1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,560 Hi everybody. We're here in the, I guess, the Menlo Park Sun living room. It's actually 2 00:00:06,560 --> 00:00:10,240 quite nice. There's a little kitchen maybe we'll show you later. But we're here with 3 00:00:10,240 --> 00:00:12,400 a special guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? 4 00:00:12,400 --> 00:00:16,280 I'm Steve Wilson. I'm the Vice President of XVM at Sun Microsystems. 5 00:00:16,280 --> 00:00:20,160 The sort of XVM group is a recent sort of grouping or brand, if you will, with Inside 6 00:00:20,160 --> 00:00:22,600 Sun. So what does it encompass exactly? 7 00:00:22,600 --> 00:00:29,040 Well, we started talking about this late last year, I think November 2007, and since 8 00:00:29,040 --> 00:00:34,600 then we built a portfolio of four products. Three of them are shipping now, and a fourth 9 00:00:34,600 --> 00:00:40,160 one will be soon. And it's really divided up into a couple different pieces. We have pieces 10 00:00:40,160 --> 00:00:47,920 specifically for the desktop side. We have things like the VirtualBox hypervisor, really popular. 11 00:00:47,920 --> 00:00:52,000 I think, I looked at the stats the other day, we're up to six point something million downloads 12 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:53,000 of it. 13 00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:54,000 Right. 14 00:00:54,000 --> 00:00:58,080 So, you know, software developers, consumers, all sorts of people using that. And, you know, 15 00:00:58,080 --> 00:01:03,640 everybody from using Macs to PCs to running Solaris and all sorts of cool things like that. 16 00:01:03,640 --> 00:01:08,640 And also on the desktop side, we have solutions to scale up to doing large scale desktop consolidation. 17 00:01:08,640 --> 00:01:16,640 So say a business that wants to run, you know, today they might have a thousand desktops out 18 00:01:16,640 --> 00:01:17,640 in their office. 19 00:01:17,640 --> 00:01:20,640 And they want to get those out of the office because it's so expensive to maintain them. 20 00:01:20,640 --> 00:01:24,200 So you can virtualize those, consolidate them on a set of servers, and then manage them. 21 00:01:24,200 --> 00:01:30,200 And our VDI software can take care of all of the authentication about how users get to their 22 00:01:30,200 --> 00:01:31,200 sessions. 23 00:01:31,200 --> 00:01:32,200 Right. 24 00:01:32,200 --> 00:01:37,760 And they want to broadcast out either to existing PCs or dedicated thin clients like a Sunray, 25 00:01:37,760 --> 00:01:38,760 things like that. 26 00:01:38,760 --> 00:01:39,760 Yeah. 27 00:01:39,760 --> 00:01:41,760 I mean, how does that effort relate to the Sunray? 28 00:01:41,760 --> 00:01:44,760 Sun's been doing virtual desktop with Sunray for a long time. 29 00:01:44,760 --> 00:01:47,320 It's just, we didn't call it virtual desktop. 30 00:01:47,320 --> 00:01:48,320 It was great clients. 31 00:01:48,320 --> 00:01:53,920 And what's happened over the last couple of years is that as this technology has come around 32 00:01:53,920 --> 00:02:00,120 to do general purpose virtualization, we got out of the mode where you could only say, 33 00:02:00,120 --> 00:02:04,280 do Unix desktops with Sunray. 34 00:02:04,280 --> 00:02:10,680 So now, most of our customers using Sunray are using the VDI software to allow them to do 35 00:02:10,680 --> 00:02:18,000 virtualization with a full Windows XP or Vista desktop and be able to get access to that anywhere. 