virtualization.info

VMware just closed an OEM agreement with Likewise to embed its technology in future versions of vSphere.

Likewise is a US company that offers several products for enterprise authentication. The most popular is simply called Open and it’s available free of charge as open source (GPL and LGPL licenses).
Likewise Open uses Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) and Name Service Switch (NSS) to authenticate non-Windows machines to Windows domains.
It supports Kerberos. NTLM and SPNEGO authentication. It also offers single sign-on for SSH services.

This partnership will allow Microsoft Active Directory users to seamlessly log-in on ESX/ESXi hosts.

virtualization.info received unconfirmed tips that this feature may appear within vSphere 4.1, currently in private beta.

Labels: Alliances, Likewise, VMware

Neocleus is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in May 2008 without much fanfare  (see virtualization.info coverage).
At that time, their Xen-based client hypervisor, Trusted Edge, was pitched as a secure endpoint platform that could be enriched by 3rd parties applications.

Two years after that, Neocleus still doesn’t get any significant traction despite many customers are well aware of (and very interested on) the client hypervisor concept because of its potential to deliver VDI in offline mode.
One reason for this lack of interest is that so far the startup made extremely complex to exactly understand the details of its product and to access it (the whole “drop us an email” argument doesn’t work well for a technology that is completely new and that faces severe skepticism about performance and hardware support).

So at the beginning of last week Neocleus announced a shift in its go-to-market strategy, with the release of NeoSphere, a version of Trusted Edge, that can be OEM’ed and extended by PC lifecycle management (PCLM), security and help desk vendors.
The first customer is the management vendor BigFix, according to Brian Madden.

Interestingly, every reference about Trusted Edge disappeared from the corporate website except a mention inside the original press announcement.

Labels: Alliances, BigFix, Neocleus

The virtualization startup Reflex Systems may have changed its go-to-market strategy, focusing more on virtual infrastructure management than on security, but it didn’t forget its roots.

Exactly one year ago the company hired a former ISS executive, Preston Futrell, as new Vice President of Sales, in September 2009 launched a new version of its new flagship product that features a VMware VMsafe-certified policy compliance enforcement engine, and now it closes a deal with TippingPoint, a well-known player security market.

TippingPoint, a subsidiary of 3Com, which was recently acquired by HP, offers a popular line of intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
The partnership allows TippingPoint to include Reflex VMC in its Security Virtualization Framework, a bundle of products (Digital Vaccine Labs, vController, Security Management System and of course the IPS appliances) that enforces segmentation between virtual machines and supports separation of duties between the different teams that manage the virtual infrastructure.

Labels: Alliances, Reflex Systems, Security, TippingPoint

A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced a new partnership with Novell on virtualization.

The deal includes two parts.
The first one is focused on providing joint technical support to those customers that run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a XenServer guest OS.
The second one grants the use of Platespin Recon for Citrix and its Solutions Advisors partners.

While Novell could be considered a Citrix competitor because of its implementation of Xen, the reality is that, at the moment, Citrix has no interest in competing with anybody at the hypervisor layer.
The Citrix strategy is focused on placing XenDesktop on top of every possible hypervisor. And this includes ESX, Hyper-V and of course as many Xen flavors as possible.
So the Novell version of Xen is just an additional opportunity to sell VDI for Citrix.

At the same time the Novell commitment on Xen validates the hypervisor that Citrix is using as main foundation, keeping developers and customers engaged, and Citrix has all the interest to not disrupt it.
The increasing focus that Novell has on KVM must be clarified before customers start to think that yet another vendor (after Red Hat) is abandoning Xen.
This is probably why the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby offered a surprising insight about the value and shortcomings of KVM, the reason behind the Novell and Red Hat decision to invest on it, and the increasing interest for Oracle VM:

…

It's important to realize that for a Linux vendor, KVM significantly simplifies the engineering, testing and packaging of the distro. KVM is a driver in the kernel, whereas Xen, even with paravirt_ops support in the Linux kernel, requires the vendor to pick a particular release of Xen and its tool stack, and then integrate that with a specific kernel.org kernel, and exhaustively test them together - rather than just getting a pre-integrated kernel and hypervisor from kernel.org. So it is entirely reasonable to expect that over time the distros will focus on KVM as a hypervisor. I think KVM is extremely powerful in this context. But ultimately the choice depends on how the end-user wants to acquire/consume virtualization.

