h6. *[TheRegister: Sun's VirtualBox 3.0 exits betaland|http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/01/sun_virtualbox_3/]*
{quote}
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Update: This story originally said that Sun had not open-sourced VirtualBox. Sun does offer an open source version
Only two weeks ago, Sun Microsystems quietly kicked out two quick betas of its VirtualBox 3.0 desktop and sometimes server-virtualization hypervisor, and today, the product is ready for prime time.
Click here to find out more!
That was a short beta program, wasn't it?
VirtualBox will go down in its history as one of the most popular programs distributed by Sun Microsystems just ahead of its $5.6bn takeover by software giant and hardware wan(not)abe Oracle a few weeks from now.
According to Andy Hall, the senior product manager at Sun who speaks for VirtualBox, Sun was trying to be low-key about the VirtualBox 3.0 beta, but thanks in part to El Reg and a few other trade rags that caught the beta slipping out, Sun got over 25,000 people to download the code in the past two weeks and give it a whirl.
All told, Sun saw over 1 million downloads in both April and May of this year, hitting 14.5 million downloads in total since VirtualBox was launched in October 2007 by German software company Innotek (acquired by Sun in February 2008). Product registrations have crested above 4 million. "The rate of downloads is actually accelerating, and so is the rate of registrations," says Hall, adding that the conversion rate is quite high. "We're really pleased by the snowballing effect."
Sun has not talked about the conversion that perhaps matters most: how many people have opted to pay the piddling $30 per year that Sun charges for tech support on VirtualBox.
As El Reg reported two weeks ago, VirtualBox 3.0 is a major upgrade of the product.
The most important new feature is virtual SMP support that now allows a single VirtualBox guest operating system to span as many as 32 virtual processors on x64 machines. A virtual processor in VirtualBox lingo, I've been told, is one core no matter how many threads it has supporting simultaneous multithreading.
This expanded virtual SMP support for VirtualBox partitions requires VT-x features on Intel's Core and Xeon processors and AMD-V features on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and Opteron processors - and with this expansion, VirtualBox will be able to easily create a single partition on the biggest four-socket x64 iron on the market.
Not that this is practical or desirable considering that a guest partition can only support 16 GB of main memory - 512 MB per core is not a balanced configuration on a 32-core server.
So it's reasonable to assume that one of the next feature Sun (or Oracle) will put into the next VirtualBox release is support for a lot more main memory per guest - at least 64GB and maybe as high as 256GB. Hall was mum on the subject.
VirtualBox 3.0 also has Direct3D 8 and 9 graphics support for applications, which allows design programs, modeling applications, and games to run in guests and make use of these graphics functions from inside guest operating systems. The software also includes support for OpenGL 2.0 graphics, which are supported in Linux, Windows, and Solaris.
VirtualBox is a type 2 hypervisor, rather than a type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor, which means it runs atop Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris (the host environment) and then slices up the CPU, memory, and I/O capacity of the machine to support multiple guest operating systems. (There are lots of different guests, but Mac OS is not one of them because Apple has rules about virtualizing its OS). Hall says that Sun has no plans to create a bare-metal version of VirtualBox, a project that its rival on desktops, Parallels, is taking on, and Citrix is working with Intel to create as well for desktops.
If Sun were not in the process of being subsumed into Oracle, which itself is picking over the carcass of Virtual Iron to make a beefed up version of the Xen hypervisor, Sun might have come to the realization that turning VirtualBox into a type 1 hypervisor is a better idea than trying to cook up another variant of Xen using OpenSolaris as the wrapper for the hypervisor. This is what Sun's xVM Server hypervisor was supposed to be, but now, it is something like nine months late to market and very likely never to see the light of day because if Oracle doesn't need one thing, it is three different Xen hypervisor stacks. The kindest thing to do might be to sell off VirtualBox and let it live by itself. Maybe Oracle will be kind and do that. (OK, you don't have to laugh that hard....)
