Is the day coming...

... when you will be able to run Windows on top of Solaris x64, just like you can run Windows on top of Linux using VMWare today? As of today, Solaris is supported only as a guest operating system under VMWare.

If Solaris can be a host operating system to another OS, then it is possible to use some of the Solaris features on the hosted OS. For example, today, it is possible to use DTrace on a Linux system running on a Solaris BrandZ Zone. In a similar fashion, if one can run Windows on top of Solaris, it is then possible for Windows to indirectly take advantage of features such as DTrace and ZFS. And with things like resource management, it then becomes possible to cap the resources used by that instance of the Windows OS. The thought of being able to do this excites me no end. :)

Anyway, I've always wondered what Sun is going to do in this area. A few years ago, we had a product called SunPCi. This product is a combination of hardware and software. The hardware component was a card that goes into a SPARC box. This card had an AMD processor. With this hardware/software combination, one can then install Windows and some Linux distros on top of Solaris. It was similar to VMWare in so many ways. I used SunPCi a lot and I loved it.

When Solaris x86/64 was announced, I thought that Sun would then take the SunPCi software component and make it run on Solaris x64/86. But that has not happened.

Then, last October, ThinGuy mentioned that Sun is working with Win4Lin. Today, I see this.

Hmmm.... win4solaris, anyone?