virtualization.info

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

Dell doesn’t seem interested in becoming a major virtualization player on its own but continues to stack up 3rd party solutions to build its product portfolio.

In September 2008 the company signed an OEM agreement with both PlateSpin (a Novell subsidiary) and Vizioncore (a Quest subsidiary), in December 2008 signed a similar deal with Egenera.

Now it’s the time of Reflex Systems, the US startup that changed its name (formerly known as Reflex Security) and go-to-market strategy at the end of last year. 
The OEM agreement only covers the new multi-hypervisor management tool that Reflex unveiled in November: Virtualization Management Center (VMC).

Definitively a good restart for a company that struggled to find success in the virtualization security market.

Labels: Alliances, Dell, Reflex Systems

At the end of January Citrix and Intel made a surprising joint announcement, revealing a major technology partnership to develop a client hypervisor based on Xen (codename Thunder Lake).

The agreement will have an impact on the market as this new platform will be integrated into upcoming Citrix products in H2 2009 and will be distributed through all the major OEMs.

Despite both companies abundantly clarified that the deal is non-exclusive, for some reasons VMware became nervous.

VMware and Intel always collaborated and most customers perfectly know how tight is the relationship between the two: Intel invested $218.5 Million in the virtualization vendor during its IPO, and for a long time there were rumors that the chip maker was contemplating the acquisition of VMware.

But that was not enough: last week at VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2) VMware felt the impellent need to announce its partnership with Intel on the upcoming Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).

A comparison of the two press announcements highlights some subtle differences: the Citrix-Intel deal sounds like a R&D and financial operation that will move a consistent amount of money (and will likely provide Intel a remarkable commission on every Thunder Lake sold by Citrix), while the VMware-Intel deal seems just an official confirmation that the VMware CVP will support Intel vPro technology (which is entirely expected).

It’s “develop” (Intel-Citrix) versus “deliver” (Intel-VMware).

Whatever this read of the announcements is correct or not, one thing is clear: VMware is getting nervous if it decided to refresh customers’ memory about its well-known partnership with Intel.
Now it must be seen who exactly is feeling some pressure: the PR department, the company leadership or the customers?

Labels: Alliances, Intel, VMware

Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware officially announced the new, much awaited high-availability module for its vCenter Server (formerly VirtualCenter).

VMware took forever to admit that vCenter is the weakest point of failure in its virtual infrastructure, despite its mission critical role:

It’s true that VMware HA can (partially) protect vCenter if it runs inside a virtual machine but 60% of the customers still run it on physical machines.

The lack of any native hot stand-by or clustering capability inside the management tier stimulated the growth of a small but lucrative ecosystem that the company sales engineers further promoted, suggesting several products from trusted partners: Double-Take, Steel Eye, CA, Neverfail Group and of course Microsoft Cluster Service.

Starting last week it’s no more the case: VMware is OEM’ing with an exclusive agreement the Neverfail technology under the name of vCenter Server Heartbeat 1.0.

“Exclusive agreement” means that VMware is committed to not close a similar deal with Neverfail competitors and that Neverfail cannot sell this product by itself anymore.
The two companies didn’t disclose how long this partnership will last.

Heartbeat 1.0 is a fail-over product that protects every component inside the vCenter host, including the licensing server and Update Manager (WUM), and works across LAN and WAN links.
The product anyway is not the solution for every customer.

Right now the Neverfail technology has a protection module for Microsoft SQL Server only. If a customer runs the vCenter database on Oracle he has to stick with alternative solutions mentioned above.
Additionally, the cost of Heartbeat is one of the highest in this market segment: the product will be available in mid-March in two SKUs.

• VC Heartbeat - $9,995
• VC Availability Acceleration Kit - $12,995

Both prices are per protected VMware vCenter Server instance (it doesn’t matter if the vCenter data base is on the same machine or elsewhere).

Nonetheless VMware knows pretty well how to crush its former partners:

Pretty much like it happened to the VDI ecosystem when VMware acquired Propero in April 2007, the partners above will certainly start looking elsewhere for profit: Citrix is firmly partnering with Marathon Technologies for XenServer HA, but Microsoft needs a lot of help with Hyper-V right now.