Hall says that Sun doesn't track how customers are deploying VirtualBox but that anecdotal evidence suggests that it is seeing more and more action on servers. At the recent JavaOne trade show in San Francisco, Sun plunked down a bunch of racks of x64 servers running Solaris 10 and put VirtualBox atop of that Unix to allow it to drive virtualized Windows 7, Ubuntu, or Solaris images from Sun Ray thin clients. Anyone attending JavaOne got a smart card that let them log into the virtual desktop system, and they could pick whatever platform they wanted. Hall says Sun set up the infrastructure so it could generate and manage as many as 21,000 unique desktops over the course of the event, and some 16,000 desktops were created by attendees.
Even with the Oracle acquisition looming, Hall says the Virtual Box team is keeping focused and is getting set to kick off a community-driven Web console project for managing multiple guests across the network. Sun could have - and maybe should have - opted to use xVM OpsCenter, the management tool that was supposed to span all of Sun's different server and desktop virtualization products (dynamic domains, Solaris containers, and logical domains on Sparc boxes and Xen partitions, Solaris containers, and VirtualBox slices on x64 iron).
But with Oracle probably converging around a Xen stack once the Sun deal is done, it is probably time for VirtualBox to get its own management tools. Hall says that VirtualBox 3.0 already has some APIs that have been changed to expose management features and that it will be working with a number of independent projects that have already been started out there on the Web to create a single console written in Python. This project is expected to launch "in a few months," according to Hall.
Provided Oracle doesn't step on it, of course. With VirtualBox being open source, what Oracle does or doesn't do doesn't matter a damned bit. VirtualBox can live on. ®
{quote}
h6. *[CNet: Yahoo redesigns data center, ditches carbon offsets|http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10276103-54.html?tag=mncol]*
{quote}
by Tom Krazit
Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets.
Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent.
Data centers are vital to huge Internet businesses such as Yahoo, and companies throughout this industry have started paying more and more attention to the amount of energy consumed by facilities that can have thousands of servers running all day, every day. Google has talked up its own push for greater efficiency in its data centers, and Microsoft just announced plans for two new data centers geared around energy efficiency.
As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.
Yahoo plans to focus its green strategy on projects such as the Buffalo data center rather than the purchase of offsets, which means it will take them some time to return to the carbon-neutral goal set in 2007. "We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change," Filo wrote.
Corrected at 3:05 p.m.: Yahoo clarified the new data center will be in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo.
{quote}
h6. *[InfoWorld: Google bolsters 3-D API for browser|http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/google-bolsters-3d-api-browser-569]*
{quote}
by Paul Krill
Google this week began offering a "substantial" update to its O3D API for building rich, interactive 3-D applications in a browser, tuning it for different types of hardware.
Highlighted at the Google I/O conference in May and shown running in a Google Chrome browser at that time, O3D enables 3-D graphics and features a JavaScript API. IT began as an effort to establish an open Web standard for 3-D graphics. An update was released Monday.
"With today's release, we focused on addressing a theme we heard in the requests and feedback from the community: That O3D should run as well as possible on many different types of hardware," said Google product manager Henry Bridge in a blog post. "Toward that end, we're releasing two new additions: Software rendering and feature requirements. If you've already installed the O3D plugin, you should receive these additions automatically."
Software rendering lets O3D use the main processor to render 3-D images if the machine running the application does not have supported graphics hardware. The concept of feature requirements, meanwhile, will help minimize how often O3D has to fall back to software rendering.
"Feature requirements allow developers to state upfront that their app will require certain hardware capabilities to render properly. If the machine running the app supports those features, O3D will run it fully hardware accelerated; if however, it is lacking any of the required capabilities, O3D will drop into a software rendered mode," Bridge said.
Other features include a full-screen mode to make O3D applications more absorbing and a community gallery featuring demonstrations that use O3D. Developers can submit applications for inclusion in the gallery.
O3D is intended to use hardware acceleration on a variety of GPU chip sets to provide high-end real-time 3-D graphics on most systems.
