The new virtualization capabilities are part of the ongoing Xen open-source project, which allows multiple operating systems, including Linux and Solaris, to run simultaneously on the same hardware. Sun also plans to include system management technologies to provide tools for systems administrators to configure and run the virtualization features.

Xen support is expected to be built into Solaris 10 by September 2006.

The Solaris Containers for Linux features are also expected to be integrated into Solaris 10 by then, according to Sun. Using containers, an application written for Red Hat Linux will 'appear' to be running on a Red Hat system. But it will actually be running in a special segmented container on a Solaris kernel. The container feature will be ready for OpenSolaris by the end of this year.

Asked if containers are being developed for use with other operating systems such as SUSE Linux and Debian, Weinberg said additional containers can be expected over time. 'There's quite a bit of interest in the BSD community to run BSD applications on top of Solaris,' he said.

The integration of the open-source Postgres database into Solaris 10 is being done in part to allow Sun customers to get direct support from Sun for the database, rather than having to strictly rely on the Postgres community for help, according to the company. Initially, Postgres will be available as a download from Sun, but it will be integrated into the operating system next year. Weinberg said that certain attributes of Postgres made it the most suitable database to include, but said other integrated databases will likely be included in the future.