The icon has finally changed, see below for the old and new:

With the update comes a raft of new features including:

• Latest Intel hardware support
• Large Page support
• In-hypervisor Networking
• Storage I/O subsystem
• Remote Video Acceleration
• Page Fusion
• Memory Ballooning
• Hot-plug CPU’s
• Virtual SAS Controller
• Online Snapshot Merging
• OVF Enhancements
• Guest Automation
• USB Keyboard and Mouse
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5
• Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”)
• Mac OS X – On Apple hardware only

The client is called the Oracle Sun Ray 3 Plus and boasts the following features:

• Low power consumption (typically around 14W)
• 4 x USB 2 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet
• SFP (all Form Pluggable) fibre optic module for use with 1000 SX, 1000 LX, or 100 FX fibre optic connectors
• 2 x DVI connectors
• 2560 x 1600 resolution for a single display or 5120 x 1600 for two displays
• Smart card reader

One big jump from the older Sun Ray 2 hardware is the gigabit Ethernet, with it’s greater transfer speeds, this makes the four USB 2 ports possible.  Clients around the globe will be very happy with that.

The standard Sun Ray 2 supported a 1600 x 1200 resolution, even the Sun Ray 2FS client only supported 1920 x 1200 or 3840 x 1200 resolutions.  The Sun Ray 3 plus has a massively higher resolution with a single monitor supporting 2560 x 1600 or a dual monitor setup supporting 5120 x 1600 resolution thanks to the more powerful graphics card and the two DVI ports.

The fibre connectors are nothing new, they were present on the old Sun Ray 2FS and, of course, the standard smart card reader.

The only negative thing I have to say about this new hardware is that it takes up around 10W more than it’s predecessor.

I like the fact that Oracle have released this, it shows that they are committed (at least in the immediate future) to Sun Ray and the Sun Ray software.  I’d love to see one of these things, they should really help push Sun Rays into the workplace as a very viable alternative to those lumps of metal on everyones desks!

I think this is a much better acquisition than what IBM offered, personally, I think IBM were looking to buy up competition, Oracle have a number of reasons to buy Sun as I see it:

• Expanding the business into new markets means more fingers in more pies, hopefully those pies have got meat in them otherwise you’ve wasted your time.
• Fishworks, the ability to create appliances.
• A large base of customers running Oracle on Solaris and Sun kit.
• Solaris technologies such as ZFS and DTrace

The Oracle site has an amount of information for existing customers etc. It can be found here.
There is a discussion over at opensolaris.org which echo’s some of my thoughts, found here.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but it’s going to be an odd couple of months these last two working for Sun/Oracle.  I’m glad this has happened while I was on an industrial year, I’ve gained the experience of a potential take-over and that of a take-over with little risks attached for me, far more than I can say if it happens in a couple of years time when I potentially have mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay!

My weekly blog will continue, due Friday, I will expand on the other events of today and probably link to this article…