virtualization.info

April 21, 2010 I'll be at the Catalyst 2010 conference in Prague, hosted by Burton Group (recently acquired by Gartner), presenting a lecture titled Securing the Internal Cloud.

2010 is considered the year of cloud computing. Vendors like VMware, Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft are releasing new solutions that turn virtualization platforms into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
There are new parts of the equation: side-by-side with the hypervisor and the management layer, there’s automation, billing, self-service provisioning, service catalogs, application SLAs, multi-tenancy and more.
Across the globe, customers are looking at this offering and evaluating the conversion of their data centers in private clouds, and security is one of the first aspects that should be assessed.

How do the new elements of a private cloud impact security?

In this session, we’ll explore the differences between a virtual infrastructure and a private cloud, trying to figure out if and how they extend the data center attack surface, and what can be done to handle any new threat that IaaS architectures introduces.

There are amazing professionals speaking at the conference, including:

• Chris Wolf - Senior Analyst at Burton Group
  with Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: Assessing Vendor Solutions (and many more sessions)
• Drue Reeves - Vice President, Research Director at Burton Group
  with Building a Viable Cloud Strategy (and many more sessions)
• Giles Hogben - Program Manager, Secure Applications at ENISA
  with Europe's security strategy for cloud computing
  (we worked together on the Cloud Computing Security Risk Assessment published in November 2009)
• Richard Garsthagen – Senior Evangelist at VMware
  with Building a Private Cloud using Virtualization: Practical Next Steps
• Richard Jones - Service Director, Data Center Strategies at Burton Group
  with Server Virtualisation Hypervisor Competitive Differences
  (a top speaker at our own Virtualization Congress)
• Ruben Spruijt – CTO at PQR and Jeroen van de Kamp – CTO at Login Consultants
  with Project VRC 2010: Best Practices in Virtualising Terminal Servers and Desktops
  (another two top speakers at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress)
• Simon Crosby – CTO, Data Center & Cloud at Citrix
  with Extreme Makeovers: Virtualization and the future of the enterprise desktop

For this reason virtualization.info will report from the conference, publishing interesting news and announcements launched during the keynotes and some sessions.

If you plan to attend and you didn't register yet there's a great gift: Burton Group was kind enough to grant virtualization.info readers a special discount price.
To use it go here and use the DOTINFO to pay 995 Euros.

I’ll stay in Prague for the entire conference (April 20-22). If you plan to attend I’d be extremely pleased to meet you in person before or after my speech.

Alessandro


(just in case you are interested but cannot attend, I'll speak at other events this year. My full schedule is here)

Labels: Announcements, Cloud Computing, Events

Some of our readers may be familiar with the virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab facility.
Operated by our trusted partner Kybernetika, Rent-A-Lab (RAL) is a cutting-edge data center located in Zurich, equipped with some of the latest and greatest servers, storage and network gears a virtualization professional may ever desire.

RAL is available for rent to worldwide customers. virtualization.info and Kybernetika offer unrestricted, on-demand (24/7) access to its bare metal since January 2007.
Customers can use it to install complex, multi-tier virtual infrastructures (our hardware is supported by every player in the market, including Citrix, Microsoft and of course VMware) and do whatever they want with them: training classes (the most common scenario), product evaluations, benchmarks, etc.

The project started three years ago with a single rack, equipped with 9 enterprise class servers, 2 SANs and 2 network switches. Over time, we continued to expanded the facility.
In summer 2008 we were already able to offer access to over $1 million (USD) in hardware to concurrent customers from around the world (at impressive connection speed).

Down the road we achieved some customers’ recognition and support from vendors: NetApp, EMC and Cisco filled our racks with their hardware and selected our facility to host presentations, online events (like our first round of OneHourOn webcasts with EMC), and premiere workshops (like the first Cisco Nexus Bootcamp in Switzerland).
VMware and Cisco even selected RAL as their preferred location to run the first UCS Bootcamp in Switzerland, which is running since the beginning of March. And so far we served over 200 attendees.

Today we are extremely proud to announce that RAL further expanded and moved to a new location.

The facility now features 30 HP servers (DL380 G5) and a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform with 10 blades (soon to be upgraded to 20 blades). 
Servers and storage (from Dell | EqualLogic, EMC, HP and NetApp) are interconnected by multiple Cisco 4948 network switches and Brocade 5000 storage switches.

Every single point of failure in the infrastructure (including Internet connectivity of course), which is worth over $2.5 million (USD) now, has been eliminated.

And just in case you want to see with your eyes we have three live webcams:

• http://tv01.d-on-d.com
• http://tv02.d-on-d.com
• http://tv03.d-on-d.com

(username/password: tvdond / tvdond)

The whole data center has been migrated to a new location in Zurich downtown. It’s 4 minutes from the railway station and 15 minutes from the airport, surrounded by hotels.
We built a classroom facility all around the racks (two rooms, for a total of 90 seats), so that it’s easier for our customers to hosts their courses, demos and meetings on-site, and not just online.

We are also planning to host some exclusive mini-conferences in these rooms, showing new products in action rather than on PowerPoint slides.
Vendors that are interested in arranging launch events at virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab are welcome to contact us.

We are preparing other surprises. Stay tuned for more!

Labels: Announcements

As most readers know, virtualization.info can deliver its daily news through the email newsletter, the RSS feed, the Twitter stream and even the Windows Live Alerts service.
What most of you probably don’t know anyway is that virtualization.info is on Facebook too:

www.facebook.com/virtualization.info

If you become a fan, our news will appear on your Facebook stream, just in case you prefer to aggregate everything on this platform.

This may be even more convenient if you are using your Facebook identity to comment on our articles, a new feature that we activated just a few weeks ago.
With over 350 million users in the world, it was time for virtualization.info to be there too.

P.s.: Facebook offers a nice Discussion Board for each fan page.
Feel free to use the virtualization.info one to debate about any virtualization topic you like or just to say “Hi”.