VMware says that this move doesn’t kill any ecosystem as its strategy won’t change: it will continue to suggest 3rd party solutions to the customers that are out of range for Heartbeat 1.0.
Even assuming this is true there are a couple of points that VMware seems to overlook:

• Most of time customers want just one vendor to deal with. It simplifies the licensing and support procedures, and usually grants a higher level of integration.
• Compared to other “minor” modules like Update Manager, Heartbeat is a key, almost mandatory feature that every customer has to buy sooner or later, VMware will enrich the module capabilities, introducing support for Oracle databases and much more.

Who will want to stay with Double-Take, Steel Eye or CA at that point?

Labels: Alliances, High Availability, Neverfail Group, VMware

In October 2007 Citrix closed a major agreement with HP to resell XenServer Enterprise Edition on ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

In March 2008 the two companies took a step further, launching a special version of Citrix hypervisor called XenServer HP Select Edition which comes pre-installed in selected servers and offers a free management console called ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC). 

In May 2008, when Citrix launched its new end-to-end VDI solution XenDesktop, HP was there once again confirming support for the product on ProLiant and Compaq thin clients.

The love story continues today with HP announcing that its Blade PC systems will be sold with the just released Citrix XenDesktop 3.

At the moment there are no details about the configurations, pricing or availability. It’s likely that HP will unveil the product at the upcoming Synergy 2009.

It’s interesting to note how many different VDI games HP is trying to play at the same time.

Besides partnering with Citrix, the company is about to use the technology provided by Desktone (which is funded by Citrix) to become a hosted VDI provider.
At the same time it’s refreshing its current VDI offering by updating its own remote desktop protocol RGS and OEM’ing the Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, HP, VDI

The US startup Desktone launched in April 2008 signing impressive partnerships with Verizon, with SoftBank Telecom, with HP and with IBM.

Then the company returned to silent mode until yesterday when it announced a new technology partnership with vmSight.

vmSight offers a performance monitor focused on applications response time in a virtual environment which may be particularly useful in a VDI environment.
DABCC.com published a detailed review of the product that is worth a read.

Desktone will offer the vmSight Center console to its hosted VDI (or Desktop as a Service, DaaS, as they like to call it) providers so to understand which customers are abusing the system and which ones are having a poor experience.

vmSight has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Alliances, Desktone, Performance Monitoring, VDI, vmSight

After signing a major OEM agreement with IBM and a promising technology partnership with eG Innovations in October 2008, Leostream is ready to close additional deals.

This time the company allies with BOSaNOVA, a thin client vendor that offers VDI Ready CE.Net, Linux and XPe devices.

At this point the Leostream connection broker has a conspicuous number of partners in the server-based computing industry: Wyse, IGEL Technology, Praim, Astec Technology, Cranberry, Devon IT and even Fujitsu Siemens.

Labels: Alliances, BOSaNOVA, Leostream

Yesterday Quest held its Q4 2008 earning call and its new President and CEO Douglas Garn reported a couple of interesting details talking about the virtualization subsidiaries:

• On the service side of our virtualization, Vizioncore continues to deliver very strong results. We had record revenue in Q4, despite the economic conditions. We closed out the year of 2008 with over 15,000 clients within Vizioncore, which is absolutely remarkable. Certainly we’re hoping that they more than double that this year.
• On the desktop side, again we continue to see strong traction on the desktop virtualization area. Customers are highly interested and we’re engaged in many, many positive opportunities. We’ve signed a significant OEM deal with one of the top tier one hardware vendors and it’s a nice size opportunity for us, but cannot give you any more detail.

In the second statement Garn is referring to Provision Networks division, which Quest acquired in November 2007.
It’s not clear anyway if the OEM agreement he’s talking about is the one with HP, which silently embedded the Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack in its revamped VDI offering in December 2008.

Labels: Alliances, HP, Provision Networks, Quest, Vizioncore

Yesterday EMC and Microsoft signed a 3 years extension of their strategic alliance (now ending in 2011).

Part of the agreement involves virtualization, which is pretty odd considering that EMC owns 80% of VMware and that VMware can be seriously impacted by the endless amount of free virtualization products/technologies that Microsoft released and will release in future.

The thing is rather comic as part of the agreement (published by both companies PR departments) includes:

Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.

Now, coopetition is something that every customer can understand but believing that the EMC consulting division will recommend (or support) the implementation Hyper-V over VMware seems way too much.

