Sun is entering into an agreement to buy desktop virtualisation firm Innotek

Sun has announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement for desktop virtualisation vendor Innotek. Sun said the acquisition would allow its xVM platform to be expanded onto desktop systems.

Sun Software executive vice president Rich Green said, “Innotek’s VirtualBox would complement our recently announced Sun xVM Server platform, designed for the datacentre.”

Innotek’s open source VirtualBox package allows desktops and laptops to run Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris OSes side-by-side and would compete with Citrix’s XenDesktop software, Microsoft’s Virtual PC package and VMware’s Workstation product.

“VirtualBox will align perfectly with Sun’s other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects, enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next generation of applications," added Green.

Currently supported guest OSes on VirtualBox includes all versions Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Linux 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, Solaris x86, OS/2, Netware and DOS.