If the use case involves the customer buying, installing and running Linux to achieve virtualization, KVM will eventually do a fine job. If on the other hand, the user expects to deploy a virtualization platform that is entirely guest OS agnostic, using a complete virtual infrastructure platform then a type-1 hypervisor that is OS agnostic (xen.org Xen Cloud Platform, Citrix XenServer, OracleVM, VMware vSphere) is what they will go for. I have previously made the case that OS-bundled hypervisors have both inherent advantages and disadvantages in penetrating the market: The opportunity is to supplant the existing OS footprint with a new version of the OS that includes virtualization. The disadvantage is that no OS vendor has yet done a good job of virtualizing its competitors' products, and indeed strategically is never likely to do so. Let's be blunt: thus far they have done a mediocre job at best…

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, KVM, Novell, Xen

Now that both Virtual Iron and Sun acquisitions are complete, Oracle owns three hypervisors, a couple of virtualization-friendly enterprise management consoles and a connection broker.
What the company is missing is everything else around the hypervisor, from capacity planning to VMs backup.

Oracle may decide to own the missing pieces, trying to rival the impressive VMware portfolio, or work to build a reach ecosystem, trying to convince several third parties to become virtualization partners. And while it’s true that the VMware aggressive expansion is pushing its partners in new directions, most vendors are mostly looking for deals with Microsoft or Citrix.

For these firms, focusing the limited R&D resources on Oracle VM is a risky move considering its scarce adoption after more than two years on the market.
At the same time anyway, there are two big opportunities in embracing the Oracle way: first of all, the early partners get as many deals as they can without competition; secondarily, if their success is remarkable, Oracle may always consider an acquisition.

So it doesn’t surprise too much that the Canadian startup Lanamark is one of the first to join the Oracle PartnerNetwork. Oracle can use its capacity planning platform to demonstrate the density Oracle VM can achieve and validate it against more popular hypervisors.

The move may be just the first of a long series in different areas. Oracle needs partners (or more owned components) if it really wants to compete against VMware. 

Labels: Alliances, Capacity Planning, Lanamark, Oracle

The VMware | Cisco | EMC coalition is waiting for Acadia to start its business and begin the implementation, administration and delivery of their new datacenters-in-a-box.

Meanwhile the three companies prepare and publish key documents to understand how the VBlock computing stack is designed and how it can be used.

Specifically, the documents published online are:

1. The Deployment Guide
   Deploy a full Vblock (for delivery) as an integrated whole
2. The Rapid Provisioning Guide
   Simplify Rapid Provsioning across the entire stack whether you are a service provider or an enterprise customer
3. The Reference Architecture Guide
   Detailed configuration specification, how it is tested, etc.

Only the Reference Architecture is available for public access. It includes information about Vblock configuration type 1 and type 2.

The other two documents can be accessed only by VMware, Cisco and EMC partners.

Chad Sakac, the EMC Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance, reveals that customers are also looking for Vblock 0 configurations and even smaller than that.
The VCE Coalition anyway is not ready yet to publish details about Vblock 0 stack because “there are specifics that need working out”. Below you can see the prototype developed by the three:

Sakac also informs that the current Vblock roadmap developed by VMware, Cisco and EMC extends to 2012.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, Papers, VMware

Today, with a joint webcast, VMware, Cisco and NetApp announced a new partnership.

The three companies created an architectural blueprint, and they jointly own the intellectual property (IP) of it, called Secure Multi-Tenancy.

It’s available today, since it doesn’t include any new product or technology, ready to be implemented and deployed through partners.

The announcement is nowhere near the launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition that VMware, Cisco and EMC used to shake the market in November 2009, but takes a similar approach in offering pre-tested and validated computing stacks.

Specifically, the fault-tolerant architecture includes VMware vSphere and vShield, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), the Nexus 1000V virtual switch and MDS Switches, and NetApp
MultiStore with Data Motion technology:

VMware, Cisco and NetApp designed the architecture around four principles:

• Availability allows the infrastructure to meet the expectation of compute, network, and storage to always be available even in the event of failure. Like the Secure Separation pillar, each layer has its own manner of providing a high availability configuration that works seamlessly with adjacent layers. Security and availability are best deployed from a layered approach.
• Secure Separation ensures one tenant does not have access to another tenant’s resources, such as virtual machine (VM), network bandwidth, and storage. Each tenant must be securely separated using techniques such as access control, VLAN segmentation, and virtual storage controllers. Also, each layer has its own means of enforcing policies that help reinforce the policies of the adjacent layers.
• Service Assurance provides isolated compute, network, and storage performance during both
  steady state and non-steady state. For example, the network can provide each tenant with a certain bandwidth guarantee using Quality of Service (QoS), resource pools within VMware help balance and guarantee CPU and memory resources, while FlexShare can balance resource contention across storage volumes.
• Management is required to rapidly provision and manage resources and view resource availability. In its current form, each layer is managed by vCenter, UCS Manager, DC Network Manager, and NetApp Operations Manager, respectively.

