Guys, do you intend to offer more support for Sun Solaris? Specifically, support for Solaris Containers/xVM Server & Sun’s Web Server (Java Web Server) would be GREAT! Sun’s web server is highly optimized & performs better than Apache. It is also free & I believe is in the process of being open-sourced. It will also take advantage of Sun’s layer 7 caching technology to speed up webserving even more. I think with the open-source push of linux people have forgotten, or never knew, just how great solaris & sun hardware is for webserving on a massive scale.
Jamie and I are both big fans of Solaris. (Jamie has worked with it for ages…I’m relatively new to it, but I’m fond of zones and ZFS.)
So, VM2 (our new cloud computing control panel) has great support for Zones, and ZFS is already (mostly) supported by Webmin’s filesystem related modules. So, on that front, it’s pretty solid already.
On Java and Sun’s web server…well, we haven’t been hearing from customers that Java would be a valuable addition (one or two folks…but nothing like the clamoring we heard for Ruby on Rails and Django), so it’s never made it to the front burner. I have been following the JVM-based languages like Rhino, jRuby and Jython with interest…Somehow Java seems like it ought to fit nicely into our products (and, once again, Jamie is a long-time Java user), but we haven’t really gotten a good solid feel for what people want from Java in Virtualmin.
New web server support is a tough one–it’s so deeply integrated into Virtualmin, and it’s the most complex part of the job, that adding new ones is a huge undertaking. We’ve had quite a lot of interest in both LigHTTPD and nginx (and this is the first I’ve heard anyone mention Sun’s web server–most Java-related requests have been for Tomcat), but the complexity of that task means we’d need to be hiring an additional developer, and we’re not quite in a position to do that. We’ll see how things shake out over the next couple of months–revenue has been going up pretty steadily. Maybe we’ll see the budget reach the tipping point for hiring another dev soon.
Joe, thanks for the response. How can we get ahold of VM2 to play with? I’ve been experimenting with enomalism for a while now but it would be nice to have said features all in one product. Also, the Java Web Server from Sun is more marketing than anything in terms of the name. It is the continuation of the old Netscape Web Server that Sun bought YEARS ago. Sun, just likes to put Java in the name of anything. Though, it does have a built-in Java app server.
I don’t want to bash linux (well, I do… but that’s due to my background in environments where stability & security & support are important above all… nothing like an hour of downtime costing $50k in profit) but, I have always felt that Solaris by design was a better platform for webhosting enterprises. While linux is great for learning & for the labs it really isn’t quite “there” yet when you put it against the big boys.