Labels: Announcements

Last month virtualization.info announced a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
The webcast shows a live configuration and/or management of a popular virtualization product among the ones that we daily track in the news.

There are no slides at all. Everything is performed live and directly on product consoles.

Our first show featured the configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays, something that is not exactly easy to test without the proper lab equipment.

We got several inquiries from the vendors to show their products in the next OneHourOn shows, but before moving on we’d like to repeat the first one one more time for the readers that wanted attend and couldn’t because of the limited seats available.

This time we increased the availability to 50 seats, and we’ll progressively increase more as long as we are satisfied by the performance.

So the second virtualization.info OneHourOn show is scheduled for July 23 @ 6pm CET (9am PST).
Once again our presenter will be Marcel Brunner, VMware Specialist at EMC Switzerland.
The webcast will be delivered in English language.

Like for the previous show, attending the event is free.
You are welcome to register at this address: http://onehouron.eventbrite.com

Attention: The attendees will receive the coordinates to join the meeting by email, so be sure to register using a real email address and be sure to check the SPAM folder if you didn’t receive the meeting coordinates by June 22.

If you want to send suggestions about what product should appear in the next OneHourOn show, or if you are a vendor and are interested in demoing your product during the next OneHourOn show, please send an email to onehouron@virtualization.info

Labels: Announcements, EMC, OneHourOn, VMware

Today virtualization.info is happy to announce the launch of a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
We’ll use our on-demand datacenter to show the configuration and management of products provided by the many virtualization vendors that we daily track in the news.

So no slides at all.

This is a great opportunity to see in action a product that you may be interested in purchasing and by the way this also is a great opportunity to see how powerful, flexible and fast Rent-A-Lab can be.

Of course we’ll take full advantage of the enterprise equipment we have (currently 28 servers, each with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5420 2.5GHz, plus 35TB of storage served by SANs from several vendors).
This is why the first OneHourOn webcast will show a fairly complex installation to reproduce in a lab without expensive test equipment: the installation and configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays.

The first virtualization.info OneHourOn is scheduled for June 25 @ 6pm CET.
Our presenter will be Marcel Brunner, VMware Specialist at EMC Switzerland.
The webcast will be delivered in English language.

Attending the event is free.
Because this is the first attempt to run such virtual event we decided to limit the number of seats to 15.
You are welcome to register at this address: http://onehouron.eventbrite.com

Attention: The attendees will receive the coordinates to join the meeting by email, so be sure to register using a real email address and be sure to check the SPAM folder if you didn’t receive the meeting coordinates by June 24.

If you want to send suggestions about what product should appear in the next OneHourOn show, or if you are a vendor and are interested in demoing your product during the next OneHourOn show, please send an email to onehouron@virtualization.info

Labels: Announcements, EMC, OneHourOn, VMware

Tomorrow will be the last day of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress and we have a lot of great sessions and top notch speakers to present.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that you’ll see tomorrow here at the MGM Grand:

9.00am - 9.50am

• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren't Telling You [VC103]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Richard Jones, Service Director, Data Center Strategies, Burton Group
• The Real Cost of VDI [VC112]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Brian Madden, Independent Analyst, Brianmadden.com

10.00am - 10.50am

• Simplifying Virtualization Management Using New Industry Standards [VC110]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Winston Bumpus, President, DMTF
• Lessons from the Real World: Storage in Virtualized Environments [VC104]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead, ePlus Technology

11.00am - 11.50am

• My Cloud or Yours? The importance of standards-based virtual infrastructure management [VC111]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Abolfazl Sirjani, Co-chair, Virtualization Management Committee, DMTF
• Virtual Building Blocks: A Modular Approach to a Comprehensive Solution [VC108]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Jason M. Langone, Director of Virtualization Services, Infinite Group

1.00pm - 1.50pm

• Building the Datacenter of the Future [VC204]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer of Datacenter and Cloud Architecture, VMware
• Virtualization Technologies and the Manageability Challenge [VC205]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Brian Duckering, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Endpoint Virtualization, Symantec

5.00pm - 5.50pm

• Panel: The Future of Virtualization [VC303]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Brian Duckering, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Endpoint Virtualization, Symantec
  Richard Jones, Service Director, Data Center Strategies, Burton Group
  Simon Crosby, CTO, Citrix
  Tim Wegner, Vice President, Product Dev, High Availability Solutions, Stratus Technologies
  Alessandro Perilli, Founder, virtualization.info (moderator)

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Labels: Announcements, Events

The first day of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress is just ended and so we are free to focus on what will come next here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that we’’ll have tomorrow, after the Citrix Synergy keynote:

11.30am - 12.20am

• Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro: The Complexity and Insecurity of the Cloud [VC105]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Christofer Hoff
• Storage considerations for Virtual Desktop Deployments [VC203]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Dave Glatfelter, Product Alliance Manager, HP

2.00pm - 2.50pm

• Virtualization Startups Launch [VC401]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Geoff Hayward, President and CEO, Data Gardens

3.00pm - 3.50pm

• Hypervisor management with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 [VC202]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Edwin Yuen, Technical Product Manager, Integrated Virtualization Strategy, Microsoft
• Automating Virtual Infrastructures With PowerShell [VC101]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Cody Bunch, Virtualization Engineer, Rackspace
  Patrick Ancillotti, Virtualization Engineer, Rackspace

4.00pm - 4.50pm

• Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Large Scale Virtualization Projects [VC102]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Virtualization, Dell
• Preventable Disasters - How Come Many Virtualization Users Never Think Availability? [VC201]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Tim Wegner, Vice President, Product Dev, High Availability Solutions, Stratus Technologies
  Daniel Kusnetzky, Principal Analyst, KG LLC

5.00pm - 5.50pm

• Panel: Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds) [VC302]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Christofer Hoff
  Dave Shackleford, Chief Security Officer, Configuresoft
  Michael Berman, CTO, Catbird
  Alessandro Perilli, Founder, virtualization.info (moderator)

Be sure to check the rest of the agenda to see the other sessions and panel that will take place on May 7.