Steve Ballmer answers to CNET on this very point with a hard-to-believe statement:

We're not sitting here pretending we're partnering with VMware. That's more competition.

With EMC, which is a large majority owner in VMware, but is also independent, there's a lot that rides on virtualization. The fact of the matter is the storage business is being transformed also by virtualization. And virtualization is transforming the storage business. We want to do very well in virtualization. While Joe may own 80 percent of VMware, he still thinks it's a good idea to sell storage in places where perhaps we'll win as opposed to VMware…

(the entire interview below definitively deserves a read)

EMC always waved the VMware independence and its desire to not influence the virtualization vendor, but at the end of the day, as Patrick O’Rourke at Microsoft says, VMware provides EMC $200 million direct profit /year plus additional indirect profit positively influencing the stock trading.

Assuming EMC will really do its best to play fair with both VMware and Microsoft on virtualization, the real question is: how VMware will react to this?

At this point it’s legit to suspect that this agreement is the real reason why Diane Greene couldn’t stay as VMware CEO and had to be replaced by Paul Maritz (a former Microsoft executive).

While wondering about this last point it’s worth to recap the current status of the some key strategic alliances in the virtualization world:

• Microsoft, which is now seriously partnering with EMC, is also seriously partnering with Citrix which is now seriously partnering with Intel which was rumored to be interested in buying VMware away from EMC.
• EMC, which is now seriously partnering with Microsoft, owns 80% of VMware which is now seriously partnering with Cisco which owns 1,7% of VMware

So, let’s see, this story will end up with VMware and Citrix seriously partnering together?

Labels: Alliances, EMC, Microsoft, VMware

At the beginning of December 2008 virtualization.info broke the news about the upcoming entrance of Cisco in the x86 server market, revealing some details about a massive blade system codenamed California that will be powered by VMware technology (and probably by EMC storage).
Only two months later the rest of the worldwide press (including mainstream newspapers like the New York Times) confirmed the information.

Cisco (as well as VMware and EMC) stays mum about this project, besides the company’s CTO, Padmasree Warrior, admitted the future entrance in new markets with something called Unified Computing.
It’s even unclear when the three will announce the partnership (VMworld 2009?).
Despite that, we may have the first pieces of the puzzle. And it’s coming from EMC.

Yesterday in fact, Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC (and Top Blogger 2008 for virtualization.info), published one of his amazing posts highlighting the vision of a private cloud in a box:

…

Point 1: It presumes a 100% virtualized datacenter (at least as far as x86 workloads go).   What can we do to make any x86 workload a candidate for a VM, and how do we help customers accelerate that transformation.

Point 2: Every Layer of the physical infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Network, Storage) need to be transparent.   Transparency means "invisible".   This implies a lot, and implies that the glue in the middle, like a general purpose OS, needs to provide the "API models" for those hardware elements to be transparent. 

Point 3: Every Layer of the physical infrastructure needs to be able to think/understand/respond to "VM objects" (or more accurately, groups of VMs that define applications and application SLAs).  These groups of VMs that define the application become central, both as a way to get fast value (Virtual Appliances), and also for the infrastructure to support.   Long and short - the Network and Storage need to be "VM-aware".

…

Of course Sakac published the article as a personal view of the future, but his point of view is pretty reliable as, by a fortunate coincidence, he co-presented with Steve Herrod, CTO at VMware, and Ed Bugnion, CTO at Cisco, at the last VMworld 2008 (and will do again at the upcoming VMworld Europe 2009).

So, just in case, be sure to read the whole piece as it’s the best indicator publicly available today to understand what these three vendors will do in the near future.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, VMware

Cisco isn’t ready yet to call its virtual switch for VMware ESX 4.0, the Nexus 1000V, out of beta, but one of its employees already published a pretty detailed diagram of its architecture.

