T1 Hypervisor and Logical Domains

Many people may not remember, but when the T1 was announced, it was stated it had a built-in hypervisor. Of course, now lots of people have their T1000's and T2000's. It would appear that Sun will release at some point a firmware upgrade to enable this feature to create Logical Domains so you can carve up a T1 based server. Each LDOM will have it's own OBP instance and act just like a normal Solaris SPARC environment. The kicker is that this is all in firmware! This is not Zones or Xen. I see this as a huge step in the right direction for Sun and can only hope that it gets released soon. Here's an interesting article on the subject that gives a good idea of what will be possible. I especially like the slide on page 3 that shows CPU, Memory, and *I/O* being virtualized with the next version of Solaris. I'm really interested in finding out more about these features. With these kinds of features in such a small package, it opens up a lot of possibilities for virtualization and consolidation. With the ability to have LDOM's running different versions of Solaris (10, 10u2, Solaris Express, etc) and run zone's inside of those domains is really interesting. This could benefit developers, engineers, and of course production environments. When the Niagara II servers come out, the performance will be there to take this to the next level. Of course, we'll all have to wait and see how this will unfold.

NOTE: If Sun needs a beta tester, I'm available:)