Compared to the VMware-Cisco-EMC Vblock computing stack, this solution seems to lack a unified management console that can coordinate all the other pieces (in the VCE Vblocks that piece exists: it’s the EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager) but the description above seems to suggest that future generations will have something different.

Overall, the blueprint is really interesting and customers may welcome this new attempt to reduce their investment in the design phase. The only problem is that the customer’s security department has to trust vShield, a virtual firewall that VMware acquired from the startup Blue Lane Technology in November 2008 and that was launched in early 2007.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, NetApp, Security, VMware

Yesterday Microsoft and HP announced a 3-year agreement to spend $250M on several fronts: Hyper-V and System Center, Windows Azure, Exchange, SQL Server and more.

The problem with such announcements (see the 3-year alliance with EMC for another example) is that just a few (to not say nobody) really understand what’s the difference between before and after the deal.
The language used in the press announcements never helps.

Microsoft and HP already are very good partners. Customers expect the option to have Microsoft products inside their brand new HP servers at the purchase time because this happens since a lot of year.
So this deal requires some clarifications (of course we’ll focus on Hyper-V, System Center and Azure):

• Part of the investment is to develop new integrated offerings that involve Hyper-V Server, System Center Essentials, HP Virtual SAN appliance (formerly Lefthand Networks), HP Flex Fabric and HP Operations Center.
  Specifically, HP is now able to OEM Hyper-V in future bundles rather than just offering it as a preconfigured option for its ProLiant customers. Additionally, HP can also OEM System Center Essentials and SQL Server.
• Part of the investment is to pump up the sales channel (at worldwide level) and the professional services that will sell and support the products above.
  The investment in the sales channels will be 10x the actual one.
• The announcements has been used to highlight that Microsoft will continue to buy HP ProLiant and BladeSystems for the Windows Azure cloud infrastructure.
  This doesn’t mean that HP is or will be the only hardware provider for Azure.

Now, despite Steve Ballmer and Mark Hurd clarified that this deal was discussed no less than two years ago and that it was approved in April 2009, it’s very likely that its execution has been impacted by the VMware-Cisco-EMC (VCE) alliance.

The leadership of HP is threatened by the entrance of Cisco in the server market primarily because Cisco is not just trying to sell bare metal, it’s trying to sell a complete hardware/software platform that doesn’t require any interaction with other vendors.
On paper, this is the peace of mind for every data center admin.

For now this platform is limited to a “simple” bundle of vSphere, the Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system and the Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager, a super console kindly developed by EMC.
But soon the three may come out with a totally integrated implementation of the VMware vCloud APIs, turning a set of specifics into a concrete private cloud facility (Vblock 4 anyone?).

HP didn’t just lose the opportunity to do this first. It also (partially) lost a key partner, VMware, which is executing its cloud vision with someone else.
So HP buys 3Com to reinforce its enterprise-grade networking offering, and announces a major commitment to work with Microsoft. 
And the target is not just the VCE Vblock offering. The virtualization market’s money is on professional services. So the target also is the joint venture that Cisco and EMC created: Acadia.

At the lowest level, this agreement is not about developing some amazing new virtualization platform that can slam the Vblock. It is about avoiding that Cisco sells too many Vblocks.

Labels: Alliances, Cloud Computing, HP, Microsoft

Not like we didn’t see this coming. Today Microsoft and NetApp announces a three-year alliance on virtualization, cloud computing and storage management.
The pact includes joint product development, technical integration, sales and marketing activities.

Finally the Hyper-V enterprise users will have a solid alternative to Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) for virtual machines live backup when using the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) technology.

The two companies together will release architecture blueprints for disaster recovery with virtualization (like this one), snap-ins to manage the NetApp storage inside the Hyper-V console, management packs for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).
On top of this NetApp will work with the recently formed team that is working on the Microsoft Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, to be the storage partner of choice when Azure customers ask for private clouds solutions.

NetApp is a major storage partner of VMware, which spent remarkable effort in these years to persuade the customers that its products can integrate with VI (and now vSphere) much better than the ones offered by the VMware’s parent company EMC. For NetApp, VMware is a cash cow, despite EMC. 
Nonetheless, the vendor now announces that it’s ready to become a major partner of Microsoft too, not just by supporting Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), but by signing a long-term agreement which even involves Azure.

