KVM OpenSolaris

Although I deleted my old OpenSolaris VirtualBox VM, I thought I'd see if KVM could handle the last OpenSolaris 134 development release.
KVM worked work, it installed very well and runs fast. What impressed me the most was the 134 build itself. Everything was updated and better than the older 2008.05 release I was stuck using at work (My Xeon CPU would not boot the 2009.06 release, build 118 and above seem okay).
The Package Manager looks wonderful. I'm using it to install SunStudioExpress, to explore the new developer features.
I think that I will keep this VM around and reload Solaris 11 into it whenever that gets released.
I find that it is always useful to use compilers from different platforms to check the correctness of your code, and Sun Studio is a good compiler.

Migrating to KVM

I've begun the process of migrating to the KVM virtualisation technology. I did have some reservations about it initially, because I felt that we should not have to deal with full machine VMs running legacy OSs like Windows and instead new VM technology should be focusing on para-virtualising many copies of GNU/Linux.
But I have been trying out KVM with each new GNU/Linux distribution and finally it is getting good. The speed and technology have always been good but the GUI side was lacking, but it has greatly improved.

On my Fedora 13 x64 system, KVM is very fast at creating brand new VMs. But what to do with my VMs that I have built up on VirtualBox ?

So far I've migrated 3 VMs using a command like this :

$ cd $HOME/.VirtualBox/VDI
$ qemu-img convert CentOS4_32-bit.vdi -O qcow2 CentOS4.qcow2

This will convert the VDI file into qcow2 for use in KVM. I'm sure that they are better ways to do this, but it worked for me for 3 VMs so far.

I miss a few features from VirtualBox, mostly the save current state which saves the VM and closes it all down, like a hibernate. I miss the graphical performance of VirtualBox which is fast. The Shared Folder support is also great.

But KVM is developing rapidly. The performance is great and much faster than any other VM product that I have tried. I can't wait to see how KVM develops in the future.

OpenSolaris is killed off

I have been sad to see the demise of Sun. They were one of my favourite companies and were the leading innovators of UNIX. They gave so much to the industry and redefined it in so many ways.

With the new of the demise of OpenSolaris, I have deleted my OpenSolaris partition at work and deleted my VirtualBox VMs of OpenSolaris 2009.06 x64. It looks like they will have a Solaris 11 Express in the future but I'm not sure if I will try that.

The Register: OpenSolaris killed off

Oracle's attitude seems to have turn sour with news like this :
BBC News: Oracle sue Google
Will they be suing MS next for .NET ? which is just a Windows-specific copy of Java and the JVM.
How safe are MySQL, OpenOffice and VirtualBox?