36 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:25,680 You can be in Starbucks on your smartphone accessing your Windows desktop over the WAN now. 37 00:02:25,680 --> 00:02:29,680 So essentially, it's extending the Sunray idea to just any sort of... 38 00:02:29,680 --> 00:02:34,720 Any device and any OS you can now do. 39 00:02:34,720 --> 00:02:38,680 And the Sunray plays a key part in that because as people realize they want to get the same 40 00:02:38,680 --> 00:02:44,280 benefits they're getting from server virtualization on the client, what they're saying is, all right, 41 00:02:44,280 --> 00:02:49,000 I can virtualize all this, but if I still just have to have the same PCs sitting around 42 00:02:49,000 --> 00:02:53,280 the office, every time a hard disk fails, I got to send a tech out there to go deal with 43 00:02:53,280 --> 00:02:54,280 it. 44 00:02:54,280 --> 00:02:58,240 And they're sitting there burning 150 watts 24 hours a day, whether anybody's using them. 45 00:02:58,240 --> 00:03:01,280 So you have the ability to drop a Sunray down there. 46 00:03:01,280 --> 00:03:05,280 I think the current base model Sunray draws something like six watts. 47 00:03:05,280 --> 00:03:06,280 Right. 48 00:03:06,280 --> 00:03:09,320 It's like an LED or something. 49 00:03:09,320 --> 00:03:10,320 Yeah. 50 00:03:10,320 --> 00:03:13,320 And you can just leave that on 24 hours a day for 10 years. 51 00:03:13,320 --> 00:03:14,320 It never crashes. 52 00:03:14,320 --> 00:03:15,320 There's no moving parts. 53 00:03:15,320 --> 00:03:16,320 There's no state. 54 00:03:16,320 --> 00:03:18,320 So we've got the virtual box stuff and then the VDI stuff. 55 00:03:18,320 --> 00:03:19,320 Yeah. 56 00:03:19,320 --> 00:03:21,320 And then there's the two other components you were talking about. 57 00:03:21,320 --> 00:03:22,320 Yeah. 58 00:03:22,320 --> 00:03:24,320 And then you go over to the server side. 59 00:03:24,320 --> 00:03:29,360 So we have the Ops Center management tool that we've been shipping for a while. 60 00:03:29,360 --> 00:03:31,360 So there's XVM Ops Center. 61 00:03:31,360 --> 00:03:33,360 We started shipping that back in February. 62 00:03:33,360 --> 00:03:38,360 And that's really become Sun's mainline server management tool for how do you manage a data 63 00:03:38,360 --> 00:03:39,360 center. 64 00:03:39,360 --> 00:03:44,400 Everything from managing your server down to the, you know, how do I manage the firmware on the 65 00:03:44,400 --> 00:03:45,400 server? 66 00:03:45,400 --> 00:03:47,400 How do I bare metal provision the operating systems? 67 00:03:47,400 --> 00:03:52,400 How do I do patching and software lifecycle management and compliance reporting? 68 00:03:52,400 --> 00:03:53,440 Right. 69 00:03:53,440 --> 00:03:57,440 But to date, it's been very focused on the physical part of the data center. 70 00:03:57,440 --> 00:04:02,440 And so what we're going through right now is we're just finishing up the XVM server product. 71 00:04:02,440 --> 00:04:07,440 And XVM server is our dedicated bare metal hypervisor. 72 00:04:07,440 --> 00:04:14,600 So unlike virtual box that you install on top of an existing guest operating system, you install 73 00:04:14,600 --> 00:04:17,600 XVM server on the bare metal machine. 74 00:04:17,600 --> 00:04:18,600 Right. 75 00:04:18,600 --> 00:04:20,600 It sort of takes the place of the OS. 76 00:04:20,600 --> 00:04:26,840 And then you have the ability to do remote management of it through a browser user interface 77 00:04:26,840 --> 00:04:33,440 or an API or connect it to an Ops Center instance and manage it as part of your enterprise. 78 00:04:33,440 --> 00:04:34,440 Oh, right. 79 00:04:34,440 --> 00:04:37,960 So there's sort of like local command line-ish sort of management if you wanted to do that. 80 00:04:37,960 --> 00:04:41,280 But then you can also do it more remotely so you can sort of batch operations together. 81 00:04:41,280 --> 00:04:42,280 Yeah. 82 00:04:42,280 --> 00:04:45,760 So it's actually one of the things I'll show you a little bit later is we have a pretty rich 83 00:04:45,760 --> 00:04:50,160 browser graphical user interface built into every copy of XVM server. 84 00:04:50,160 --> 00:04:51,160 Okay. 85 00:04:51,160 --> 00:04:54,400 But it's dedicated to small deployments. 86 00:04:54,400 --> 00:04:55,400 Right. 