This is just another effect of the VMware/Cisco/EMC (VCE, aka Virtual Compute Environment) coalition.
Pretty much like the acquisition of 3Com from HP. And the many more that will likely come.

Labels: Alliances, Microsoft, NetApp

No matter how hard Microsoft and Citrix try to convince customers.
The whole idea that the two companies can recreate the Terminal Services-MetaFrame synergy on server virtualization doesn’t sound good. And it doesn’t sound good for a simple reason: in the first case, MetaFrame (or Presentation Server or XenApp) is a sophisticated add-on that enriches Terminal Services but can’t exist without it; in the second case, Microsoft and Citrix have completely overlapping virtualization platform which can fully replace each other.

The two companies may be totally aligned in terms of marketing effort to jointly attack the VMware leadership, but what happens when the Microsoft and Citrix sales guys actually visit the customers?
Aren’t they obliged to compete for the same account? If not, how exactly they suggest to the customer to choose between Hyper-V plus System Center versus XenServer plus Essentials? And even if there’s no friction there, which hypervisor do they recommend between Hyper-V and XenServer when the customer wants a XenDesktop-powered VDI environment?

The Microsoft and Citrix official position is that they don’t care which hypervisor is chosen, but virtualization is still pretty new for many. When the customer looks for guidance, how they will proceed?

Finally, somebody reports about this untold conflict:

…One instance where I was involved was where Microsoft actually brought Citrix into a pre-sales meeting.  The discussions were going well and the talk was about Hyper-V, among other things, being deployed in this customer.  Without any indication of what was coming, the Citrix Field Sales team proceeded to stand and step all over Microsoft and start talking about XenServer and why this needed to be the hypervisor of choice in this customer's environment.  Needless to say, the customer was confused and looked like a "deer in the headlights".  The discussion went downhill fast and the meeting ended with the customer frustrated, confused, and wondering why Microsoft and Citrix weren't getting along as was always talked about and that the message was so confusing.  So what happened?  The customer went with VMware and has since moved deeper into that technology…

Of course this is just an opinion, even if it comes from a well-known, respected and knowledgeable expert in the virtualization community.
As usual, virtualization.info welcomes other, different opinions. And if they come from the field level it’s much better.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

Last week Leostream and Ericom announced a partnership to support the new Ericom accelerator for Microsoft RDP launched in September, Blaze, inside the Leostream Connection Broker.

It is an uncommon move considering that the two vendors compete in the VDI space with a multi-hypervisor connection broker.
Anyway both have to face the competition coming from the platform providers Citrix and VMware, plus the one coming from third parties like Quest/Provision Networks.

Assuming the market will receipt well this combined offering, this effort may lead to further collaboration and even a merge, to stay competitive in the VDI market which is considered by many as ready to explode next year.

Labels: Alliances, Ericom, Leostream, VDI

As expected, today VMware, Cisco and EMC announced a special alliance, a coalition as they call it, dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE).

This entity will share investments to sell the components, training and consulting for a number of bundle packages called Vblocks.

The VCE will also count on a partners ecosystem, which already counts on six system integrators: Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.

The Vbocks can be deployed at customers data centers or hosted online. 
To design them, operate them on behalf of the customers, or just transfer them from the hosting facility to the customers data centers, Cisco and EMC created a special joint venture called Acadia
VMware and Intel invested in Acadia too, and the company will start operating in 2010. 
It’s not clear why the system integrators above cannot do that instead of Acadia.

At its launch VCE will offer three Vblocks:

• Vblock 0
  entry-level configuration available in 2010
  supporting 300 up to 800 virtual machines
  leveraging Cisco's UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC's Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
• Vblock 1
  mid-sized configuration (undisclosed launch date) 
  supporting 800 up to 3,000 virtual machines
  leveraging Cisco's UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC's CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
• Vblock 2
  high-end configuration (undisclosed launch date) 
  supporting up to 3,000-6,000 virtual machines 
  leveraging Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC's Symmetrix V-Max storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform

VCE will develop and offer additional bundles over time for shared services, applications and vertical industry solutions.
“Shared Services” and “Applications” is where the interest should focus the most. There, it’s possible to see popping up the hosting provider Terremark, where VMware invested $5 million, and SpringSource that VMware acquired in August for $420 million.

All Vblocks will be ISO 27001 compliant.

To manage these data-centers-in-a-box as a whole, EMC is offering a new management product called Ionix Data Center Insight.