Besides the diagram, the entire blog post is really interesting as it details how the virtual switch will work:

• The Nexus 1000V software on the physical server acts like a line card of a modular switch, described as a VEM (virtual ethernet module)
• The Nexus 1000V VEM is a direct replacement of the VMWare vSwitch function
• The Nexus 1000V VSM (virtual supervisor module) acts like the supervisor engine of a modular switch
• One Nexus 1000V VSM instance manages a single ESX cluster of up to 64 physical servers
• The form factor of Nexus 1000V VSM can be a physical appliance or a virtual machine
• The network administrator manages the Cisco Nexus 1000V (from the VSM) as a single distributed virtual switch for the entire ESX cluster
• Each virtual machine connects to its own Virtual Ethernet (vEthernet) port on the Nexus 1000V providing the network administrator traffic visibility and policy control on a per virtual machine basis.  Virtual machines can now be managed like physical servers in terms of their network connectivity
• …

Thanks to Scott Lowe for the news.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, VMware

Phoenix Technologies doesn’t seem much scared by the recently announced partnership Citrix and Intel to develop a client hypervisor.

In fact, despite both Citrix’s Project Independence and Phoenix Technologies’ HyperCore are client hypervisors based on Xen, the former seems to be part of a complete VDI platform built to satisfy the highest end of the enterprise market, while the latter seems rather targeting the consumer market and the SMBs.

To further demonstrate that its just released HyperCore is not threatened by Project Independence, Phoenix announces a major partnership with ASUS, which will include the hypervisor in its future notebooks.

ASUS certainly has a lot of interest to slip this product into its EEE PCs: Phoenix developed HyperCore hoping that it would serve virtual machines running just a single program (like an Internet browser or a video player) in place of Windows.
And this is exactly what the ASUS customers need to save the short battery life of their netbooks.

It’s clear that Phoenix is trying to partner with every notebook vendor on the market. Besides ASUS, the company already closed a similar deal with NEC in July 2008.

Labels: Alliances, ASUS, Phoenix Technologies

Surprisingly enough in the last few months Intel sold many of its VMW shares (some of them were acquired by Cisco). There may be a good reason: Intel has some serious business to do with the VMware’s competitor Citrix.

Last Friday the two announced a joint effort (codenamed Thunder Lake) to develop a version of Xen for consumer equipment like desktops and laptops (something the industry is calling a desktop or client hypervisor).

Of course the product is not developed for the consumer market, but for the big enterprises with a large-scale population of clients. For this reason Citrix and Intel will offer the new hypervisor along with a centralized management system to control the hypervisor distribution, a delivery mechanism that works on bare-metal hardware, and a security wrapper around the virtual machines to enforce granular access control policies.
The entire platform will be optimized for Intel vPro technology.

The two companies promise near-native performance inside the virtual machines, ability to work off-network (so there will be a synchronization system between the client and the data center) and bandwidth-intelligent streaming.
Many competitors are trying to deliver the same things, including Phoenix Technologies, Virtual Computer, Neocleus, and of course VMware.

Once available in H2 2009, this client hypervisor will be distributed through the major OEMs and will be integrated into upcoming Citrix products.

This news doesn’t come totally unexpected: just few months ago virtualization.info highlighted how Intel mysteriously appeared among the Citrix partners that are developing a client hypervisor powered by Xen in a presentation from Simon Crosby, CTO of Management and Virtualization department at Citrix.

Update: Citrix published a video of the client hypervisor, codename Project Independence, in action.
It doesn’t show anything about the way it’s installed, configured and managed, but it certainly shows how some multimedia workloads (DVD playing, 3D rendering) are easily served inside the virtual machines.

See it at the new sister (and beta) site of virtualization.info: virtualization.tv

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Intel

One of the biggest challenge when adopting a new virtualization platform is securing the ISVs support.
Without it moving from the market leader to a more innovative or cheaper solution is a risky business.

It’s the case of KVM, the open source virtualization platform that is part of the Linux Kernel since version 2.6.20 and that is attracting a large number of developers (away from Xen, we were told).

KVM may be very cool, and the fact that Red Hat acquired its maintainer, the startup Qumranet, certainly ignites high hopes for the platform.
But the reality is that, at today, KVM is still too young to feature the ISVs support that VMware, Citrix or Microsoft can offer.

Excluding IBM, which just started to its Lotus Notes, Symphony and a bunch of other applications on the Virtual Bridges implementation of KVM, no other major IT vendor is officially endorsing KVM.

As often happens, Microsoft is the key to change this situation: it’s now more than clear that virtualization is being used across the globe to virtualize and consolidate in large majority Windows boxes.
If Microsoft officially supports Windows in a KVM virtual machine then the other ISVs will follow, and the customers can start adopting the solution with confidence.

