Xen lures big-name endorsements

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said. And IBM has expressed interest in moving it to the Power chip, Schlaeger said.

Among operating systems, the NetBSD variant of Unix works on Xen--and the version was done so quickly, Pratt said, that XenSource hired the NetBSD programmer who did the work, Christian Limpach.

And Sun's Solaris--which the company has begun aggressively pushing for x86 servers--is another likely candidate, said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's network systems group. "We think the open-source virtual hypervisor is the way to go," he said. (Hypervisor is a term IBM is trying to trademark referring to a layer of software that lets hardware be divided up so multiple operating systems can run on it.)

The IBM connection
Sources familiar with IBM's plans expect Big Blue to play a significant part in Xen. The company has decades of experience in the field with mainframes, Unix servers and Intel-based servers.

Although IBM has a sales and development partnership with VMware, it also has an in-house hypervisor project for x86 chips--a project that came to light in a January posting to the Xen mailing list. Researchers in IBM's labs were using it as a foundation for a project called sHype, or Secure Hypervisor, to make virtual machines less susceptible to attack. The software uses rules that govern administrative privileges and the flow of information between virtual machines.

"We now plan to contribute this to Xen by integrating our security architecture into it," IBM researcher Reiner Sailer said in the posting. Pratt responded favorably in his posting: "It'll be great to have IBM contributing to Xen security."

That's not all. One source familiar with IBM's plans said the company expects to contribute software for two key computing technologies--input-output services for communicating with devices such as network cards and virtual memory for extending physical memory using hard drives.

Despite the Xen support, IBM reaffirmed its VMware ties Thursday. "IBM has a strong and vital business relationship with VMware. That relationship is stronger than it's ever been," said spokesman Jim Larkin.

VMware, for its part, labels Xen a "nascent" virtualization project that's hampered by its requirement that the operating system be modified. "Xen will not be very useful for the overwhelming majority of customers that have deployed standard Linux operating systems today," VMware said in a statement.

But VMware--combined with Intel's VT technology and Microsoft's competing Virtual Server--faces a definite threat, Haff said.

VMware has higher-level VirtualCenter and VMotion management software, Haff said, but the core virtualization product is crucial to the subsidiary. "It's where most of their money comes from today," Haff said.