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Labels: Announcements, Events

The virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress will begin in just one day here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that we’’ll have tomorrow, after the Citrix Synergy keynote:

2.30pm - 3.20pm

• Project Virtual Reality Check [VC106]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Ruben Spruijt, Solutions Architect and CTO, PQR
  Jeroen van de Kamp, Enterprise Architect and CTO, Login Consultants
• Building Purpose-Driven Applications for Embedded Virtualization [VC206]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Debasish Biswas, VP of HyperSpace/HyperCore, Phoenix Technologies

3.30pm - 4.20pm

• Yes Automation Does Make Life Better [VC109]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Stephen Beaver, Virtualization Evangelist, Tripwire
• Virtual Infrastructure Management: Challenges and Best Practices [VC107]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Gary Lamb, Senior Director, Data Center Virtualization, INX

4.30pm - 5.20pm

• Panel: I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream [VC301]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Alex Vasilevsky, CTO, Virtual Computer
  David Greschler, Director, Virtualization Strategy, Microsoft
  Dr. Gaurav Banga, CTO, Phoenix Technologies
  Ian Pratt, Chairman, Xen.org
  Alessandro Perilli, Founder, virtualization.info (moderator)

Be sure to check the rest of the agenda to see the other sessions and panel that will take place on May 6 and 7.

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Labels: Announcements, Events

As we said in the previous post the Speakers, the Agenda and the Panels, the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress will happen in just one week in Las Vegas, co-located with the Citrix Synergy 2009 at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.

As some readers may remember, the conference program will include a particular general session on May 6.
During this slot we’ll present on stage up to six early stage start-ups that just came out of stealth mode or that just released their first product on the market.

Following the successful approaches used by Demo and TechCrunch conferences, we asked these companies to briefly present on stage their brand and then show the juice technologies they are about to offer.
For the attendees, it’s a great opportunity to see what will come out in the coming months and to reconsider their virtualization strategy accordingly.

Today it’s a great pleasure for me to announce that Data Gardens will launch and present on stage its first product for this first edition of the Virtualization Congress: Syntropy.

DataGardens changes the way businesses provide IT services across multi-site data center environments. Its products reduce the cost of IT provisioning and administration, while increasing productivity, utilization, and resiliency. DataGardens software systems extend conventional virtualization services including virtual machine migration, high availability, and load balancing, so they can be leveraged across multiple distributed sites. This unique capability enables DataGardens to offer solutions for remote IT provisioning, multi-site resource sharing, business continuity, and consolidated multi-site backup.

If you didn’t check the agenda it’s definitively time to do it and book a last minute flight to join us there.
(and just in case you need some help to justify the trip, here’s a toolkit ready for you)

See you in a week!

Labels: Announcements, Data Gardens, Events

Here we go. In just one week we’ll have the first edition of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress in Las Vegas, at the MGM Hotel, in co-location with the Citrix Synergy 2009.

I think we are safe to say that the list of speakers we lined up for the event is remarkable.

Some of the biggest and most respected names in the virtualization community will speak on stage about planning, designing, implementing and maintaining virtual infrastructures.

The Virtualization Congress line-up includes professionals like:

• Brian Madden (one of the most accredited expert worldwide in desktop and presentation virtualization)
• Christofer Hoff (the leading, independent voice about security in virtualization and top virtualization blogger in 2008 for virtualization.info)
• Mike DiPetrillo (the reckless and straight-forward unofficial voice of VMware, another top virtualization blogger in 2008 for virtualization.info)
• Richard Jones (a top analyst from one of the most concrete firms tracking the virtualization space today, the Burton Group)
• Ron Oglesby (author of the best-seller book VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide)
• Ruben Spruijt (one of the most respected voices in the application virtualization market, thanks to his independent comparisons about features and performance of the leading products in this space)
• Scott Lowe (top virtualization blogger of 2008 for virtualization.info and author of the upcoming Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0)
• Stephen Beaver (author of several books about virtualization since 2005, one of the restless moderators at the VMware VMTN forums)

With such top-notch speakers it’s easy to guess that the expectations for the agenda are probably very high. Hopefully we’ll not disappoint you with sessions like:

• Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Large Scale Virtualization Projects [VC102]
• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren't Telling You [VC103]
• Lessons from the Real World: Storage in Virtualized Environments [VC104]
• Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro: The Complexity and Insecurity of the Cloud [VC105]
• My Cloud or Yours? The importance of standards-based virtual infrastructure management [VC111]
• Storage Considerations for Virtual Desktop Deployments [VC203]
• The Real Cost of VDI [VC112]
• Virtual Infrastructure Management: Challenges and Best Practices [VC107]

And just to be sure that there’s will be some fireworks at the end of each conference day, we have three panels with bright and competitive minds moderated by an uncomfortable host: me, Alessandro Perilli.

• I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream [VC301]
  Panelists: Ian Pratt (Chairman at Xen.org), Dr. Gaurav Banga (CTO at Phoenix Technologies), Alex Vasilevsky (CTO at Virtual Computer) and David Greschler (Director of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft).
• Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds) [VC302]
  Panelists: Christofer Hoff, Michael Berman (CTO at Catbird) and Dave Schackleford (CSO at Configuresoft).
• The Future of Virtualization - VC303
  Panelists: Richard Jones, Simon Crosby (CTO at Citrix), Brian Duckering (Sr. Marketing Manager at Symantec and Tim Wegner (VP at Stratus Technologies).

See you in a week in Las Vegas!

Labels: Announcements, Events

Just 33 days are left before the Virtualization Congress 2009 takes place at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

For the ones that don’t know it the Virtualization Congress is an independently developed conference by virtualization.info but this year it will run side by side with the Citrix iForum, the Geek Speak Live! and the Network World Live, all together under the umbrella of the Citrix Synergy brand.
So if you like our agenda and you want also to see/try some of the technologies that Citrix is releasing/developing (XenServer for free, Essentials for Hyper-V, Project Independence, the ICA Receiver for the iPhone just to name a few) this may be a great opportunity.