87 00:04:55,400 --> 00:05:00,760 And it doesn't have the ability to manage the physical hardware and, you know, do patching 88 00:05:00,760 --> 00:05:03,000 and compliance reporting and all that kind of stuff. 89 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:07,280 As you move up to Ops Center, you actually keep a lot of the same user interface, but now 90 00:05:07,280 --> 00:05:11,400 you add a lot more features to it to do all of that classic data center management stuff. 91 00:05:11,400 --> 00:05:12,400 Right. 92 00:05:12,400 --> 00:05:14,400 And you get one console that lets you manage the whole thing. 93 00:05:14,400 --> 00:05:18,160 So which sort of family of virtualization does the XVM stuff come from? 94 00:05:18,160 --> 00:05:20,120 I mean, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel for this. 95 00:05:20,120 --> 00:05:25,880 So it is, it's using some code from the Zen community underneath the covers to do the lowest 96 00:05:25,880 --> 00:05:28,400 level virtualization pieces. 97 00:05:28,400 --> 00:05:32,400 But it's also using a lot of technology from Open Solaris. 98 00:05:32,400 --> 00:05:38,680 And by taking some technology from the Open Solaris family, we actually get a lot of interesting 99 00:05:38,680 --> 00:05:42,400 benefits because Solaris has this long history in the enterprise. 100 00:05:42,400 --> 00:05:46,720 Some really interesting things that come out of that are the ability to leverage things 101 00:05:46,720 --> 00:05:50,400 like the Solaris fault management architecture. 102 00:05:50,400 --> 00:05:52,640 We've taken that and moved it in. 103 00:05:52,640 --> 00:05:57,640 And so, you know, when Sun started growing up Solaris in the nineties and running on big 104 00:05:57,640 --> 00:06:03,160 SMPs, one of the things you find when you run on a machine that has 64 CPUs is your odds 105 00:06:03,160 --> 00:06:07,900 of having a CPU failure have now gone up by a factor of 64. 106 00:06:07,900 --> 00:06:13,140 And if every time you had a CPU or a DIM hiccup, you know, your giant Oracle database 107 00:06:13,140 --> 00:06:15,420 crashed, that would be really bad. 108 00:06:15,420 --> 00:06:20,900 So Solaris had to learn to be resilient to things like that and could manage those faults, 109 00:06:20,900 --> 00:06:24,140 manage around them, isolate bad components and keep running. 110 00:06:24,140 --> 00:06:27,780 And so we're taking some of that same technology, putting it into XVM servers. 111 00:06:27,780 --> 00:06:32,260 So if you have a DIM that goes bad, if you're running Windows on that server, you get a blue 112 00:06:32,260 --> 00:06:33,540 screen of death. 113 00:06:33,540 --> 00:06:35,680 That's just the only, the only out. 114 00:06:35,680 --> 00:06:40,920 But with XVM server, if you were running Windows in a set of guests on top of XVM server, XVM 115 00:06:40,920 --> 00:06:41,920 server could isolate. 116 00:06:41,920 --> 00:06:46,280 Then you have the, the, the, the op center manages all of the XVM stuff. 117 00:06:46,280 --> 00:06:51,280 So like, I mean, you know, we were speaking at the server level, you have the, you know, 118 00:06:51,280 --> 00:06:53,560 you manage when hardware goes bad and things like that. 119 00:06:53,560 --> 00:06:58,000 So like, what's the more, what sort of management do you get when you have the operation center 120 00:06:58,000 --> 00:06:58,920 integrated into things? 121 00:06:58,920 --> 00:07:04,160 So op center, um, really, if you, if you think about the life cycle of a machine, be it sort 122 00:07:04,160 --> 00:07:08,160 of physical or virtual, but start with the physical one, cause it's sort of the most general 123 00:07:08,160 --> 00:07:09,160 case. 124 00:07:09,160 --> 00:07:13,160 You know, you start by ordering the machine, it shows up in a box, you unpack it, you put 125 00:07:13,160 --> 00:07:15,160 it in a rack and you table it up. 126 00:07:15,160 --> 00:07:16,160 Right. 127 00:07:16,160 --> 00:07:18,960 And that's the part you have to do yourself. 