{quote}
{quote}
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Update: This story originally said that Sun had not open-sourced VirtualBox. Sun does offer an open source version
Only two weeks ago, Sun Microsystems quietly kicked out two quick betas of its VirtualBox 3.0 desktop and sometimes server-virtualization hypervisor, and today, the product is ready for prime time.
Click here to find out more!
That was a short beta program, wasn't it?
VirtualBox will go down in its history as one of the most popular programs distributed by Sun Microsystems just ahead of its $5.6bn takeover by software giant and hardware wan(not)abe Oracle a few weeks from now.
According to Andy Hall, the senior product manager at Sun who speaks for VirtualBox, Sun was trying to be low-key about the VirtualBox 3.0 beta, but thanks in part to El Reg and a few other trade rags that caught the beta slipping out, Sun got over 25,000 people to download the code in the past two weeks and give it a whirl.
All told, Sun saw over 1 million downloads in both April and May of this year, hitting 14.5 million downloads in total since VirtualBox was launched in October 2007 by German software company Innotek (acquired by Sun in February 2008). Product registrations have crested above 4 million. "The rate of downloads is actually accelerating, and so is the rate of registrations," says Hall, adding that the conversion rate is quite high. "We're really pleased by the snowballing effect."
Sun has not talked about the conversion that perhaps matters most: how many people have opted to pay the piddling $30 per year that Sun charges for tech support on VirtualBox.
As El Reg reported two weeks ago, VirtualBox 3.0 is a major upgrade of the product.
The most important new feature is virtual SMP support that now allows a single VirtualBox guest operating system to span as many as 32 virtual processors on x64 machines. A virtual processor in VirtualBox lingo, I've been told, is one core no matter how many threads it has supporting simultaneous multithreading.
This expanded virtual SMP support for VirtualBox partitions requires VT-x features on Intel's Core and Xeon processors and AMD-V features on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and Opteron processors - and with this expansion, VirtualBox will be able to easily create a single partition on the biggest four-socket x64 iron on the market.
Not that this is practical or desirable considering that a guest partition can only support 16 GB of main memory - 512 MB per core is not a balanced configuration on a 32-core server.
So it's reasonable to assume that one of the next feature Sun (or Oracle) will put into the next VirtualBox release is support for a lot more main memory per guest - at least 64GB and maybe as high as 256GB. Hall was mum on the subject.
VirtualBox 3.0 also has Direct3D 8 and 9 graphics support for applications, which allows design programs, modeling applications, and games to run in guests and make use of these graphics functions from inside guest operating systems. The software also includes support for OpenGL 2.0 graphics, which are supported in Linux, Windows, and Solaris.
VirtualBox is a type 2 hypervisor, rather than a type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor, which means it runs atop Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris (the host environment) and then slices up the CPU, memory, and I/O capacity of the machine to support multiple guest operating systems. (There are lots of different guests, but Mac OS is not one of them because Apple has rules about virtualizing its OS). Hall says that Sun has no plans to create a bare-metal version of VirtualBox, a project that its rival on desktops, Parallels, is taking on, and Citrix is working with Intel to create as well for desktops.
If Sun were not in the process of being subsumed into Oracle, which itself is picking over the carcass of Virtual Iron to make a beefed up version of the Xen hypervisor, Sun might have come to the realization that turning VirtualBox into a type 1 hypervisor is a better idea than trying to cook up another variant of Xen using OpenSolaris as the wrapper for the hypervisor. This is what Sun's xVM Server hypervisor was supposed to be, but now, it is something like nine months late to market and very likely never to see the light of day because if Oracle doesn't need one thing, it is three different Xen hypervisor stacks. The kindest thing to do might be to sell off VirtualBox and let it live by itself. Maybe Oracle will be kind and do that. (OK, you don't have to laugh that hard....)