We already offer a bundled ticket to let you attend all of the four events at a discounted price but we’d like to do some more today. Let’s call it a stimulus package to travel.

(of course this is not an April Fool’s prank)

We’ll select 40 people from our event system that registered by 9pm PST on April 15 and give them the following:

• 5 people will get free airfare on round trip domestic or international airfare to the conference
• 10 people will get a 4-night hotel stay at the MGM Grand during the conference
• 25 people will get a $100 room credit for on site expenses

(please see Terms and Conditions for eligibility)

The winners will be notified via email no later than April 20.
The email will provide instructions on how to book the travel using our event system.

To win you have to register.

Labels: Announcements, Events

VMworld Europe 2009, a great event which has just ended, there is another one is about to start: the virtualization.info’s independent conference Virtualization Congress 2009.

The event is really shaping up.
We have already published the first ten sessions that will make the agenda.
We have two stealth startups that will launch their brand and products during the Call for Startups general session.
And very soon we’ll announce the members of our three hot panels:

• I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream
• Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds)
• The Future of Virtualization

If you plan to attend the Virtualization Congress, you will also be able to attend the Citrix iForum, the Network World Live! and the Geek Speak events as the four conferences will take place at the same time in the same location.

We are offering an All-Inclusive ticket that grants access to every keynote and breakout session. And hopefully the news of XenServer for free is teasing some of you to digg more into the Citrix offering.

Please note that the Early Bird for having $400 off ends tomorrow. Go register today!

Before closing we’d like to clarify the reason behind the choice to arrange the event in Las Vegas during this tough time:

• The MGM Grand room rate is only $174 a night plus 9% tax - one of the lowest tax rates in the US
• Direct flights to Las Vegas from over 140 cities have an average airfare of $240
• The MGM Grand is only one mile from McCarren International Airport, which means an inexpensive taxi fare of only $20-$25 (one-way) and an airport shuttle fare of only $7 per person (one-way)
• For staying at the MGM Grand you get a $25 credit to use at restaurants and bars (Starbucks, Diego, Grand Buffet, Studio 54, Tabu, etc.) within the hotel

This is a table of what would cost to attend the conference in any other major convention city in US:

Labels: Announcements, Events

One of the missions of virtualization.info is to report about new vendors entering the virtualization market with valuable, innovative products.

We believe so much that promoting the virtualization startups is the right thing to do that we decided to use the Virtualization Congress 2009, to do so.

Less than one month ago we launched a contest, calling for all the early-stage companies that want to launch for the first time at our conference in Las Vegas in May.
Six of them will be selected to present their brands and products on stage (for free) and one of them will get a year of advertising on virtualization.info (for free).

Today we are happy to announce that we have the first submission.
Of course we’ll not unveil the name of the submitting companies, but in April we’ll announce those selected to present on stage.

Some of the leading architects in the virtualization community will be at the Virtualization Congress to speak.
Some of these guys, along with many potential customers and partners (and buyers), will attend the Call for Startups general session, so this will be a great exposure opportunity.

Remember: for the Virtualization Congress 2009 US we accept submissions up to March 31, and we’ll select just six startups. So be sure to apply as soon as possible.

Labels: Announcements, Events

As most readers may know, exactly two years ago virtualization.info and its partner Kybernetika announced the availability of a data center facility that can be rented and accessed online.
We called it virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab, the on-demand data center for virtualization professionals.

Over the months this facility was scaled up and upgraded, at a point that now Rent-A-Lab is split into two independent data centers, offering a grand total of 28 enterprise servers (HP DL 380 G5, each with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5420 2.5GHz) and over 35TB of storage, distributed in multiple arrays from the leading vendors in the market.

Today we are happy to announce that availability of two EMC Celerra NS20 machines as part of the Rent-A-Lab equipment, featuring

• 45 disks with 146GB each
• 6 Fibre Channel interfaces (4GB)
• 8 Ethernet interfaces (1GB) that can be accessed through iSCSI, NFS and CIFS protocols

With EMC, NetApp, Dell EqualLogic, HP and Pillar storage side by side, virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab is the perfect playground to test how the hypervisors perform with different back-ends.

To demonstrate the value (and the speed) of this infrastructure we are preparing something special for our readers. Stay tuned!

hint: this has something to do with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

Meanwhile you may want to take a look at the actual configuration of Rent-A-Lab.

Labels: Announcements

One week ago virtualization.info published the results of its Virtualization Industry Survey 2008 about the Hardware Virtualization adoption.

Easy to guess, the responses for Q6 - What hardware virtualization platform do you implement? generated concerns among our readers, as Microsoft Hyper-V appeared “more adopted” than VMware ESX.
Some of you demanded a clarification on the methodology used to collect and validate the published data, others simply judged the whole survey as 100% useless.
A few noted that, differently from the usual behavior, there was no comment on the results. It was not a case.

Now that enough buzz was generated it’s time to disclose the real information we collected.

The responses were collected online, through a web form (developed with Google Forms) that accepts anonymous answers (so there is no profiling of the surveyed person) and doesn’t enforce any security measure (so any reader can vote multiple times during a single day or over a longer period of time).
The only tracker that the survey platform registered was a unique timestamp for each response form, reporting date and time (HH:MM:SS).

Some quick tests with Google Forms, that anybody can perform (as the product is free), would confirm that a visitor can complete the survey multiple times per day without being tracked or blocked.

Despite that, virtualization.info tracked every possible information about the people that visited the form page using a 3d party statistic engine.
For each visit we recorded things like the source network, the country, the city, the browser, and other typical information.
Of course this is not enough to unambiguously say how many from a certain source network submitted the survey form. But, depending on how much time a visitor spent on the page (and we tracked this information), we can guess with a good level of confidence if the visitor filled the form or not.

