Summary of the new feature in Opensolaris 2009.06

Peter Dennis created a nice presentation for Community One, about the new features in OpenSolaris 2009.06

Have a look: wikis.sun.com

3MobileTV now in HD

A small update on 3MobileTV on my G1. I mentioned two weeks ago, that the 3MobileTV live-streams are working on my G1, but only the non-HD versions.

After upgrading the firmware to 1.5, I tried the HD-streams again. I use the firmware from JF, perhaps there is some additional magic in it, but with this firmware, the HD-streams are working fine!
HD is really a big difference, my G1 screen seems now a lot larger :)

My next wish is now, some kind of buffering. Because atm, it seems there is no buffering at all. If there is a performance issue, the player stucks and sometimes you have to restart the stream.

Oracle buys Virtual Iron

Oracle did it again, they bought one of the last available Xen specialists on the virtualization market. Today, they announced the acquirement of Virtual Iron.

Now, Oracle owns three Xen-based virtualization solutions: Oracle VM, xVM-Server and Virtual Iron. It seems clear, that Xen is the strategic virtualization technology for them. Which could mean, that Xen has a great future, although Redhat, Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions use the rival technology KVM.

But, I have to say, I don't feel very well after reading the announcement (FAQ):

. . .
How will Virtual Iron fit into Oracle’s overall virtualization management strategy?

The combination of Oracle and Virtual Iron supports Oracle’s strategy to provide complete, full stack management across the virtual and physical enterprise and is expected to provide customers with comprehensive and dynamic virtualization management. The combined suite of products is expected to simplify the deployment and configuration of physical servers, virtual machines, and applications while providing a highly available platform for hosting Oracle software and other enterprise applications. In addition, dynamic virtualization management software will help maintain virtual machine performance, improve data center utilization, and optimize power consumption. Virtual Iron combined with Oracle VM and Enterprise Manager, is expected to provide a functionally rich virtualization management product suite that can efficiently manage the entire software stack across virtual and physical environments to make applications easier to deploy, manage, and support.
...

Oracle Enterprise Manager should be extended to manage Xen virtual machines?
"... management across the virtual and physical enterprise ..."? - Wait I've heart about it, ... Sun xVM Ops Center! Right?, Not?

I really don't know Oracle Enterprise Manager, but according to this press release, it sounds, that Oracle Enterprise Manager should become very similar to Sun xVM Ops Center.

xVM Ops Center 2.1 is today in a quite good shape, but xVM-Server is only as beta available, I guess it well take some time, until it's ready.

Another interesting question for Oracle's virtualization strategy is: Will they use Linux for the Xen dom0 or their own Solaris, in the future? ATM, Linux is used by Oracle VM and Virtual Iron. Solaris is used for xVM-Server. Solaris in dom0 would mean: ZFS, Dtrace, SMF, FM, Crossbow and a lot more great Solaris technologies, but does it matter for Oracle?

There are potential conflicts with the xVM portfolio, a clear roadmap for virtualization, especially for xVM, is strongly needed. Oracle, Sun are you listening?

3MobileTV on Android G1

I guess, I'm one of the very few G1 owner with drei.at (Hutchison 3G Austria) as provider. But in my opinion this is really a winning team. Beside the quite cheap contract, they offer interesting services, like MobileTV.

I recognized a few months ago, that drei.at offers for their 3G data-contracts a few free live-streams for watching TV on notebooks. They offer ORF1,ORF2, BBC World,ATV,PULS4, Red Bull Tv... and many more channels. If you visit http://www.drei.at on a notebook with a 3G modem from drei.at you could watch the live-streams in the Quicktime file format (*.mov).

So I was looking for quicktime streaming support for android, unsuccessfully.

Today, I had the idea, to look for the mobile portal website "Planet3". With the help of Google, I found it. Please keep in mind, that this URLs only work with a contract from drei.at:

• http://mobile.drei.at

And more important the MobileTV portal:

• http://mobile.drei.at/mobiletv/

The live-streams there, work out out the box, RTCP is used for the protocol and 3gp for the file format. So it's very similar to youtube mobile, which is also supported on android.

You need a proper 3G connection, for a nice watching experience. There are also HD live-streams, but they don't work fluently. I don't now if it's because of my connection quality or my G1. Perhaps the HD streams work better with Android 1.5.

The screen size is also pretty usable.