This article made me want to take about a 5 hour shower! Windows on a Sun box? BLASPHEMY! Somebody is going to smoke a great fat turd in hell for that!

My favourite McNealyism was "In a world without walls who needs windows? In a world without fences who needs gates?"

If we are looking at Green IT, Green DC, it may be a good idea if Sun allows Windows guest OS on Solaris boxes and Windows does vice-versa with its virtualization host.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=712

http://virtualization.sys-con.com/read/428562.htm

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206902810

There are companies like Transitive who are leaders in cross platform virtualization and there is market for reusing components of your infrastructure and appliations on newer systems, if such coexistence is allowed.

Why have a less optimally loaded Sun Server AND a Windows Server - instead why can't one have the same Solaris Server run Windows server as a guest or vice-versa? I

n the current age of mergers and acquisitions, companies do land up with diverse hardware and applications where both sides of the company may need to use some such applications and infrastructure optimally. Who said having redundant hardware was cheap? Now if a customer can reuse servers instead of buying new for DR and FT, they could use a Solaris guest sitting on windows host and vice versa - won't they be happier and the world a little more greener?

http://www.transitive.com/

There is a way round this which doesnt need MS and Sun to get a room... Don't use windows servers. Almost everything you can do on windows can be done on Solaris (or some flavour of Linux). There will even be Active Directory available on them soon, and if you don't want to wait a better solution can be created using a mixture of Samba, LDAP and a few others anyway. Use of IMAP and LDAP can replace exchange, MySQL and PostgreSQL are much better than MS SQL (Faster, lighter weight...) the list goes on.

I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, and I sound like another Linux/Unix fanboy, but I realy do not see the need for Windows servers. I hate them with a passion, as they make everything more difficult. I see a point for windows on a workstation, but a server?

Paris Hilton because she's not bloated

To parody a rather witty AC from slashdot*, "... the stability of Windows with the value-of-money of Sun hardware. Sign me up."

* said in response to apple's boot camp

Sun do make good hardware, so if MS is going into datacentres then Sun would rather it was on their boxes than Dell or HP.

Sun do seem to have lost the plot on the software front though. They (or they + foss) have all the bits they need to totally oust Windows but they just haven't put it together yet (and we've been waiting a long time).

I'd hope that extra hardware sales would give them the income boost to put in some more s/w R&D 'till they get a clue and, come the time, lots of sun boxes would be already in the racks ripe for conversion.

But my synical side knows they'll see the profit increase as a sign that all is hunky-dorey and will do stuff all.

Paris, Dumb Blonde, nuff said.

"....Almost everything you can do on windows can be done on Solaris...." You missed the main point here - EVERYTHING you might want to do on Solaris x86 can already be done better on Linux.

" You missed the main point here - EVERYTHING you might want to do on Solaris x86 can already be done better on Linux."

And RH Linux already runs as a branded zone inside solaris x86. Pretty soon Linux and Windows will run as Xen guests with solaris as the OS serving as a host.