Oracle will soon be announcing that it’s discontinuing development of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Sun Ray software and hardware, and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client product lines.

https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/important_information_about_oracle_desktop

http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-to-halt-development-of-sun-virtualization-technologies-7000018028/

Solaris 10 update 11 is available now.

Get it here:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/solaris10/overview/index.html

Solaris 11 GA released

Today marks the release of Oracle Solaris 11, the first cloud OS.

Oracle Solaris 11 delivers ground-breaking features for secure and agile deployment of services in large scale cloud environments and enterprise data centers. With over 4,000 different new features, Oracle Solaris 11 raises the bar on enterprise operating systems. Oracle Solaris 11 is 7 years in the making and a whole new set of capabilities, from advanced network virtualization to high performance cryptography and virtualization, dependency aware software packing and installation technologies.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/whats-new/index.html

Download: http://oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.htm

Release Notes: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19963-01/index.html#release-info

Documentation: http://oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/documentation/index.html

According to this post by Joerg Moellenkamp, Oracle Premier Support for Solaris on HP servers is once again available, with purchase options through HP and directly from Oracle as well. HP’s Solaris Support Matrix is here.

It seems a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth could have been avoided if someone at Oracle had just said “We’re reworking the OEM agreements, give us a month or two.”

According to this Register article, IBM is ceasing sales of Solaris 10 on its x86-64 hardware as of August 27th. It is not clear at this time whether Oracle has pulled IBM’s OEM license (as it did with HP), or if IBM is making this change on its own. Dell is now the only remaining third-party vendor of Solaris on x86 hardware.

Oracle has announced some new x86 servers and other hardware.

* The X4800 is an 6RU 8-socket Xeon 7600 system with up to 1TB of RAM and 4 or 8 CPUs.
* The X4470 is a 3RU 4-socket Xeon 7500 system with up to 512GB of RAM and up to 4 CPUs.
* The X4270M2 is a 2RU 2-socket Xeon 5600 system with up to 144G of RAM and two CPUs.
* The X4170M2 is a 1RU 2-socket Xeon 5600 system with up to 144G of RAM and two CPUs.

Also announced were new blade CPU cards, network expansion modules, and the 1U Sun 72port 10G Ethernet switch.

According to this Heise Online article (in German), new machines using the Xeon 5600 and 7500 CPUs will be announced next week by John Fowler, Sun Vice-President of Systems.

According to this Register article, Oracle has cancelled HP’s OEM contact to distribute, sell, and support Solaris on HP Proliant x64 systems.

From HP’s notification:

As you may have heard, Oracle has exercised its right to terminate HP’s Solaris technical support agreement. If you have purchased Solaris 10 Subscriptions and Software Technical Support for HP ProLiant servers from HP, then you will continue to receive subscription support from Oracle and technical support from HP for the period of your contract. You will be able to purchase 1 and 3 year Solaris 10 Subscriptions and Support from HP until July1, 2010. No renewals will be accepted after this date. HP will deliver technical support through June 30, 2013. After that date, HP will no longer be in a position to provide Solaris technical support.
Additionally, starting with ProLiant G7 servers, HP will no longer certify and support Solaris on ProLiant. Solaris certified and supported ProLiant G6 servers will support up to Solaris 10 10/09 or Update 8 for the standard hardware support period (5 years from the date of shipment).

Oracle’s OEM agreement for Solaris on Dell hardware remains in effect.

Sun has released a new version of VirtualBox, its free desktop virtualization software.

“VirtualBox 3.1 introduces the virtualization industry’s first “Teleportation” capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved, uninterrupted between disparate hosts – including those on different operating systems, different classes of computer (e.g. server to client) and even different CPUs (e.g. Intel to AMD).”

Sun released new Open Systems products today, all powered by the Intel Xeon 5500-series processors (except for the Ultra 27, which has a Xeon 3500-series CPU).

* Sun Blade X6270 bladeserver module
* Sun Blade X6275 bladeserver module
* Sun Fire X2270 server
* Sun Fire X4170 server
* Sun Fire X4270 server
* Sun Fire X4275 server
* Sun Ultra 27 workstation

All of these new systems and blade modules have Flash-based solid state disks (SSDs) as a supported option.

This article describes Sun’s $30M deal with Australia’s BOM to build a supercomputer cluster.

Located at BOM in Melbourne and the ANU in Canberra, the HPC environments will have more than 2500 Sun Blade (1500 at ANU, 1000 at BOM) server modules based on the new Intel “Nehalem” Xeon processor.

Hewlett-Packard and Sun have today announced an agreement that enables HP to distribute and support Solaris 10 on HP ProLiant and blade server systems.

Jonathan Schwartz also has a blog entry about this announcement.

I’m in need of four 1G PC2700 or PC3200 DDR memory sticks so that I can get an Ultra 20 up and running here at SunHELP.

Update: Thanks to Jerry K. for his gracious donation that will enable me to buy four good 1G sticks from NewEgg.

Sun has announced that the WikiMedia Foundation will be using SunFire x4150 and x4500 servers along with StorageTek storage arrays to expand its infrastructure.

Update: Jonathan Schwartz has some thoughts on this announcement.

Sun has relesed the Sun Storage 7000 series of unified storage systems. The systems use a “hybrid storage pool” consisting of solid state disks, hard disk drives, and RAM to improve performance over traditional HDD-only units.

The Sun Storage 7110 has 8GB of RAM and provides 2TB of storage in a 2U form factor.

The Sun Storage 7210 provides up to 44TB of storage in a 4U form factor.

The Sun Storage 7410 scales up to 576TB with multiple expansion arrays.

In addition, Sun has released a simulator for the units as a VMWare virtual machine image.