Ontic Oren

As the first product from Sun to be released under a GPLv3 license, there’s a ton of interest and questions coming up around our Ops Center open source plans. Consider this blog post my attempts to help answer any questions. I’ll queue up a podcast in a few weeks to discuss the open source process and what we’re doing with Ops Center as well. Please let me know any questions you want answered.What we’re open sourcing

• The agentry infrastructure, AKA “CAC” or Common Agent Code. CAC is the basis and building block for the agent itself. This is the first component to be open sourced, and will be available on OpenxVM December 10, 2007
• The agent itself. The agent does the actual work. The agent sits on each managed operating system instance
• The proxy server. The proxy server provides both scalability and network efficiency. It has an embedded DB and a web server.
• The satellite server. This is the main act – where all the UI is performed, the logic, and everything that makes ops center so great.

When we’re open sourcing itTurns out, open sourcing code is hard work. We need to scrub the code for 3rd party, copyright, encumbrances, etc. We need to pull out any non-relevant information. We need to do the actual physical process of getting code outside our firewall. We need to deal with lawyers. All of which means, it takes a while. We’ve been working on it for a few months, and we’ll keep working on it for a few more.Net net – we’re going to do this in phases. To start, we’re releasing the aforementioned CAC on December 10th. This is both a sign of good faith, plus demonstrate our commitment. It gives people a set of code they can start to evaluate and play with, and help expand some of the functionality. As we continue to get the code base approved and in process, we’ll then be in place to release the entire product open source by 2Q 2008 (that’s calendar year, not silly Sun financial year)What about xVM server?It’s already open source! xVM is integrated into every nevada build now. We’re working tightly with the community, and developing this further all the time.If I missed anything, let me know via email or the comments. I’ll either update this post, do another one, or even add it to my next xVM unscripted podcast!

With the stroke of midnight, Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0 is launched to a joyous world.So what is it? It’s a highly scalable datacenter management platform that runs across cross-platform Linux and Solaris OS-based x86 & SPARC systems to help customers improve efficiency, and save time & money by:

• Better managing datacenter consolidation, keeping guest OSes up-to-date and monitoring for virtual assets on a network
• Automating provisioning & updating OS instances (Solaris & Linux) to increase availability & utilization & minimize downtime
• More effectively deploy, manage and monitor security and compliance in IT operations, either locally or remotely

You can see the features here, click the image for a bigger version.There’s a huge amount of cool stuff in here, but one of the enhancements we’ve put in place that I’m most excited about is the new network architecture. It’s cool for a few reasons:

1. Firewall friendly. All communication is up and out, and it’s all XML over HTTPS. So what? This means that the agent talks to the proxy, the proxy to the satellite. And it’s all over the same ports that your network admin already has open, and is managing. No custom firewall rules, no custom network config, no painful installations!
2. Scalability. You can now have hundreds of agents talking to each proxy, and hundreds of proxies talking to each satellite. Put a different proxy in each location, or use multiple in one location to really scale into the thousands of nodes.

So go ahead, check it out!