I recently came across a very interesting application virtualization technology that I thought would be of interest to a number of my readers.  Transitive QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC to Linux X86-64 allows you to wrap a native Solaris application in a virtualization wrapper so that the application can be run on X86 Linux OS.

Transitive’s Henry Kwok, Systems Engineering, explained this best:

“QuickTransit is a cross-platform virtualization solution that allows applications compiled for Solaris/SPARC to run on Linux or Solaris/x86 without any changes to the binary. We use a technology called DBT (Dynamic Binary Translation), which is very similar to Java JITs, i.e. we generate native instruction at run-time and specially optimize the frequently executed portions.

It is important to understand that this product is orthogonal to the VMware virtualization approach, in that we do not migrate entire systems (i.e. OS and everything else), but instead are focused on the application level. There is no Solaris kernel or OS running. Instead systems calls are mapped to Linux systems calls. “

As I have walked around my customers, I notice pockets of Sun boxes here and there. I know customers would love to be able to migrate those systems to their enterprise standard virtualization technology of VMware.  Well, with Transitive it appears that now they can.

(Note:  I have had no direct or indirect experience with Transitive’s technlogy.  Mileage may vary, consult your doctor before starting any excercise regiment, yadda, yadda, yadda…)