With much surprise it’s possible that the unlikely event already happened.

As most readers remember Cisco is using a mysterious virtualization platform inside its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) 4.1 appliance. 
Despite the company stays mum about the VMM used inside WAAS, in the past months virtualization.info received a remarkable number of confirmations from different sources that the appliance is almost certainly powered by KVM.

Now Cisco is selling WAAS 4.1 and its new virtualization capabilities certifying its use as a platform where the core Microsoft services (part of Windows) can be consolidated.
To do so Cisco joined the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) in August 2008. But the SVVP program doesn’t include Windows support.

This means that, through the SVVP program, Microsoft is supporting its core services inside the Cisco WAAS 4.1 virtual machines (which are, we are almost sure, KVM virtual machines), but not the operating system itself.
So, who is supporting Windows exactly? 

The only two possibilities are that Cisco is in charge for the OS support, and it seems unlikely, or it’s Microsoft that is making an exception and is supporting its operating system inside KVM, at least the Cisco implementation of it.

The reason why all these details are unclear, and Cisco customers should investigate before buying WAAS 4.1, is the business relationship of the two software giants: Cisco is definitively in bed with VMware and it’s preparing to make a major announcement, while Microsoft is totally in love with Citrix, which probably isn’t too happy to know that KVM is being supported so quickly.

If it will emerge that Microsoft officially supports Windows on KVM, this may further boost the Red Hat chances to attract customers with its upcoming new virtualization platform.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, KVM, Microsoft

Yesterday Sun announced a new offering for the SMB segment: a bundle of some of its mid-range servers and SANs with VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.
Exactly: Sun, which is investing million of dollars on its own hypervisor, is actively pushing two leading competitors.

What’s the strategy behind this initiative?

This is not just a typical offering to pre-install the hypervisor of choice inside a brand new server like every major OEM does since a while now: Sun issued a press announcement, published a dedicated website, highlighted the differences between the two virtualization products suggesting which one is better in which scenario.

An agreement to resell competing hypervisors would make sense if Sun was three years away from releasing xVM Server. But while in late, xVM Server is almost here (as the available documentation demonstrates).

Supposing that Sun can successfully sell ESX and Hyper-V to its customers, what its sales reps will tell them when xVM Server will be out? “Do you mind throwing away the investment that we suggested and that you just made and switch to our hypervisor?”

At that point it will not matter if xVM Server+Ops Center will be a free, valuable platform: customers will invest in learning, deploying and troubleshooting ESX or Hyper-V. How they could consider switching to xVM Server before, let’s say, three years?

This is not the first time that Sun pushes for a competing hypervisor: its VDI solution at the moment only supports VMware ESX and the company couldn’t say when they plan to support xVM Server.

As the Sun VDI is around since a while, it (barely) makes sense that the company tried to push it using the support for ESX as a major selling point. But what’s the sense of this new initiative announced just (hopefully) weeks before the xVM Server launch?

The Sun virtualization proposition seems solid and promising over the long term. Why the company has to sell other solutions instead of waiting for its own?

Labels: Alliances, Microsoft, Sun, VMware

Thanks to its fault-tolerance engine, everRun FT, Marathon Technologies became one of the key partner of Citrix in the last year at a point that parts of its product were included in the new XenServer 5.0.

Now Marathon is ready to rock Microsoft Hyper-V as well: last week the company announced a new agreement with Microsoft to develop a future version of the hypervisor which uses everRun as fault-tolerance mechanism.

Once again Citrix and Microsoft are sharing technologies and partners, making their two hypervisors more and more similar in approach and features.
Over time the difference between the two will be in a small set of cutting-edge capabilities that Citrix will implement 18 months before Microsoft, and will sell to enterprises that don’t want to go with VMware anymore for any reason.

Labels: Alliances, Marathon Technologies, Microsoft

SearchServerVirtualization.com is breaking the news today revealing that Citrix will release a management suite for Microsoft Hyper-V in Q1 2009.
The product, dubbed Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V (codename Encore), will bring in some most wanted features like the virtual machines live migration that Microsoft will be unable to deliver until Windows Server 2008 R2, somewhere in 2010.

