There’s no doubt that VMware is still the top virtualization player, but the upcoming Q4 2008 will highlight in a crystal clear way that it’s no more the only player available.

The landscape is being reshaped by several major vendors trying to erode the VMware leadership with different strategies:

• Citrix is targeting the enterprises with a comprehensive product portfolio for application delivery and highly specific features: the Xen-based hypervisor (XenServer), the management layer (XenCenter), the desktop and application virtualization platform (XenApp), the VDI broker (XenDesktop) and much more.
• Microsoft just started targeting its SMB customer base with competitive pricing, extended support policies, massive interoperability agreements and an impressive number of converging products: its new hypervisor (Hyper-V), its new application virtualization and streaming platform (App-V), the upcoming new management layer (SCVMM 2008), the backup layer (DPM 2007), the performance monitoring layer (SCOM 2007) and more.
• Novell is including new products in its portfolio to extend its capability to sell virtualization outside the Linux world: a new high-performance virtualization platform based on the Xen hypervisor, P2V migration and capacity planning tools (acquired by PlateSpin) integrated with its ZENworks management layer, and a brand new application virtualization platform (offered through the OEM agreement with Xenocode).
• Oracle is recalling its own customer base with a strict support policy and a new, free of charge hypervisor based on Xen: Oracle VM.
• Parallels is working to release its first bare-metal hypervisor, strongly focusing on the Apple market and on the hosting segment, where it has a real leadership.
• Red Hat just found a unique opportunity to conquer an important side of the market, switching from Xen to KVM and buying the valuable VDI startup Qumranet.
• Sun is about to put on the table the most complete computing stack for virtualization, from servers and storage to hypervisor (xVM Server) and management (Ops Center), passing through VDI (Sun VDI).
• Virtual Iron continues to focus on the SMB market with a high quality virtual infrastructure and key new features.
  While it is the smallest vendor in this list but also the one of the most experienced. Acquiring its Xen-based hypervisor may represent the last cheap opportunity to enter the virtualization market for a big firm (IBM, HP, Dell, Symantec, Quest and few others).

Sun just released a new major version of its desktop virtualization product, VirtualBox 2.0, but doesn’t seem happy enough.
The French news magazine LeMagIT reported that Sun will unveil its new hypervisor, xVM Server, on September 10.

The bare-metal VMM is powered by Xen but Sun replaced the Linux kernel running in DomU with Solaris.
The company worked on this product for more than one year and last month finally started an Early Adoption program to approach the first customers.

Sun is one of the most interesting virtualization player to look at in the coming months.
It has a unique position as it will be the only vendor on the market able to offer a complete computing stack for virtualization: the physical hardware (both servers and storage), the hypervisor, the management layer and the VDI connection broker.
This implies less issues with support and licensing and new platforms specifically tailored for virtualization.

To further consolidate its position and fill up the holes in the current feature-set, Sun may proceed in acquiring multiple companies.
Any startup developing capacity planning, virtual lab automation (Sun seems smarter than Microsoft here, and it’s already pushing virtualization to its immense JAVA developers community) or VM lifecycle management products can be an acquisition target. 

If the news will be confirmed, this Q4 2008 is expected to be one of the hottest period ever for hardware virtualization.

Update: Sun officially confirms the upcoming launch and puts online a placeholder.
A live webcast is scheduled for Sep. 10 @ 9am PST.

Red Hat just announced that it acquired the VDI startup Qumranet for $107M.

The startup left the stealth mode in September 2007 and has just 60 employees, all of them will keep their work as Red Hat employees.

The move is critical and has a major impact on many aspects of the virtualization world.

The Qumranet strategy
Qumranet offers an interesting VDI solution made by a  management console, a connection broker and a new remote desktop protocol.
But more than that, Qumranet maintains KVM, the new virtualization platform that has been implemented in the Linux kernel after just six months of development.

KVM allows any Linux box to become a virtualization platform, and KVM is the only company at the moment able to offer a VDI solution for KVM.
This means that customers looking for cheap, large-scale virtual desktop infrastructures have to buy the Qumranet solution.

The Red Hat strategy
In the last few years, despite a number of announcements, Red Hat didn’t demonstrate a neat strategy about virtualization. But in June the company officially declared its intention to move from Xen to KVM.

Just two months after, a Red Hat executive formally revealed the company interest in VDI. At that point it was easy to forecast a special deal with Qumranet.

(it seems that when virtualization.info presumed the acquisition, the deal was already signed)

Buying Qumranet Red Hat just solved a number of problems:

• obtaining direct control on the development of a virtualization engine (something that the company was never able to do with Xen because of XenSource, and even less after XenSource was acquired by Citrix)
• obtaining a platform which is ready for virtualization ubiquity (KVM is flexible enough to be deployed on servers, desktops, embedded devices and anywhere Linux can fit)
• obtaining a strong position in the growing VDI market
• differentiating its virtualization offering from the competitor Novell (both are currently adopting Xen)
• enforcing its position of open source leader while the competitor Novell is seen as a suspicious Microsoft ally

Both Citrix and Red Hat acquired a virtualization company that develop and control an open source virtual machine monitor (VMM). But there’s a major difference between the two companies.