Before going any further, it’s worth to highlight that in an anonymous survey like this one, each vendor is in the same condition and can equally cheat to influence the results.
In an ideal world the vendors (or better, their employees) would recognize that this is a very bad idea, as their actions completely mess up the result and waste the efforts of the ones that prepared the survey and the ones that participated it with honesty.

Said so, the following numbers should be self-explanatory.

Oct. 29, 2008 - The survey is unofficially announced inside an article about the IDC and Gartner market shares reports.

Here’s what happened on the survey form page that day and the other two (Oct. 29-31) of that week:

• 237 page views from Microsoft Corp with 1:49 minutes per visit on average
• 147 page views from Microsoft European Internet Data Centres with 2:37 minutes per visit on average
• 473 responses marked “Hyper-V” as answer to question Q6

versus

• 75 page views from VMware Inc. with 2:30 minutes per visit on average
• 178 responses marked “ESX” as answer to question Q6

Here’s what happened on the survey form page over the entire survey period (Oct. 28 - Dec. 31):

• Microsoft (US and EMEA) page views - 551 with 1:38 minutes per visit on average
• VMware (US and EMEA) page views - 136 with 3:23 minutes per visit on average

Labels: Announcements, Market Trends

In December 2008 virtualization.info launched a Call for Papers for the first edition of the Virtualization Congress in the United States.

The initiative was so wildly successful that we collected over 120 submissions (and despite the deadline was Dec. 31 we continue to receive new ones every day).

Today we are happy to announce the first round of breakout sessions that will make the Virtualization Congress 2009 agenda.

As you’ll see the sessions we’ve selected cover some of the hottest topics in which a virtualization professional can utilize in today’s market.
We believe that the level the contents and the height of the speakers is remarkable:

• Automating VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell
  Cody Bunch
  Virtualization Architect at Rackspace
• Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Large Scale Virtualization Projects
  Ron Oglesby
  Practice Executive, Virtualization at Dell
• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling you
  Richard Jones
  Service Director, Data Center Strategies at Burton Group
• Lessons from the Real World: Storage in Virtualized Environments
  Scott Lowe
  National Technical Lead at ePlus Technology
• Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro: The Complexity and Insecurity of the Cloud
  Christofer Hoff
  Chief Security Architect at Unysis
• Project Virtual Reality Check
  Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp
  Solutions Architect and CTO at PQR / Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants
• Simplifying Virtualization Management Using New Industry Standards
  Winston Bumpus
  President at DMTF
• Virtual Infrastructure Management: Challenges and Best Practices
  Gary Lamb
  Senior Director, Data Center Virtualization at INX
• Virtual Building Blocks: A Modular Approach to a Comprehensive Solution
  Jason M. Langone
  Director of Virtualization Services at Infinite Group
• Yes, Automation Does Make Life Better
  Stephen Beaver
  Virtualization Evangelist at Tripwire

The full abstract for each session, which is really worth to read, can be read at this page: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/sessions.htm

From this first round of sessions it should be clear how the Virtualization Congress is keeping its independence despite its joint location with the Citrix Synergy 2009.

As Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, said on his corporate blog at the beginning of the year:

Citrix has no influence or control over the Virtualization Congress program whatsoever. Alessandro and his independent program committee (which does not have any representation from Citrix), together with the readers of virtualization.info, will independently develop their agenda, select speakers and run the event.  Like other vendors, Citrix has submitted session proposals, but I have no idea whether or not they will be accepted.

P.s.: If you liked the sessions above wait to see the three panels we’ll have at the end of each conference day. Here’s the tentative titles:

• May 5 - I Was There when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream
• May 6 - Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds) 
• May 7 - The Future of Virtualization

Feedbacks about the breakout sessions and the panels are greatly welcome.

Labels: Announcements, Events

Today can finally publish the results of our Virtualization Industry Survey 2008 about hardware virtualization adoption.

The survey was open at the end of October just for our virtualization.info Vanguards members, then extended to all our readers.
In a little more than one month 1050 responses were collected and, as promised, we are publishing today the surprising results:

Q1 - What is the size of your company? 

Q2 - Where your company is located?

Q3 - What is your job title? 

Q4 - Where hardware virtualization is being adopted in your company? (multiple choice)

Q5 - What is the current adoption level of hardware virtualization in your company?

Q6 - What hardware virtualization platform do you implement? (multiple choice)?

Q7 - How many virtual machines do you have deployed at the moment?

Q8 - Which tasks are you employing virtualization for? (multiple choice)

Q9 - What is the biggest challenge in your virtualization projects?

Q10 - Which is the biggest obstacle you found so far in adopting virtualization?

Of course this is just the report of the raw data. The numbers we collected can analyzed in many ways so we’ll publish a second article about this survey trying to extrapolate the most interesting facts, like how many companies use VMware ESX and Hyper-V at the same time, or what kind of challenges are facing the customers managing more than 1000 virtual machines.

Update: Part 2 of this post is now available here.

Labels: Announcements, Market Trends

Today we’ve closed the voting session for the Virtualization Congress 2009 US Call for Papers.
As many of you probably read in the past weeks, the initiative was very successful as we collected 98 submissions (and more are coming in these hours).

It’s amazing the time that our readers took to review them and vote.
Unfortunately, somebody tried to abuse the chance to vote anonymously (something we did to not bother people with yet another registration system) and cheated in a shameless way. But we have the proper tools to discover which votes are inflated.
Besides that your feedback has helped us a lot to understand how the agenda should be. Thanks!

Now it’s time for another call: the Call for Startups.
On stage we don’t want just the best speakers talking about the real-world challenges in planning, designing, implementing and maintaining virtual data center.

The Virtualization Congress wants to be also a place where new virtualization firms can launch and show revolutionary new technologies.

This year we’ll offer the stage, at no cost, to maximum six early-stage startups.
Each of them will have at least 10 minutes to demo their product, for the first time, in front of the Virtualization Congress audience.