128 00:07:18,960 --> 00:07:24,640 Once you have that up, um, and sort of powered, you know, you got the power connected and the 129 00:07:24,640 --> 00:07:29,400 network connected, um, you can go to op center and do the rest of your management from there. 130 00:07:29,400 --> 00:07:30,400 Right. 131 00:07:30,400 --> 00:07:35,040 So you can remotely power the machine on, um, you can check its firmware level and make 132 00:07:35,040 --> 00:07:38,400 sure you have the latest firmware available for that system. 133 00:07:38,400 --> 00:07:43,180 Um, if you don't, you can update the firmware, then you can go ahead and put the OS out there 134 00:07:43,180 --> 00:07:48,640 with op center two, um, which is the one that will be shipping concurrently with XBM server. 135 00:07:48,640 --> 00:07:53,920 You'll be able to either put down a bare metal OS, like say, uh, you know, a Solaris or a Linux 136 00:07:53,920 --> 00:07:59,080 OS or deploy XBM server itself onto the bare metal. 137 00:07:59,080 --> 00:08:00,080 Okay. 138 00:08:00,080 --> 00:08:01,080 Right. 139 00:08:01,080 --> 00:08:02,080 So, you know, in effect deploy the hypervisor. 140 00:08:02,080 --> 00:08:05,720 So if you want to run a virtualized data center, you might get a hundred new machines. 141 00:08:05,720 --> 00:08:08,720 And the first thing you got to do is put a hypervisor on all of them. 142 00:08:08,720 --> 00:08:13,040 So instead of running around to each of them with a CD and installing it, we can, we can 143 00:08:13,040 --> 00:08:14,040 jumpstart all of those. 144 00:08:14,040 --> 00:08:15,520 So what's used to push that out? 145 00:08:15,520 --> 00:08:19,240 I mean, what, what kind of machine do you have to make sure you get that it's ready for that 146 00:08:19,240 --> 00:08:20,240 sort of thing? 147 00:08:20,240 --> 00:08:24,400 So, um, so in general, when you're going to run with op center, um, you may actually have 148 00:08:24,400 --> 00:08:26,660 one or even more than one management server. 149 00:08:26,660 --> 00:08:32,280 So you're going to have a management server in the center that we kind of call the controller. 150 00:08:32,280 --> 00:08:37,960 And, um, that controller is going to run the browser user interface and it's going to have 151 00:08:37,960 --> 00:08:42,200 a database that has the configurations of all the machines and sort of the, the source 152 00:08:42,200 --> 00:08:45,120 of truth for what's going on in the system. 153 00:08:45,120 --> 00:08:51,460 Um, but then, and, and for a, you know, small to medium scale deployment, you can just start 154 00:08:51,460 --> 00:08:54,920 managing servers there for a very large one, say thousands of servers. 155 00:08:54,920 --> 00:08:58,960 And we do have people using ops center with, you know, I think our largest customer right 156 00:08:58,960 --> 00:09:00,400 now is running 4,000 servers. 157 00:09:00,400 --> 00:09:01,400 Okay. 158 00:09:01,400 --> 00:09:07,240 Um, you'll create actually a second management tier, um, where you put a set of proxy servers 159 00:09:07,240 --> 00:09:10,600 and you can put those at different points on the network. 160 00:09:10,600 --> 00:09:11,600 Right. 161 00:09:11,600 --> 00:09:14,560 Um, so it, it does two serve two, it serves two purposes. 162 00:09:14,560 --> 00:09:16,440 One is it lets you scale out horizontally. 163 00:09:16,440 --> 00:09:21,520 So if you want to manage thousands of machines, um, you don't have to manage them as independent 164 00:09:21,520 --> 00:09:26,520 clusters, you can manage them as one central cluster, but still have the compute power to 165 00:09:26,520 --> 00:09:27,520 manage them. 166 00:09:27,520 --> 00:09:28,520 Right. 167 00:09:28,520 --> 00:09:33,440 And what we see is that, um, you know, in, in modern data centers, you have so many firewalls 168 00:09:33,440 --> 00:09:37,680 and things walling off different parts of the data center, but you still might want to manage 169 00:09:37,680 --> 00:09:42,520 that centrally and sort of the, the management protocols that go on to do these low level 170 00:09:42,520 --> 00:09:44,960 operations, like provisioning a server. 