Ionix will not replace the vSphere and UCS management consoles, but will coordinate them, gluing them with an application management stack that controls what happens inside the virtual machines:

The most important question around this partnership is: why these VMware, Cisco and EMC have to form a coalition to validate and sell their products as a commercial bundle?
Their architects already produce jointly validated infrastructure blueprints that customers can use to design new data centers. 
Part of their channels already sell their solutions together where it makes sense, and more will do if the products works better together.
Their customers don’t need a new brand and marketing brochures to buy the idea of cloud computing and private cloud. Cisco alone (in terms of selling servers) is new enough to generate interest and concerns.

VMware is taking a lot of risks with this move.
HP alone sells 36% of all virtualized servers. And it has EDS.
Dell just acquired Perot Systems, which is one of the biggest consulting arms in the world to sell the VMware-centric Dell virtualization portfolio.
IBM just has to think about Red Hat and its new KVM-centric offering, and it could be a dangerous competitor on a global scale.

Months ago virtualization.info published an article suggesting that VMware may be slowly morphing into an infrastructure management company that will compete with BMC, CA, HP and IBM.
Maybe it’s not VMware, it’s EMC that has this ambition. Ionix seems to imply so.
And because Cisco may have a similar ambition too, and both can’t afford to become an infrastructure management company in 2010 without controlling the virtual layer, VMware is the mandatory addition.

Maybe the VCE coalition is just an attempt to generate significant results that can validate a future merger.
VMware, Cisco and EMC all have a neutral position in the market today. 
All have a solid relationship with the entire ecosystem (except their direct competitors), including Microsoft (except of course for VMware).
While this coalition doesn’t change much, apparently, an actual merger would drastically change the way these companies behave. And the shareholders may not consider the move worth losing the current market alliances.
But, if a coalition could produce amazing results in 12-18 months of work, then it would much easier to justify the new Ciscoware.

While waiting to see if the merger will take place or not, it’s worth to consider once again how this coalition will impact the other OEMs that so far preferred VMware over Microsoft and Citrix.
A number of smart people suggested that this partnership will not change anything, but it’s worth to remind that Cisco has a significant stake in VMware, that Intel and VMware just invested in the new Acadia joint venture, and that VMware just sent out a message to its sales channel that says:

…The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses. As a result, organizations will no longer have to choose between best-of-breed technologies and end-to-end vendor accountability…

Who knows if HP, Dell and IBM consider this a non-problem.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, VMware

Last week Microsoft and Red Hat announced the certification of their operating systems, Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), on each other virtualization platforms, Hyper-V and KVM.

It is a major announcement in many ways.

First of all, customers that have Windows/Linux mixed environments finally have a decent choice. 
Side by side with Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, now Hyper-V (both R1 and R2) supports RHEL 5.2, 5.3 and the new 5.4.

More importantly, Microsoft and Red Hat validated the use of Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 as guest operating system on the KVM implementation that comes with RHEL 5.4.

On top of that Microsoft has even accepted to provide support to Red Hat users that run most of its enterprise applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Now, and only now, Red Hat has something concrete to tell to the customers.
With the large majority of virtual machines running Windows worldwide, without this mandatory step the new Red Hat offering couldn’t be considered anything more than an interesting future platform.

Thanks to the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) instead, KVM, or at least the Red Hat implementation of KVM, is at the same level of VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Novell Xen and Oracle VM Server in terms of support for Microsoft technologies.

Now Red Hat has to hurry up and show the serious stuff.

Labels: Alliances, KVM, Microsoft, Red Hat

In 2007, when Citrix, one of Microsoft's strongest allies, acquired XenSource, a startup whose success depends on an open source product (the Xen hypervisor), nobody really believed the move would benefit the community in any way.

The major concerns were that, over time, Citrix would abandon the development of Xen to focus on a proprietary hypervisor, that Citrix could try to influence the Xen development to provide an indirect advantage to Microsoft and/or that Citrix could use its influence on the Xen project to damage all the competitors that were relying on it (at that time Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Oracle).

After the XenSource acquisition, some major vendors (Red Hat and IBM for example) and individual contributors lost interest in the Xen project and started to focus on KVM (IBM effort, Red Hat effort). Possibly because of this relationship between Citrix and Microsoft, possibly because Citrix has never been an open source champion.
Of course VMware did all its best to facilitate the exodus from the Xen project.

virtualization.info is unable to exactly track or measure the Citrix contributions to the Xen project since the XenSource acquisition, which made progresses in the last two years and has an impressive roadmap.
People more informed on this aspect are welcome to comment to the post with details.