Citrix never had an involvement in the open source world, and despite the culture introduced by Simon Crosby and his staff (and their tireless efforts), the community has a hard time in recognizing Citrix as a company that can give back. When talking about virtualization Citrix is first and foremost seen as the best Microsoft ally against VMware.
Red Hat instead is a beloved, open source paladin. The company made some mistakes in the past, but its effort in supporting Fedora still makes it a leader in the Linux world.
This difference is now specially important: some entities currently contributing to the Xen development may find much more interesting to work with Red Hat rather than with Citrix (think about IBM).

At the same time some firms heavily relying on Red Hat (think about Oracle), may be in deep trouble now that the company is definitively replacing Xen with KVM.
These entities may need to look at Novell now, or start working on their own implementations.

In any case the acquisition of Qumranet is a major achievement for Red Hat, which has now a unique opportunity to become a real virtualization leader.

Microsoft announces today that the new version of its application virtualization platform, acquired by Softricity in 2006, is now called App-V 4.5.

The product, once known as SoftGrid, has been renamed Application Virtualization for some months, but the company has finally decided to adopt the less confusing App-V name.

App-V 4.5 will be included in the upcoming Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2008 R2, expected within few weeks.
Additionally, the product will be fully supported by the just released System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2 and by System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 through a new Management Pack.

More important than that, along with App-V 4.5, Microsoft will release a new Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA), allowing 3rd parties to stream applications to their customers with App-V.

This new SPLA, called Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Hosting for Desktops, is not as open as originally planned and leaked by Endeavors Technologies and other application virtualization vendors.

Considering the original intention, it’s likely that the new restriction is now due to the upcoming competition with VMware, as the competitor is now fully into the application virtualization market with ThinApp, acquired in January by Thinstall.

Nonetheless this is a major step towards the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) reality: without a change in the Microsoft licensing, the number of business products that could be streamed on users desktop is limited and this severely restricts the profit opportunities.

virtualization.info will cover the new SPLA in details as soon as it’s available.

After losing its co-founder and CEO, Diane Greene, in July, VMware suffers another important loss: the Executive Vice President of R&D, Richard Sarwal.

Sarwal was recruited by Green and spent only nine months at VMware.

He goes back to Oracle, where he worked for 18 years. His former employer should be more than glad to have him back considering the company effort in developing a competitive hypervisor: Oracle VM.

Stephen Herrod, Ph.D, CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, will replace Sarwal.

The attention anyway is still much focused on Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Architect at VMware and husband of Diane Green.
Outside the company, he’s generally recognized as the company visionary and his departure could be a nasty event for VMware.

A couple of weeks after the sack of Diane Greene, virtualization.info inquired VMware and was granted that Rosenblum was still working for the company.

When Microsoft officially officially launched its new Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) just two weeks ago, an unexpected vendor applied for it: Cisco.

The SVVP program is developed to extend the support that Microsoft offers on Windows Server and most back-end servers to those 3rd party hypervisors that pass validation.

As far as we can understand, there’s no reason to apply for this program without a hypervisor.
So, or Cisco is about to announce a hypervisor, or the SVVP has additional purposes that Microsoft didn’t detail.

Today another unexpected vendor appears on the SVVP applicants list: Unisys.

It’s not a secret that Unisys is heavily involved in virtualization, omnipresent in virtualization adoption projects across the globe, but as far as we know the company doesn’t offer (yet) a hypervisor.

As Unisys contributes to the Xen open source project, this may be the first step to launch a Xen-based solution.

Just two weeks ago Microsoft officially launched its new Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), developed to extend the support to those 3rd party hypervisors that pass validation.

At the announcement time a number of key virtualization vendors already applied for the Program, including Citrix, Novell, Sun, Virtual Iron and Cisco (why Cisco?).

At the last minute VMware confirmed its commitment and now, ironically enough, its flagship hypervisor, ESX 3.5 Update 2, is the first to pass the validation.

This means that from now on, Microsoft had to deliver cooperative technical support to those VMware customers running Windows Server 2008 and earlier, as well as any Microsoft back-end server defined in the program (and this includes mission critical products like SQL Server and Exchange).

With a surprising announcement Novell unveiled its plans to enter the application virtualization market yesterday.

The company signed an OEM agreement with a small firm called XenoCode, which recently reshaped its technology to deliver application virtualization.

Novell already rebranded the XenoCode Application Studio as ZENworks Application Virtualization (ZAV), offering it at $39 per concurrent user.

With this move Novell confirms its strong commitment on virtualization.

Novell already has its own hypervisor, the Xen implementation embedded in SUSE Enterprise Linux 10, but it’s also planning a second virtualization platform featuring just the hypervisor.

On the management side its ZENworks Orchestrator acts as hypervisor console, VM lifecycle management and virtual infrastructure orchestrator.

Last but not least, at the beginning of the year Novell acquired PlateSpin granting itself P2V migration and capacity planning capabilities that should be integrated in the ZENWorks family by the end of this year.

Sun releases today the second generation of its desktop virtualization platform, VirtualBox, acquired by innotek in February.

This new version introduces a few but important capabilities like:

• support for 64-bit guest OSes (Microsoft Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5)
• support for AMD RVI
• support for Microsoft VHD virtual disk format
• new interface for Apple Mac OS edition (native 10.5 Leopard GUI)
• Python API (for Solaris and Linux hosts only)

Download it free of charge here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Last week Citrix announced that the its next generation desktop and application virtualization platform, XenApp 5.0, will be launched on September 10.

The company made the product available slightly ahead of time so you can download a trial later today here.

Citrix also published a valuable Technical Guide for Upgrading or Migrating to XenApp 5 that every customer should read.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.