171 00:09:44,960 --> 00:09:50,680 These are not firewall friendly things there, they're, they're UDP protocols, they're broadcast 172 00:09:50,680 --> 00:09:51,680 there. 173 00:09:51,680 --> 00:09:57,120 And, um, what we see is a lot of customers who want to manage things centrally, um, with 174 00:09:57,120 --> 00:10:01,520 a lot of the existing management tools, you, you have to turn your firewalls into Swiss cheese 175 00:10:01,520 --> 00:10:03,940 to get, um, to get this to work. 176 00:10:03,940 --> 00:10:08,100 And so by putting the proxies out there on all your individual subnets, um, you can just 177 00:10:08,100 --> 00:10:14,740 have a very thin standard HTTP connection between, or HTTPS between the, the controller and the 178 00:10:14,740 --> 00:10:15,740 proxies. 179 00:10:15,740 --> 00:10:16,740 Right. 180 00:10:16,740 --> 00:10:19,740 And so, you know, again, to, to manage a, a small virtualized environment, there's actually 181 00:10:19,740 --> 00:10:23,860 a version of an ops center that just comes built into every copy of XVM server. 182 00:10:23,860 --> 00:10:25,720 And so there, there's nothing extra to install. 183 00:10:25,720 --> 00:10:31,040 As you get up to a medium sized deployment, you might have that one central management server 184 00:10:31,040 --> 00:10:34,380 that you've run up center and then run multiple servers from it. 185 00:10:34,380 --> 00:10:38,120 And then as you get up to very large, you can actually put that middle tier in and have the, 186 00:10:38,120 --> 00:10:39,940 the proxies and scale it all the way up. 187 00:10:39,940 --> 00:10:40,940 That makes sense. 188 00:10:40,940 --> 00:10:45,000 And so if someone wanted to use, uh, you know, XVM server on their existing data center, I mean, 189 00:10:45,000 --> 00:10:47,540 what would that scenario be like if they're not taking stuff out of boxes? 190 00:10:47,540 --> 00:10:48,540 Yeah, absolutely. 191 00:10:48,540 --> 00:10:53,860 So you, so what you're going to do is, you know, let's say you wanted to start just simply 192 00:10:53,860 --> 00:10:54,860 and try it out. 193 00:10:54,860 --> 00:10:56,200 You're just going to pick a server. 194 00:10:56,200 --> 00:11:03,020 Um, in the, in the simplest case, you're going to, um, you know, download an, uh, an ISO image 195 00:11:03,020 --> 00:11:11,380 from sun and, you know, say burn it to a DVD, um, and put it in the CD drive and, um, boot 196 00:11:11,380 --> 00:11:11,940 up the machine. 197 00:11:11,940 --> 00:11:14,520 You're going to go through a really simple install experience. 198 00:11:14,520 --> 00:11:18,900 Um, it's basically boots up as a, a live CD that says, you know, takes you through the 199 00:11:18,900 --> 00:11:19,900 install experience. 200 00:11:19,900 --> 00:11:25,720 If you've installed, um, the latest, um, open Solaris or even the latest Ubuntu, the, the 201 00:11:25,720 --> 00:11:27,760 first part of the install is exactly like that. 202 00:11:27,760 --> 00:11:32,100 It just sort of walks you through an install and be familiar to, to any sysadmin. 203 00:11:32,100 --> 00:11:37,640 Um, once you get through the basic install, then you're going to log in, um, with a, with 204 00:11:37,640 --> 00:11:43,200 a browser to configure the rest of the system and, um, it'll walk you through a pretty 205 00:11:43,200 --> 00:11:48,040 simple setup wizard to, you know, set up your networks and other things, your users. 206 00:11:48,040 --> 00:11:55,720 Um, and, and then you have a, um, management console right there in the browser that's 207 00:11:55,720 --> 00:12:00,440 going to allow you to create guests, monitor them, um, all that kind of stuff. 208 00:12:00,440 --> 00:12:04,380 And I assume there's sort of like a discovery process and things like that, that, that signed 209 00:12:04,380 --> 00:12:05,700 all the junk you've got out there. 