Citrix continues to advertise the same strategy since the XenSource acquisition: deliver value on top of the Microsoft hypervisor as it did for Terminal Services in the last decade.
But with virtualization the situation is different: Citrix doesn’t have a solution that depends on a Microsoft product. Citrix has a complete virtualization stack that could totally replace Microsoft in a customer environment. So what’s the strategy for the overlapping components and features?

Lou Shipley, General manager and Group Vice President of XenServer division at Citrix clarifies it: the company plans to stay on top of competition developing software that is 18 months ahead of Microsoft technologies.

The article also reveals that Citrix will introduce a memory overcommit technique, the so called ballooning, in XenServer 6.0, along with virtual lab management and workload balancing capabilities.
The new release is expected somewhere in 2009.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

It’s not a secret that Vizioncore has been loyal to VMware for years. Since its first product launch the company never supported any hypervisor but ESX.
Several customers managing heterogeneous environments would love to have some Vizioncore products like vRanger running on additional hypervisors or even support cross-platform disaster recovery. But the company always kept its focus on VMware, trying to add value on top of the VMware solution.

The mission is getting harder and harder to accomplish as VMware continues to extend its product portfolio, practically touching every aspect of the virtual data center.

In the last twelve months Vizioncore slowly changed its go-to-market strategy, partially because it embedded Invirtus, a company that was focused on Microsoft technologies, partially because Quest, which is a strong Microsoft partner, completed its acquisition.

The long-term plans are finally emerging: Quest will use Vizioncore as the virtualization subsidiary for the server virtualization management, while the other key acquisition Provision Networks will serve as virtualization subsidiary for the desktop virtualization management.
More than that Vizioncore will open to all virtualization vendors, including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and even Sun, as the official Quest website reveals.

There’s a huge market out there now that XenServer and Hyper-V are getting some serious traction, and Vizioncore would be crazy to let it go. As already said VMware is no more the only player in town.

Labels: Alliances, Vizioncore

CohesiveFT is a company offering an online solution to assemble virtual machines and deploy them on cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon EC2. Additionally, it offers a web management console to administer them.

CohesiveFT competes with another well-known company in this space, rPath, and now both can offer support for Virtual Iron virtual machines.

The virtualization vendor partners with rPath since January 2007, and now do the same with CohesiveFT.

Labels: Alliances, CohesiveFT, Virtual Iron

More than one year ago Egenera announced a major change in its go-to-market strategy, finally allowing some partners to OEM its cloud-computing-in-a-box software: Pan Manager.

The first and only company answering the call so far has been Fujitsu Siemens. But yesterday Egenera finally announced its second partner, and it is a really desirable one: Dell.

The two signed an OEM agreement for the North America (to be extended in EMEA and APAC during 2009) that rules the distribution of Pan Manager with a massive Dell rack featuring 192 CPU cores and 1536 GB RAM.
And this is just the beginning. Dell and Egenera are jointly developing a new solution platform that will launched in Q1 2009.

Unfortunately the Pan Manager that ships with the Dell system still includes vmBuilder 2.1, which embeds Citrix XenServer 4.1 (meaning no support for Windows Server 2008 guests).
Over the course of 2009 Egenera plans to update vmBuilder to 2.2 and include XenServer 5.0.

Labels: Alliances, Dell, Egenera

Yesterday Symantec announced a new partnership with VMware to integrate its much appreciated Veritas Cluster Server with VMware Infrastructure.

As first step Symantec has enhanced VCS to cluster vCenter.

Additionally, the two companies may bundle together VCS with Site Recovery Manager (SRM) as the announcement mentions a very vague complementary HA/DR solutions as part of the joint operation.

Labels: Alliances, Symantec, VMware

Virtual Bridges is a company founded at the end of 2006, that always offered commercial flavors of QEMU for Linux, BSD and Solaris platforms.
After KVM made its appearance Virtual Bridges started to implement support for it on its products for Linux. Where KVM is not available KQEUM is automatically used.

In August it significantly extended its scope by releasing its first VDI connection broker for KVM: Win4VDI.

Compared to other products in this space, Win4VDI doesn’t connect the user to the actual guest OS, but rather to the underlying host. From there the user session is started.
In this way Virtual Bridges can leverage the authentication methods and profiles that the host is using.