For sure Citrix approached the open source world from different angles: it invested in the networking vendor Vyatta, which competes against Cisco an open source software router; it’s behind the development of the first open source virtual switch for virtual infrastructures, the Open Virtual Switch, and now it’s supporting the creation of an open source cloud computing platform, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Whatever the company has done so far, it was not enough to convince Linus Torvalds and the other Linux maintainers to include Xen in the kernel, side by side with KVM.
It seems like just a technical issue, but maybe it’s more than that.

The Citrix new move to the open source world is joining the Linux Foundation.

The official reason behind this move is to ensure that the Linux operating system works the best inside its XCP cloud and in the upcoming client hypervisor XenClient:

“The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaborative work on requirements for Linux and complementary projects such as the Xen Project, Xen Client hypervisor Initiative (XCI) and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative,” said Ian Pratt, founder and chair of Xen.org and vice president of Advanced Products at Citrix Systems. “Citrix has joined the Linux Foundation both in its role as leader of the Xen Project and because it ships commercial products based on Xen.”

In addition to developing the Xen hypervisor, the Xen community is working on the development of complete client hypervisor and cloud virtualization platform products, which incorporate Linux as an embedded, secure, optimized run time for the Virtual Machine Monitor. The Xen community also develops open source technology to permit Linux to run with optimal performance on other hypervisors, such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server.

Anyway, it’s probably safe to speculate that more than anything else, Citrix wants to see Xen shipped out-of-the-box with every Linux distribution in the market. And becoming a Linux Foundation member may be the first step to achieve the task.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Xen

Since the VMware acquisition at the end of 2003, EMC always said that its new subsidiary had to stay independent to win the market.
A few really trusted those words at the time: nothing like virtualization has driven the storage spending in the history of enterprise IT (and it’s just the beginning, wait for VDI to become mainstream).
It was hard to believe that EMC wouldn’t leverage its relationship with VMware to declass NetApp, HP, IBM, Sun (now Oracle) and others as second choice options when designing virtual data centers.
But over the years the storage giant demonstrated its commitment to keep VMware independent.
For a period of time EMC was even accused of not doing enough, lacking that minimum integration that customers expect between two technologies as complementary and connected as the VMware hypervisor and the EMC storage array.

If EMC ever used its influence on VMware to damage its competitors, virtualization.info is not aware of it and no customer or reader ever complained about that.

Now everything is changing.

It’s not changing in the sense that EMC has started to adopt sneaky or illegal techniques to better position inside the virtual data center.
It’s changing because the EMC commitment is no more to let VMware play nice with every storage vendor in a very balanced way.

The new EMC commitment is to develop, evangelize and deploy solutions that work with VMware better than anything else available from competitors. And they are doing well. Really well.

A major driver in this new strategy is Cisco: the networking giant doesn’t have any real competition in the virtualization space at this point, and this puts the company in the position to demand for an unprecedented level of commitment to its new partners EMC and VMware.

If unpleased, Cisco can go to Citrix. Or Microsoft.
And both VMware and EMC know that networking is the next biggest bottleneck in the virtual data center of tomorrow.
Simply put, Cisco is too important (with or without its unified fabric effort) to let it go.

Nobody here is trying to say that the EMC effort entirely depends on Cisco. 
Their effort depends on a long-term vision that finally makes a lot of sense and that is embraced at all levels inside and outside the company.
The synergy/symbiosis with Cisco is just accelerating the events.

NetApp, HP and IBM (assuming that one day Big Blue will start paying attention again to the x86 market) have a huge problem.
It doesn’t matter how good their solutions in the virtual data center are. It doesn’t matter how tight the integration with VMware vCenter is.
There’s a growing perception that EMC is the way to go. And a growing perception that there’s nothing on the market that can compete with the triad VMware-Cisco-EMC.

These companies have three options: do nothing, start to spend a massive amount of energies in countering the EMC activity and gain back the attention of the VMware audience, or build something similar elsewhere.
Of course this last option is the most interesting. Something may happen around Citrix and Microsoft in the coming months.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, VMware

Despite a new $4 million investment secured at the end of 2008, Embotics has been mostly silent in the last few months.

The company released version 3.0 of their lifecycle management product V-Commander at the end of August, but it didn’t introduce groundbreaking new features that show the vision and strategy of the startup.

This sort of information may come from a different front: just before the VMworld 2009, Embotics announced a partnership with Surgient, one of the oldest virtual lab automation firms currently on the market.

