T2000 Logical Domains
Well, Sun have announced it and it is linked from the frontpage of Sun.com.
A hardware virtualisation product for the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers (Niagara CPUs) will be shipping early next year. There’s not a great deal of info available for this yet, but Sun internal guys will know that this is what I did my TOI on a few weeks ago. Using an early internal preview of the Logical Domains software I had a T1000 in our lab running multiple copies of the Solaris operating system.
The Niagara CPU has a hardware virtualisation layer called the “Hypervisor” that presents an abstracted view of the system devices to guest OSes (this info has been available for quite some time on opensparc.net and the Solaris ON source). Using this and some updated system firmwares the machine can be logically partitioned allowing multiple (different) kernels to run on the same hardware. The good news is that any operating system that will currently run on a non-LDoms Niagara box will also be capable of running on an LDoms version—in fact, as far as the OS is aware nothing has changed, as it is already running beneath the Hypervisor.
I’m not 100% sure what has been announced right now, so I’ll leave it at that. I’ll add a little more info at a later date when I know exactly what is/isn’t public information. Either way, keep your eyes open :)
Tags: computing