The choice has been courageous.
Even if KVM is part of the Linux kernel and even if its maintainer, Qumranet, has been acquired by Red Hat, the spread of a new virtualization platform must surpass a huge obstacle: the ISVs support.
And at this point no ISV formally supported its applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Despite that, Virtual Bridges has been rewarded as IBM just closed an agreement with them to resell a bundle made by:

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux (which is adopting KVM in place of Xen since February)
• Virtual Bridges VERDE (a subset of WIN4VDI that only supports Linux guest OSes)
• IBM Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes and the other Lotus applications (dubbed Open Collaboration Client Solution)

The whole package is available at $49 per concurrent user.

So the move is remarkable because IBM is the first big player supporting (and actively selling) KVM-based virtual infrastructures. But it’s also remarkable considering how heavily IBM invested in Xen in the past.
After the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, a number of entities behind the open source hypervisor development were reportedly unhappy and decided to shift to KVM. And this seems the first concrete step that demonstrate how unhappy IBM is about Xen.

True or not, looking at what IBM just did, we can have an idea of what Red Hat could do.
The difference between the two vendors is that Red Hat is in a much better position to sell an out of the box VDI package: it controls the operating system, it (indirectly) controls the virtualization platform, it controls the connection broker, and its role in the industry as OS provider certainly gives much influence on what ISV applications will be supported on top.

Now, considering that, besides Qumranet, Virtual Bridges is currently the only other vendor offering a connection broker for KVM and that its experience has to be somewhat limited, the real question is: why IBM didn’t do this with Red Hat instead of Ubuntu and Virtual Bridges?

Labels: Alliances, IBM, KVM, Virtual Bridges

So far the CA activity in the virtualization space has been more than silent.
Yes, the company issued many press announcements stating that it’s reworking many of its products to support virtualization, but the software giant never took major steps to become a virtualization leader like almost every other major IT player did in the last two years.

Hiring the former co-founder of Virtugo (a virtualization startup that mysteriously disappeared shortly after its merge with uXcomm), Chris Dickson, as Vice President didn’t seem to help much.

Now things may change as CA just made a joint announcement with VMware, revealing that its Data Center Automation Manager is integrated with VMware vCenter and will interoperate with Stage Manager.
Additionally, VMware vCenter capabilities are integrated into the CA Advanced Systems Management (ASM), where the VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology can merge with the CA’s Dynamic Resource Brokering (DRB), and together they can possibly start a fantastic virtualization management sprawl.

The announcement seems to imply that these are just the first steps of a much more tighten relationship. We’ll see for how long CA will be happy to play this role in the virtualization industry.

Labels: Alliances, CA, VMware

This week Virtual Iron announced an extension of its partnership with LeftHand Networks as the virtualization vendor joined the SAN vendor’s Technology Alliance Program.

The relationship started over one year ago when LeftHand obtained the certification to work with the Virtual Iron hypervisor.

It’s interesting to note that this new deal arrives immediately after HP completed the acquisition of the storage vendor, after months of heavy promotion operated by VMware.
Maybe the relationship between Virtual Iron and HP may further improve now.

Labels: Alliances, Virtual Iron

The VDI vendor Leostream continues to execute its new strategy after the $3 million cash injection received in May.

After appointing a new Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing and closing an reselling agreement with IBM, the company now signs a partnership with eG Innovations, a company focused on performance monitoring.

eG Innovations will enhanced its product, VM Monitor, to use the data about the virtual desktop infrastructures that the Leostream connection broker can offer.
It’s unclear if the two companies will offer a bundle of if the integration will go further.

Labels: Alliances, eG Innovations, Leostream

In August Citrix promised the beta release of a new toolkit to author virtual machines compliant to the new Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) standard.

Today is the day: Citrix just released the first technical preview of project Kensho under the LGPL license.

The package at the moment includes:

• an import/export tool (for Windows XP and 2003 only) which can convert in OVF any virtual machine in VHD format, taking it from a folder (the Library) or directly from a Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V host.
• an agent to be installed on XenServer hosts which allows the direct import/export of OVF VMs (this is not needed to interact with Hyper-V as the tool uses the WinRM interface provided by Windows Server 2008)

VMware Infrastructure direct support is not available but, exactly because this is an interoperability, customers can create an OVF virtual machine with the new VMware Studio and import into XenServer with this wizard. Or vice versa.