Unfortunately the press announcement does everything but explain what this partnership will actually imply.

It may be an OEM agreement where V-Commander embeds part of the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform engine.
It may be a technology agreement where Embotics and Surgient work together to develop a new product that does both VM lifecycle management and virtual lab automation.
Or it may be just a joint marketing effort where the two companies sales teams try to sell the two products as a single bundle.

The press announcement doesn’t even say when the joint effort will actually take place.
But for sure it’s clear that Embotics has an interest in VLA tools, and may move next year to do more than just partnerships.

Labels: Alliances, Embotics, Lifecycle Management, Surgient, Virtual Lab Automation

Virtual Computer, the company founded by the father of Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May) continues to evolve its management solution NxTop Center heavily using multiple forms of virtualization.

The company already has a Xen-based client hypervisor and a fairly complex web-based console which uses virtual machines,  snapshots and clones to publish the right system environment to the right user with the right customization (what the industry is calling persona now).

Now Virtual Computer also simplified the management of the application layer thanks to a technology partnership with XenoCode, the application virtualization company that already has an OEM deal with Novell.

Compared to the Novell agreement, Virtual Computer is not OEM’ing the XenoCode Virtual Application Studio.
It is just supporting the applications virtualized with the XenoCode technology out-of-the-box inside its NxTop virtual machines.

It is not a revolution but this way Virtual Computer is silently building an end-to-end VDI stack that one day could rival with the upcoming ones from Citrix and VMware.

Labels: Alliances, Platform Management, VDI, Virtual Computer, XenoCode

In our VMworld 2009 live coverage of the Day 2 keynote, we briefly mentioned that VMware has now an OEM agreement with RTO Software to use their Virtual Profiles products inside View.

The OEM agreement allows RTO Software to sell Virtual Profiles independently and update the product’s code base.
The interesting part anyway is that RTO Software has a similar deal with another major vendor that is become increasingly active in the desktop virtualization space, Symantec, even if their version of Virtual Profiles is not out yet.

Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a virtual desktop infrastructure.
This agreement will help VMware to better compete against Citrix, Symantec and the other vendors that are developing end-to-end VDI solutions.

On top of that the persona management is a building block of the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) effort as much as the mobile hypervisor acquired from Trango in November 2008.

Labels: Alliances, RTO Software, VDI, VMware

In the last couple of years virtualization.info reported how the relationship between Microsoft and Citrix is getting tighter and tighter around virtualization, well beyond the historical Terminal Server/Metaframe partnership.

In the name of a planned integration that the two announced two years ago, XenServer uses the Microsoft virtual hard drive format (VHD), the Citrix Essentials management suite controls Hyper-V (and Citrix gives a part of it away for free) and the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will manage XenServer and XenApp.

It’s not finished anyway: yesterday Citrix announced further integration, this time about App-V and XenApp.

Citrix will now support the Microsoft application virtualization platform on its Receiver in H2 2009 and in the new Dazzle management solution in H1 2010.
Additionally, in H1 2010 Citrix will release a connector for System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to distribute XenApp virtual applications through the Microsoft management solution.

About the first part of the announcement the new CTO of XenApp division at Citrix, Harry Labana, addresses the key question immediately: is Citrix stopping Application Virtualization development?

Well, now that I have the advantage of having access to status reports I don't have to speculate anymore. I know for a fact that there are a number of enhancements that our development teams are working on, so these enhancements continue in preparation for the next XenApp release. Moving beyond just the next release of XenApp, we plan to continue to invest to enable delivery of Windows applications as a service.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

Yesterday Citrix announced a new OEM agreement with Fujitsu Technology Solutions (formerly Fujitsu Siemens) about XenDesktop.

Starting next month, the Citrix connection broker will be part of the Virtual Workplace product, which basically is the end to end VDI architecture that Fujitsu offers to its customers by assembling together several 3rd party technologies, from the physical servers to the application virtualization platform.

The two companies also preannounced an upcoming OEM deal to ship XenServer with the FTS PRIMERGY racks and blade systems.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Fujitsu, VDI

Something must be happening at Redmond if Microsoft for the first time ever decides to roll out a VDI strategy that doesn’t include Citrix as the exclusive partner.

It’s a well-known thing that Microsoft and Citrix are deeply in love with each other, sharing similar hypervisor architectures, a common roadmap, and marketing and sales resources to carry on their virtualization strategies and erode the VMware market share.

It’s true that in 2010 Microsoft will introduce a basic connection broker (called Remote Desktop Connection Broker) in the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2, but the reality is that the Microsoft sales force recommends XenDesktop as the solution of choice for any VDI scenario. At least so far.