At the end of the show the attendees will be able to vote for the most interesting company and the winner will get an entire year of advertising on virtualization.info.
That’s correct: the winner will be able to place a banner on virtualization.info for 12 months, completely free.

The list of virtualization vendors that have advertised with us so far speaks by itself, and with the tough economy we have these days we believe that this is a valuable prize.

Read the rules and apply here.

Labels: Announcements, Events

The virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009 will take place in May 5-7 at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, co-hosted with other three great events (Citrix iForum, Network World Live! and Geek Speak).

On Dec 1st we launched a Call for Papers to deliver some great contents on stage.
In one month, despite the closing quarter and the holidays, we received an amazing 97 submissions.

As promised, today we publish all of them, title and abstract, so you can vote for the most interesting ones and help us to build the event you’d like to attend.
We just removed any reference to the speaker, so there’s an exclusive focus on the topic.

To simplify the whole process we setup a Digg-like interface where you can anonymously promote (up arrow) or demote (down arrow) each presentation.
You can even comment each abstract (and we encourage you to do so), so the speakers can have some early feedbacks and fine-tune their presentations to match your needs.
Last but not least there’s a search if you are looking for something in particular and don’t want to browse all the 97 submissions.

Here we go: http://cfp.virtualizationcongress.com

Some of the proposals you’ll find there:

• Building a Business Case for your virtualization projects
• Cloud Computing Adoption Model
• Designing a Stable Virtual Infrastructure
• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren't Telling You
• iPhone Virtualization
• Power and Cooling in the Datacenter
• Security Architecture for VDI
• Virtual Infrastructures: Scale Up or Scale Out? Rack or Blade form factors?
• Virtualized Storage for Virtualized IT: Best Practices for Maximizing Efficiency, Flexibility, and Data Protection
• VM Sprawl Case Study Findings

Labels: Announcements, Events

For the fourth year in a row virtualization.info grew over 50%, now surpassing 2 Million page views / year.

We also reached 9,000 subscribers and almost 2,000 members of our network of virtualization professionals: the virtualization.info Vanguards.

But what are the articles that contributed to achieve this great numbers? Here the top 10 for 2008:

1. VMware to release ESX 3i for free next week
2. A VMware mistake may shutdown thousands of virtual infrastructures
3. VMware ESXi vs Microsoft Hyper-V- which one is better for SMBs-
4. VMware employee reveals details on CEO firing, exposes Tucci and Maritz confidential
5. What to expect at VMworld- ESX 4.0 beta, Intel six-core CPUs, and maybe Cisco virtual switches
6. Cisco to enter the x86 server market with a blade system
7. VMware Workstation 6.5 features list
8. VMware loses its CEO
9. Tool- SVMotion plug-in for VMware VirtualCenter
10. Release: Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0

Labels: Announcements

As our readers know virtualization.info tracks the evolution of the virtualization.info since 2003 thanks to the huge help of an overwhelming number of news sources, including mainstream news portal, corporate and personal blogs, web forums and newsgroups.

While most news sites don’t shine for their analysis, the overall quality of the blogs is very high.
This year a number of them really impressed for the value of the content and the knowledge of their authors.

virtualization.info recommends (in no special order):

- blog.scottlowe.org - Authored by Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead for Virtualization at ePlus Technology

- IT 2.0 - Authored by Massimo Re Ferrè, Architect at IBM

- Mike D’s Blog - Authored by Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware

- Rational Survivability - Authored by Christofer Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys

- Virtual Geek - Authored by Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC

Labels: Announcements

At the beginning of this month virtualization.info announced the Virtualization Congress 2009, to be held at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, from May 5 to 7.

This year the event will be co-hosted with the Citrix iForum, Network World Live! and Geek Speak (this last one will be offered as part of the Virtualization Congress ticket). More information about this are here.

To build the agenda we issued a Call for Papers that ends Dec. 31, 2008.
We accept proposals from any industry entity, including independent professionals, solution providers and of course virtualization vendors.

So far we got over 50 submissions that we’ll publish next Monday (January 5th) here, asking our readers to vote for the most interesting ones.

Our pre-registrations highlight a special interest for best-practices and designing sessions about most topics around virtualization (from application virtualization to virtual lab management, passing through chargeback), and so we urge the brilliant virtualization architects and engineers that make our readership to share their experiences and submit a presentation during these last three days.

We are keen to bring on stage some independent voices to build some real-world knowledge.
If you are an expert about one specific vendor it’s great.
If your presentation crosses the boundaries of a certain product it’s even better.

Submit here: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/cfp.htm

Labels: Announcements, Events

As most of our readers know by now, the Virtualization Congress 2008 planned for October in London didn’t take place as planned.

While waiting for a second chance in Europe, our team decided to postpone the first edition by several months and move it to the US.

The result is that the Virtualization Congress 2008 becomes the Virtualization Congress 2009, taking place in Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, from May 5 to 7.

There are other three important changes:

First of all, for this first US edition, the event is co-hosted with other two events: the Citrix iForum and the Network World Live!
Along with them, the Virtualization Congress 2009 will benefit the event coordination and logistics that Citrix calls Synergy.
This will give virtualization.info enough resources to deliver the great event that we have planned.

The fact that the Virtualization Congress is under the umbrella of Citrix Synergy doesn’t impact the independence of the event.
virtualization.info is still in charge of the whole agenda and has no constrains.
Citrix will not have any special benefits in terms of exposure during the event.
Every vendor, including the Citrix competitors, are more than welcome as sponsors.
Delegates will be able to attend all the three events if they like, otherwise they are totally free to just attend the Virtualization Congress 2009.

In other words, the Virtualization Congress remains “the independent stage for virtualization technologies”.