210 00:12:05,700 --> 00:12:06,700 Yeah. 211 00:12:06,700 --> 00:12:09,760 So, so as you go up to, um, full scale op center. 212 00:12:09,760 --> 00:12:12,880 So let's say, um, you've got that data center full of stuff. 213 00:12:12,880 --> 00:12:13,880 Right. 214 00:12:13,880 --> 00:12:14,880 Um, exactly. 215 00:12:14,880 --> 00:12:18,680 The first thing you're going to start with is discovery, um, has a, a number of different 216 00:12:18,680 --> 00:12:22,340 discovery protocols that it can, um, work with. 217 00:12:22,340 --> 00:12:26,340 And if, if things are set up, you know, we have a lot of sun's new things are actually 218 00:12:26,340 --> 00:12:30,120 set up to be discoverable through things like bonjour and things like that. 219 00:12:30,120 --> 00:12:35,720 Um, and, uh, which is actually, that's the same protocol that Max used to discover printers 220 00:12:35,720 --> 00:12:36,720 and things like that. 221 00:12:36,720 --> 00:12:42,000 Um, and, um, for things that aren't discoverable that way, we have the ability to go in and 222 00:12:42,000 --> 00:12:49,480 discover them via SSH and IPMI and a whole bunch of different ways that you can scour the 223 00:12:49,480 --> 00:12:50,720 data center to find all the pieces. 224 00:12:50,720 --> 00:12:51,720 Right. 225 00:12:51,720 --> 00:12:56,960 And then once you have those, um, discovered, um, op center can push out, um, a little piece 226 00:12:56,960 --> 00:13:02,500 of agentry to each of them that, um, we can use inside the OS to do software life cycle 227 00:13:02,500 --> 00:13:04,960 management, patching, compliance reporting, all that kind of stuff. 228 00:13:04,960 --> 00:13:05,960 So last thing. 229 00:13:05,960 --> 00:13:10,040 So when I first encountered, uh, ops, ops center, it wasn't, um, it was just a general 230 00:13:10,040 --> 00:13:11,960 sort of managing your data center thing. 231 00:13:11,960 --> 00:13:12,960 Yeah. 232 00:13:12,960 --> 00:13:15,240 And a lot of the focus as we've been talking about is now around virtualization, which, 233 00:13:15,240 --> 00:13:18,600 you know, makes sense because that's what operation people care about nowadays. 234 00:13:18,600 --> 00:13:24,080 And so like, is there still the sort of more generalized focus on just everything you need to run your 235 00:13:24,080 --> 00:13:25,080 data center? 236 00:13:25,080 --> 00:13:26,080 Absolutely. 237 00:13:26,080 --> 00:13:27,080 I think it's a differentiator for us. 238 00:13:27,080 --> 00:13:31,200 If you compare to something like, you know, virtual center, which is just focused on managing 239 00:13:31,200 --> 00:13:32,200 that hypervisor layer. 240 00:13:32,200 --> 00:13:33,200 Yeah. 241 00:13:33,200 --> 00:13:36,580 Um, it's, it's up to you to figure out how do you manage the hardware underneath it and how 242 00:13:36,580 --> 00:13:38,980 do you manage the guests that are running inside it. 243 00:13:38,980 --> 00:13:44,480 So, um, you know, no matter how powerful that tool is, as long as it's in just that space, 244 00:13:44,480 --> 00:13:47,420 you're going to have to integrate a number of other tools around it. 245 00:13:47,420 --> 00:13:49,860 And I think we can provide a much more complete solution. 246 00:13:49,860 --> 00:13:50,860 Right. 247 00:13:50,860 --> 00:13:51,860 Given that we can do both pieces. 248 00:13:51,860 --> 00:13:55,860 So you still have the management into the, the guest, if you will, right into the, into 249 00:13:55,860 --> 00:13:56,860 the virtual. 250 00:13:56,860 --> 00:13:57,860 Yeah. 251 00:13:57,860 --> 00:13:59,940 And when you get into the, the compliance reporting stuff, for example, that's what it's all about 252 00:13:59,940 --> 00:14:02,940 is the ability to see into those guests and understand what's going on. 253 00:14:02,940 --> 00:14:03,940 Right. 254 00:14:03,940 --> 00:14:04,940 Well, that sounds good. 255 00:14:04,940 --> 00:14:05,940 We'll check out the demo. 256 00:14:05,940 --> 00:14:06,940 All right, cool.