center," Klorese said.

Citrix supports Windows and Linux guests, and will be able to support commercial Solaris guests when customers require it "because Sun is shipping it Xen-ready," but has no plans now to support Mac OS X "because running Mac OS guests has to do with licensing that from Apple," Klorese said, adding most [virtualization vendors] avoid Mac OS guests as a business issue, not a technology issue."