I don't see this as anything significant. AFAIK ESX bundled their own OS (a redhat release). So you're at the mercy of the ESX folks for host OS patches and drivers. Do you really think the folks at EMC are interested in applying the latest security patches to their redhat (vmware) distribution, let alone any of the new kernel modules? And I don't see vmware taking advantage of the new VT technology coming out from AMD or Intel. I've used GSX quite extensively, and there's a significan performance hit, not to mention the constant clock sync issues. I wouldn't waste my effort or money on vmware. XEN gives you excellent performance, is VT aware, and allows you to leverage the Host OS features and drivers, which you fully control. I see KVM (kernel virtual machine) as the follow-on to XEN, and it appears both Xen & KVM are using the QEMU drivers for device virtualization. So you create your VM's under XEN, you "should" be able to readily run those under KVM. If you're thinking about Virtualization, Xen & KVM should be at the top of your list, and save vmware for doing your virtualization on a windblows box. »

I don't see this as anything more than Sun trying to look good to the Linux community. I just sat in a meeting with Sun sales rep's receiving a presentation of Sun's new low-end storage server, just a jbod with ZFS. When I mentioned that we were a Linux shop and converting our existing Solaris systems to Linux (RHEL to be exact), all I got was a song & dance about how Solaris was better, and that Sun contributed to the open source community with open Solaris. Has anybody look at open Solaris? It's pretty lame. And even after all these years, they still don't have a comprehensive admin interface, like YAST. (admin console doesn't qualify as a comprehensive admin interface) Sun HAD to build ZFS, they were loosing their lunch to Veritas. Even AIX and HPUX has some form of sysadm. I don't see how anything that Sun has could be a valuable contribution to the open source team. »