Let’s do a little something different. Today’s headlines are based on tweets from folks that are followed by and/or follow @ecoINSITE. You should follow them too.

Will Oracle kill Sun virtualization too? – SearchServerVirtualization Blog via @ColinSteele

On one hand, the future doesn’t look good for Sun virtualization. In the wake of the acquisition by Oracle — which is expected to close this summer — Sun has backed down on its plans to offer its xVM Server as a standalone hypervisor. It will only be available as part of the xVM Ops Center management console or the OpenSolaris operating system (but not the commercial version of Solaris).

Smart Grid Cyber War Games Test Security Risks – TreeHugger via @JaymiHeimbuch

During the month of July, the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC) is going to start up “cyberwar games” with utilities to test out the security of the power grid in general, with an eye on security issues for the smart grid. There are already concerns that spies have been able to hack into the power grid. Getting Ender’s Game with the grid will help determine how vulnerable computer networks running our power supplies are, and how breachable the smart grid may be.

VMware updates its virtual appliance authoring tool – InfoWorld via @VMDigest

A major addition with this version is the support added for the next generation of virtual appliances, being dubbed by VMware as vApps. First introduced at VMworld last year, a vApp is a pre-built software solution consisting of multiple virtual machines, packaged and maintained as a single entity in the DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

Europe’s Largest Grid Project Moves Closer to Cloud-style Computing – Virtualization Journal via @cloudnomics

EGEE currently provides resources to many scientific domains, each of these domains has different computational requirements and application environments. RESERVOIR offers the ability for EGEE sites to easily meet the changing needs of the users, from scaling-up services to meet peak loads and improving redundancy, to changing the resources provided to run particular applications. The RESERVOIR virtualisation manager builds on the open source project OpenNebula which has been developed at the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Clear Standards under SAP: more than a module – Manufacturing Business Technology via @sustainableIT

Clear Standards has three main functions in its on-demand software: data consolidation; analysis; and the ability to act on policies and reporting. In this latter sense, the solution helps execute sustainability programs, so it’s more than a specialized BI offering. But the overall point is that enterprise carbon management requires a heavy dose of BI functionality. An end-user company or consulting firm might be able to build that, but the value proposition of a vendor like Clear Standards is that this functionality is largely prebuilt.