Secondarily, the Virtualization Congress 2009 agenda will become much more technical, specifically designed for virtualization architects and engineers.
We ditched the “Reseller Day” planned in Europe, and extended the main agenda up to 2.5 days.
We are working to include in the schedule every possible topic about virtualization, such as:

• Application virtualization & streaming
• Benchmarks
• Cloud computing
• Hosted virtual desktops infrastructures (connection brokering, thin clients, etc.)
• Software development & testing through virtual lab automation
• Storage virtualization
• Technology adoption challenges
• Technology ROI
• Virtual infrastructures maintenance  (operational frameworks, best practices, etc.)
• Virtual machines disaster recovery / high-availability  (backup / restore, hosts synchronization, P2V migrations, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructure security (platforms hardening / patching, intrusion detection, permissions, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructures automation / orchestration
• Virtual infrastructures capacity planning
• Virtual infrastructures design
• Virtual Infrastructures performance monitoring / troubleshooting
• Virtual machines lifecycle management (provisioning, inventory, tracking, etc.) 

The third and most important change in the Virtualization Congress 2009 is that we finally accept session submissions from anybody in the industry. No more sponsored sessions only.

If you are an independent professional or a solution provider that wants to unleash some deep knowledge on stage about the topics above, then you are welcome.
We are looking for unbiased speakers that want to present breakthrough sessions through one the following formats:

• Best practices
• Case history
• Research analysis
• Designing
• Implementing
• Introduction / Overview

We’ll accept submissions until the end of December 2008.

In the first week of January the submitted sessions will be published on virtualization.info and the audience will be able to vote for ones that they like the most.

Submit your sessions here: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/cfp.htm

Labels: Announcements, Events

Fifteen days ago virtualization.info launched a web survey to try to understand the state of the union for hardware virtualization.

We invited our readers to answer the survey at the very end of a post about Gartner and IDC, questioning the marketshare numbers that the two recently published.

Despite this very unofficial launch, in just three days we collected over 500 responses, and now we surpassed 750. 
Of course our questionnaire is not comparable with the studies of the tier-1 analysis firms, but it certainly collected one of the biggest number of answers so far in a virtualization survey. And the emerging picture is surprisingly interesting.

We’d like to wait another 15 days or 1000 responses before stopping the survey. After that we’ll publish the results on virtualization.info for free.

If you didn’t participate yet please do: http://www.virtualization.info/surveys

Labels: Announcements, Market Trends

Today we’d like to introduce a new resource: the virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide.

Our Buyer’s Guide is composed by a (growing) collection of matrixes that compares many features of many products in the same category.
Every few months we’ll update the matrixes by updating the feature-set and adding new products.

We decided to start with the two most popular categories: bare-metal virtual machine monitors (VMM), or what we traditionally call hypervisors and their management consoles, or what we may call virtual infrastructure managers.

The vendors included so far are Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Virtual Iron and VMware.

As you’ll see the matrixes are incomplete and this is one of the reasons why we call this a beta for now.
Finding the technical specifications for every product on the market (even the most popular ones) is incredibly complex and involving the vendors to retrieve the missing details has been painfully slow so that at a point we decided to go on just by ourselves.
On bottom of every matrix you’ll find an email address where to send the missing data to complete the table if you want to help (of course also corrections and feedbacks are welcome).

Another reason why we call the Buyer’s Guide a beta resource is that we’d like to include the hypervisor (and management layer) from Sun as soon as it will be available.
We’d like to include the upcoming bare-metal Parallels Server as well, but it will depend on its release timeframe, which is totally unknown at the moment.

The third reason to call this a beta is that some products listed need an update. It’s the case for Citrix XenServer and XenCenter 5.0 and for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.
We’ll update their feature-set in the coming weeks.

So, as you can see, the product is far from being complete at the moment. We count on our knowledgeable readership to complete the two matrixes in just a few days.

A special thanks goes to Scott Lowe who worked on this project for a long time and made it possible.

Enjoy the virtualization Buyer’s Guide beta.

Update: Due to an overwhelming demand we already updated the matrixes to include Citrix XenServer and XenCenter 5.0 as well as Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Thanks to all the readers that sent out feedbacks and helped to fill the matrixes for the products above.

Labels: Announcements

One of the most exciting news announced at the VMworld 2008 last month in Las Vegas is the new pluggable virtual network that VMware Infrastructure 4 will introduce in 2009.

The first 3rd party virtual switch available for ESX 4 will be the Cisco Nexus 1000v.
The product is not yet in public beta but Cisco is already showing it to selected customers.

We are delighted to announce that virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab, our on-demand data center for virtualization professionals, has been selected as the demo facility for the Cisco Bootcamp about Nexus technologies in Switzerland.

The event will take place Oct. 21-23 and will show for the first time in the country a Nexus 5000 / Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) on a unified fabric (UF) in conjunction with VMware ESX environments.

Unified fabric (UF) is the overall name of the brand-new technologies that consists of: Datacenter Ethernet, Fibre-channel over Ethernet and high-speed 10G Networking for Datacenter LAN, SAN and cluster interconnect.

Unfortunately the Nexus will not be available for rent after this bootcamp, but stay tuned as we’ll fill this hole very soon. Also, look for other exciting announcements coming about Rent-A-Lab before the end of the year.

Labels: Announcements, Cisco

virtualization.info is happy to announce the launch of an iPhone version of the website.

To see it please navigate with your iPhone Safari to:

http://www.virtualization.info/i

If you like you can the page to your Home clicking on the “Plus” icon. 
At that point virtualization.info should appear on your iPhone dock like any other application.

Enjoy!

Current limitations:

• comments can be read but cannot be written
• search is unavailable

Labels: Announcements

As most virtualization.info readers know we offer a unique resource called the Virtualization Industry Radar.
It lists all the companies in the Hardware, OS and Application Virtualization markets that we daily track on the website.

67 companies are currently there, and we invited all of them to our first independent conference: the Virtualization Congress 2008.

We are very proud today to announce that 23 of those companies promptly answered.

Our newest sponsors are Parallels and EMC as Platinum, Symantec as Gold, Magirus, CiRBA, Ceedo, InstallFree, CDG and Catbird as Silver.