Today Quest announced a major deal with Microsoft to integrate its vWorkspace (the former VAS acquired by Provision Networks in November 2007) with Hyper-V, App-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

It’s great success for Quest/Provision Networks which is now validated to the eyes of customers as much as Citrix in VDI scenarios. Yet, the big question is: why Microsoft has changed its strategy?

Every year its relationship with Citrix becomes stronger (the announcement of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is just the last piece of a complex puzzle), so it’s unclear why the leadership at Redmond felt the need to look for alternatives.
The official statements about the Microsoft position in the market and its successful strategy to build a rich partners ecosystem won’t work in this case or Microsoft would have executed it a long time ago.

So it’s possible that something is actually happening at Citrix. For example is possible that the company is in acquisition talks and while Microsoft feels threatened it doesn’t want to participate the bid.
In this case opening its strategy to Citrix competitors may be a necessary counter-move to do as soon as possible.

Update: The deal is not an OEM deal. The post has been updated accordingly. 
The opinions about the reasons behind this Microsoft opening still apply.

Labels: Alliances, Provision Networks, Quest

Less than one month ago The Wall Street Journal broke the news of an ongoing acquisition talk between IBM and Sun.

virtualization.info reported about the early involvement of Cisco in the bid for Sun, a rumor never confirmed by other sources.

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that the discussion between IBM and Sun has ended and that IBM withdrew its $7 billion offering.

If Cisco was really interested in Sun, now it may be a good moment to reopen the negotiations.

As many pointed out, if Cisco really wants to emerge as a leading player in the server market, it needs all the experience, the credibility and the customers that it can have.
Building all the three things from scratch may take several years, even for a giant like the networking vendor.

Sun can provide all and a virtualization portfolio that may become useful if, for any reason, the intimate partnership with VMware gets compromised.

And by the way, after this failed bid, acquiring Sun is probably much cheaper than one month ago.

Update: It seems that the discussion is still open between Sun and IBM.

Labels: Acquisitions, Alliances, Cisco, IBM, Sun

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that IBM is in acquisition talk with Sun and considering the source this is very unlikely just a rumor:

If the deal does go through, which could happen as early as this week, IBM is likely to pay at least $6.5 billion in cash to acquire Sun, the people said. That would translate into a premium of more than 100% over Sun's closing price Tuesday.

The impact of such merge would be huge. Of course the big question is what will happen to the many overlapping business units and offerings (servers, storage, management software).

One of the things that IBM may want to save of the current Sun identity is the upcoming and so much delayed server virtualization portfolio dubbed xVM, which includes a bare-metal hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), an enterprise management console that can perform VMs live migrations and resource pooling (xVM Ops Center), a VDI connection broker (xVM VDI), a hosted virtualization product (xVM VirtualBox) and a cloud computing facility that can rival with Amazon EC2 (depending on the recently acquired Q-Layer technology).

So far IBM has been happy in its role of virtualization distributor, despite the company invented the technology in the ‘60s. But Cisco is invading the server space and has a relevant interest in VMware. Not enough to buy the virtualization vendor but enough to keep a leadership position in the fastest growing IT market today.

Of course IBM doesn’t look at Sun just to own a x86 hypervisor. Virtual Iron is available and infinitely cheaper than Sun. But earning a complete portfolio for the virtualization market must be a nice bonus to consider.

If the two big will close this deal, HP may be obliged to do something similar to consolidate its position. And Citrix seems so interesting these days…

Labels: Alliances, IBM, Sun

It’s nice to see that Leostream is finally taking a new direction. Their flagship product is still seriously in need of a major upgrade after one year and a half of hibernation but at least the company is closing new valuable partnerships every two months or so:

• a reseller agreement with IBM in September 2008
• a technology partnership with eG Innovations in October 2008
• an OEM deal with BOSaNOVA in February 2009

and now another technology partnership with NoMachine, to support their NX remote protocol on Connection Broker. 

Leostream may have multiple reasons to support a remote protocol for Linux environments such NX.
First of all the company wants to extend the range of supported infrastructures as much as possible, trying to emulate the success of Provision Networks (acquired by Quest in November 2007).
Secondarily, it wants to find a niche where there are less competitors, and where VMware is not so intrusive.
Last but not least, maybe Leostream hopes that the new Red Hat strategy around KVM will boost the adoption of Linux-based VDI infrastructures and wants to be a frontrunner there.

Labels: Alliances, Leostream, NoMachine, VDI