Charon-SSP Legacy SPARC Emulator

Charon-SSP/4M/4U/4V are members of the Charon cross-platform hardware virtualization product family. Charon-SSP creates the virtual replica of the original SPARC hardware inside a standard 64-bit x86 compatible computer system. It will run the original SPARC binary code, including operating systems like SunOS / Solaris, their layered products, and applications.

Charon-SSP/4M/4U/4V is designed to replace the following SPARC computer systems with their virtual equivalents running on a Linux host platform:

• Charon-SSP/4M – Sun-4m/V8 1/4
• Charon-SSP/4U – Sun-4u/V9 1/24
• Charon-SSP/4V – Sun-4v/V9 1/64

Original Sun-4m/V8, Sun-4u/V9, and Sun-4v/V9 hardware is virtualized, allowing the SunOS or Solaris operating system and all software that is running in that environment to remain working as always. Very few changes to the original software (operating system, layered products, or applications) are required, and their management routines remain the same.

Version 5.4 now available!

Updates to version 5.4 include:

• Redesign of graphic card emulation remote rendering, eliminating the open-source dependency
• Added support for Rocky Linux
• New suspend & resume function in SSP/4V
• SCSI EFI booting in SSP/4V
• More virtual Ethernet cards in SSP/4V
• BGE emulation in SSP/4U
• Floppy emulation in SSP/4U
• Several minor bug fixes

SPARC CPU & System

Charon-SSP virtualizes the 32-bit Sun-4m/V8 platform, 64-bit Sun-4u/V9 and Sun-4v/V9 platforms. Due to the overhead of emulation, a performance evaluation must be performed for fast SPARC platforms such as the M-, T-and S-series servers to determine if the emulator can deliver the necessary performance. The legacy SPARC emulator software layer presents almost all virtual onboard devices to the upper layer, from the Solaris/SunOS operating system to the applications.

A separate RPM installer is provided to allow the product to be installed on a standard Linux distribution, such as Red Hat Linux or Fedora. Charon-SSP works well with mainstream virtualization solutions and products like VMware, Oracle VM, etc.

Management Application

Charon Manager is an integrated component of the Charon-SSP product. It provides an easy-to-use and intuitive graphical interface to manage Charon-SSP and virtual SPARC systems either
locally or remotely. Charon Manager can be installed as a standalone application on Linux or Windows, and it works as the virtual SPARC management station.

Improved Performance

Charon-SSP utilizes Stromasys’ unique dynamic instruction translation technology (i.e., DIT) to
improve runtime SPARC instruction execution speed. This DIT technology and carefully designed architecture bring the virtual SPARC system’s performance to an accepted level.

Product License Key

Charon-SSP supports both hardware license keys and software licenses. Users can select the preferred protection method. When a hardware USB license key is used, the Charon USB HASP license key must be permanently connected to the host system. It preserves the customer-specific license parameters.