Hall says that Sun doesn't track how customers are deploying VirtualBox but that anecdotal evidence suggests that it is seeing more and more action on servers. At the recent JavaOne trade show in San Francisco, Sun plunked down a bunch of racks of x64 servers running Solaris 10 and put VirtualBox atop of that Unix to allow it to drive virtualized Windows 7, Ubuntu, or Solaris images from Sun Ray thin clients. Anyone attending JavaOne got a smart card that let them log into the virtual desktop system, and they could pick whatever platform they wanted. Hall says Sun set up the infrastructure so it could generate and manage as many as 21,000 unique desktops over the course of the event, and some 16,000 desktops were created by attendees.
Even with the Oracle acquisition looming, Hall says the Virtual Box team is keeping focused and is getting set to kick off a community-driven Web console project for managing multiple guests across the network. Sun could have - and maybe should have - opted to use xVM OpsCenter, the management tool that was supposed to span all of Sun's different server and desktop virtualization products (dynamic domains, Solaris containers, and logical domains on Sparc boxes and Xen partitions, Solaris containers, and VirtualBox slices on x64 iron).
But with Oracle probably converging around a Xen stack once the Sun deal is done, it is probably time for VirtualBox to get its own management tools. Hall says that VirtualBox 3.0 already has some APIs that have been changed to expose management features and that it will be working with a number of independent projects that have already been started out there on the Web to create a single console written in Python. This project is expected to launch "in a few months," according to Hall.
Provided Oracle doesn't step on it, of course. With VirtualBox being open source, what Oracle does or doesn't do doesn't matter a damned bit. VirtualBox can live on. ®
{quote}
h6. *[CNet: Yahoo redesigns data center, ditches carbon offsets|http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10276103-54.html?tag=mncol]*
{quote}
by Tom Krazit
Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets.
Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent.
Data centers are vital to huge Internet businesses such as Yahoo, and companies throughout this industry have started paying more and more attention to the amount of energy consumed by facilities that can have thousands of servers running all day, every day. Google has talked up its own push for greater efficiency in its data centers, and Microsoft just announced plans for two new data centers geared around energy efficiency.
As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.
Yahoo plans to focus its green strategy on projects such as the Buffalo data center rather than the purchase of offsets, which means it will take them some time to return to the carbon-neutral goal set in 2007. "We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change," Filo wrote.
Corrected at 3:05 p.m.: Yahoo clarified the new data center will be in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo.
{quote}
h6. *[InfoWorld: Google bolsters 3-D API for browser|http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/google-bolsters-3d-api-browser-569]*
{quote}
by Paul Krill
Google this week began offering a "substantial" update to its O3D API for building rich, interactive 3-D applications in a browser, tuning it for different types of hardware.
Highlighted at the Google I/O conference in May and shown running in a Google Chrome browser at that time, O3D enables 3-D graphics and features a JavaScript API. IT began as an effort to establish an open Web standard for 3-D graphics. An update was released Monday.
"With today's release, we focused on addressing a theme we heard in the requests and feedback from the community: That O3D should run as well as possible on many different types of hardware," said Google product manager Henry Bridge in a blog post. "Toward that end, we're releasing two new additions: Software rendering and feature requirements. If you've already installed the O3D plugin, you should receive these additions automatically."
Software rendering lets O3D use the main processor to render 3-D images if the machine running the application does not have supported graphics hardware. The concept of feature requirements, meanwhile, will help minimize how often O3D has to fall back to software rendering.
"Feature requirements allow developers to state upfront that their app will require certain hardware capabilities to render properly. If the machine running the app supports those features, O3D will run it fully hardware accelerated; if however, it is lacking any of the required capabilities, O3D will drop into a software rendered mode," Bridge said.
Other features include a full-screen mode to make O3D applications more absorbing and a community gallery featuring demonstrations that use O3D. Developers can submit applications for inclusion in the gallery.
O3D is intended to use hardware acceleration on a variety of GPU chip sets to provide high-end real-time 3-D graphics on most systems.
{quote}