Dibbler's Net

Symantec last year really tried to enter the Server Provisioning and Data Center Management with it’s product of Veritas Provisioning Manager 5.x Since 2007 Symantec has really stalled on Unix software development and features. I mentioned this before when comparing Clustering software. It really seems that Symantec has lost it’s vision on what used to be Veritas’ core markets.

So Friday I had the opportunity to see Sun’s upgrade to their N1 product. The new Sun xVM Provisioning. Now xVM to Sun is a category of products including the recent buy of VirtualBox. For anyone who had to use N1 you will be amazed at where Sun has come. The demo I saw was the 1.1 version of the Product.

So in comparison xVM does almost everything VPM does. It does lack full drive imaging that VPM has. But in real life use we had issues with that VPM feature. For bare metal provisioning xVM supports software they give you for remote proxies that do DHCP, BOOTP, and all the other needs for remote network OS imaging. They also support direct IPMI for handling auto server reboots and remote firmware updates (which is a really nice feature).

xVM will also support LDOM’s and zone’s in 2.0 which VPM still won’t really support at all and doesn’t plan on it. It also had real issues with T1000 hardware and it’s mini-os. There is also alot riding on the new Knowledge base portion they plan to have in 2.0.

Overall both products do OS installs using Jumpstart but xVM does it a bit better. They will both push software and run custom scripts. Both will do rollbacks but in a very different way. I liked what I saw for compliance reporting by xVM but the ability to do file level system and image comparisons worked well in VPM.

Overall Sun showed off a really nice version 1 product that almost makes you forget how complicated N1 provisioning was. At the same time look how few updates or new features are coming from Symantec in an area that should be dynamic and constantly growing right now. A year ago Symantec said that the Datacenter was their big core market moving forward. Somehow we just haven’t seen this happen.

This is now the second Sun vs Symantec product look I have done. So am I just hating Symantec and loving on Sun ? I would say no. I think that like many large corporate buys Symantec bought Veritas for a core group of products and customers. It seems that Unix and Datacenter were not that core. Sun on the other hand is going into a second life of sorts on putting out good hardware and challenging the software market. Right now no one is really challenging them in this area. Remember at one point people declared Sun dead and was asking who would buy them.

D~

Caveat. The opinions above are my personal thoughts. I have used VPM 5.x and have seen a product demo of xVM 1.1 so I haven’t gotten as deep and dirty into xVM.