With them we have since the early days: Quest/Provision Networks, Microsoft, ManageIQ, Citrix, VMware, HP, and Phoenix Technologies as Platinum, Marathon Technologies and Vizioncore as Gold, VMLogix, Veeam, Transitive, eG Innovations and IGEL as Silver.   

The details of all these companies are here.

We think that it’s an amazing number for a lot of reasons, but the best thing is that the number will continue to grow even more.
We can’t wait to announce the other major virtualization players that you’ll see on the Exhbitors' Floor of the ExCeL Conference Centre in London, from the 15th to 16th of October.

We hope to see all of our readers there.

Labels: Announcements, Events

October 14-16, 2008, in London, virtualization.info will open its first conference about virtualization technologies: the Virtualization Congress 2008.
The Early Bird (£ 200 discount) will end April 30, and before that time we wanted to give our readers an insightful update about the progresses made so far.

Well, the support we are getting from the industry is simply impressive.

Since day one we were able to announce that the biggest market players, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, are with us as Platinum sponsors.
With them other emerging stars supported the Virtualization Congress since the beginning: Quest, ManageIQ, Marathon Technologies, Veeam and VMLogix.

In less than two months since that day, we received a remarkable number of inquiries and we are glad to announce another round of great sponsors: HP, Phoenix Technologies, Vizioncore, Transitive, eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, Metron.

Unfortunately we cannot disclose the names of many others since they are signing in these hours but check back the Sponsors list to see who else is coming.

Obviously we don't have only top sponsors. A great conference is made by great speakers.

The agenda is still secret, but we can reveal the first three names:

• Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix (see his introductory video)
• Dr. Guarav Banga, Senior Vice President of Engineering and CTO at Phoenix Technologies
• Jerald H. Melnick, CTO at Marathon Technologies

Other top-level technical speakers are coming, along with some exceptional guest stars. We have new announcements in queue.

Another factor that makes a conference a better happening is the surprise element: our Call for Startups competition received several applications from stealth companies and we should be able to show something completely new on stage this October.

Hopefully this is a good start to make the Virtualzation Congress a great event to attend, but just in case we have much more coming. Stay tuned!

The Early Bird (£ 200 discount) ends in one week! Register now!

Labels: Announcements

That's right: virtualization.info launches its first independent conference about virtualization technologies.

VMware VMworld, Microsoft WinHEC (or TechEd), Citrix App Delivery Conference certainly are great technical events, so was not easy to think about a conference that could add value on top of these ones. But at virtualization.info we had the feeling that the industry needed something more, something new.

We wanted to create an event that doesn't compete with the conferences above, but complements them with unique features. Today, for this first announcement, we just want to highlight a couple of them:

• First of all, we wanted Virtualization Congress to be truly independent.
  Virtualization Congress is an event open to every company in the space, even the newest one. For this reason we invitated almost every firm in the virtualization market and each one can have the same opportunities.
  The answer we got was amazing: the three biggest players in the space, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft promptly answered and will be with us as top sponsors. Besides them we'll have some distinguished emerging stars like ManageIQ, Quest, Marathon Technologies, Veeam and VMLogix.
• Secondarily we wanted it to be truly useful for every attendee.
  

  At Virtualization Congress these vendors will not present boring, endless, introductory PowerPoint slides.
  On stage these guys have one hour of time to describe a concrete, realistic case study with real-world, circumstantiated challenges, and to show how to address those challenges with one or more features of their products.
  No marketing sessions, no solutions overviews, no wasting time.

Such event must be held at the right time, in the right place, and it's not an easy decision to make.

In the end we decided to place it towards the end of the year, as the ideal climax of all virtualization efforts spent during the previous months, as the best moment to think about the future ahead.
And we decided to place in a continent that more than others is sensitive to competition, because its companies have to compete every day for energy, space and money.

And to follow this path, Virtualization Congress 2008 will take place October 14-16, 2008 in London, UK.

There is so much more to say about this event, but we'll save something for the upcoming weeks.

virtualization.info invites all its readers to visit http://www.virtualizationcongress.com to learn more and register for the industry-wide event of the year.

Labels: Announcements

One of the most popular virtualization.info resources is the Virtualization Industry Radar.

It lists all the companies that we track on daily basis. They are focused on application/OS/hardware virtualization markets, they can offer hypervisors, VDI connection brokers, P2V migration tools, etc.

The Radar includes well-known players and startups (even some still in stealth mode) but it includes only those companies carefully screened so to grant a relevant and reliable list of players. In other words we don't include each company on the market that claims to be a virtualization vendor.

So if you don't see a vendor you know listed on the Radar this means that either it's not screened yet or that it doesn't relate to the application/OS/hardware virtualization market in our opinion.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar is a unique (and free) tool in the virtualization world, and it's so popular that it was the 7th most seen post in the entire 2007.

Today the Radar gets better: we included a summary to quickly locate a specific vendor, a detail of when a company was acquired, and most of all we included a category definition which describes which market segment a virtualization company is working on.

We selected a list of categories which were meaningful and, where possible, recognized by most vendors:

• Platform (which includes vendors providing hypervisors and hosted virtualization platforms)
• Platform Management (which includes vendors providing cross-platform virtualization management consoles)
• P2V/V2V Migration
• Reporting
• Disaster Recover (which includes vendors providing HA and backup solutions at host OS level)
• Connection Broker (which includes also those vendors offering a management interface for VDI)
• Virtual Lab Automation
• VM Lifecycle Management
• Chargeback
• Optimization

The category definition is a complex attribute to assign since many companies are busy on different markets (think about VMware or Veeam). Instead of listing all categories for each vendor, we decided to pick the category where a vendor is most known. This may be an arguable decision and it may be subject to changes, so at the moment it should be considered experimental.

At virtualization.info we hope this revamped version will be even more useful than the previous one. Enjoy it.

Labels: Announcements