The tool also does another couple of interesting things:

• it allows the extraction of metadata only from the OVF package, useful if you want to backup the VM configuration
• it allows to map the virtual resources defined in the OVF metadata to the physical resources actually available on the virtualization host, useful to avoid any additional modifications of the OVF VM after the import in XenServer or Hyper-V.

Citrix published a useful video describing all these capabilities.

As part of its OVF effort Citrix also announces a partnership with rPath, the succesful firm that offers an online tool (rBuilder) to build and deliver new virtual appliances by assembling Linux packages like Lego bricks.

The two are working together to allow rBuilder to inject OVF virtual appliances directly into Xen-based cloud computing environments, like Amazon EC2.

If rPath can see itself beyond the current role of self-service portal to build virtual machines, it could morph in a real VM lifecycle management company focused on hosted virtual infrastructures (no matter if the purpose is cloud computing or not).
Citrix is offering them a unique opportunity to reach that goal.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, rPath, Standards

At this point it’s well known that Sun is about to enter the virtualization market with a massive offering: a hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), a management platform for physical and virtual machines (xVM Ops Center), a connection broker (Sun VDI) and even a hosted virtualization platform for desktops (VirtualBox).
On top of that it’s easy to guess that the company will release virtualization friendly servers and storage arrays.

As said many times before, Sun has a unique opportunity at the moment, being the only big company that can offer a complete computing stack for virtualization, from the hardware to the software, without bothering its customers with multi-vendor license and support agreements (and issues).

In such position one would think that Sun is focusing all its effort in integrating the components above in a well concerted offering, leaving few things to desire outside the company’s portfolio. But it’s not the case.

No matter if its hypervisor is due next month or so, no matter if there’s already a connection broker that could interconnect with it, Sun continues to enforce its relationship with VMware.

Last month the two announced that VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) will be sold by Sun with its Sun Ray thin clients.

It’s not hard to figure out where the Sun customers will look at when in need of new hypervisor, and it’s hard to believe that the company will be able to redirect their attention to xVM Server as soon as it’s out.

What surprises the most is that Sun continues to do business with VMware despite the hypervisor interoperability alliance with Microsoft.
Of course the latter doesn’t imply any kind of exclusive loyalty to the Redmond giant, but in practice behind such agreements there are remarkable financial interests, and Microsoft is probably not too happy to know that Sun is encouraging the adoption of ESX rather than Hyper-V.

We’ll see after the xVM family will be out if and how this strategy will be modified and what impact it caused so far.

Labels: Alliances, Sun, VDI, VMware

At its conference VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas last month, VMware previewed the next phase of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies announcing it as VMware View.

On stage Steve Herrod, the company’s CTO, unveiled a partnership with the startup Teradici to develop a more efficient remote desktop protocol.
It seems that this may be not enough, maybe because of the time needed to have a commercial product, so VMware took some extra steps to boost Microsoft RDP performance today.

The company signed a license agreement with the thin computing vendor Wyse Technologies to use its technologies TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) to enhance the virtual desktop experience in VMware View products.

Labels: Alliances, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technologies

The UK virtualization firm Leostream continues its rebuilding after the $3 million received in May.
After a fine-tuning of its product portfolio (a still on-going process), and the appointment of an Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, the company now closes a major deal with IBM.

As part of the agreement IBM will resell the Leostream Connection Broker with its BladeCenter HC10 Workstation Blade. 
Additionally, IBM will provide direct support for this product to all its customers.

The deal is specially interesting because IBM is already busy in this space with another VDI vendor: Desktone (see virtualization.info coverage here).
The two already cooperated in deploying a massive virtual desktop infrastructure (1,400 PCs) in July.

Labels: Alliances, IBM, Leostream

Parallels and DataCore joined forces last month and are working now build a cost-effective solution which include virtualization and storage.

The press announcement doesn’t mention any product merge at the moment so this may start as just a bundle effort at the beginning.

It will be interesting to see how the Virtuozzo audience, which includes a lot of hosting providers, will welcome the new storage partner.

Parallels is clearly working to build a complete virtualization platform through exclusive partnerships and OEM agreements. 
The company already secured the VDI tier thanks to a deal with Provision Networks.
In the future Parallels may build more partnerships like this in new segments of the virtualization market to match the 360-degrees offering the VMware is preparing to launch with VI 4.0. 

Labels: Alliances, DataCore, Parallels