virtualization.info

So far we have dedicated a lot of space to Oracle, in terms of what virtualization offering it could provide and what mistakes may compromise its presence as a relevant player.

The Sun acquisition has not closed yet, so the company cannot disclose any specific plan. Without concrete information about that, what we have published so far, and what follows below, is pure speculation.
Nonetheless it’s worth spending some more time evaluating the strategy that Oracle may put in place and how it may impact the current players.

As already said many times, now the company is in the unique position to offer an entire computing stack, including servers, storage, the hypervisor, the operating system, the middleware, some of the most used business applications, thin clients, a VDI connection broker and an enterprise management software to coordinate all of the above.
Leveraged in the right way, and assuming Oracle may become a credible virtualization player, it represents a remarkable competitive advantage for some customers (while others can clearly see it as a painful way to lock themselves in).

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and now Red Hat, have to deal with multiple vendors and support thousands of different hardware and software components (VMware just launched a certification program for software. Why did they have to do that?). And a lot can go wrong when your hypervisor is the glue that keeps together servers, storage, network, guest operating systems, enterprise management agents, guest middleware and guest applications.
Oracle is the only one, in the virtualization market, that could say, “We know exactly what happens at every level of the stack, because we provide all the components; we can guarantee the behavior and the performance of our virtual infrastructure because there are no 3rd parties involved.”

There’s another company that is in a similar position, but in a completely different market: Apple.
Apple develops its software and its systems, and is fully in control. Steve Jobs considers this one of Apple’s biggest assets:

We're the only company that owns the whole widget -- the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can't do.

It is a lock-in, the growing number of issues around the iPhone App Store approval process confirms this, but it’s a huge success.

Of course the consumer market and the enterprise market are different worlds, but Oracle may well pitch its virtualization offering in the same identical way.
If so, Oracle is going to compete with the just born Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a nice acronym that also means VMware Cisco EMC, the three companies that founded it.

The value of VCE products, the self-contained virtual data centers called Vblocks, is not only in the hardware and software that make the units. It’s in the fact that VMware, Cisco and EMC design, produce, test and certify the units to serve a specific amount of virtual machines, for a specific amount of users, interacting with specific workloads, that perform in predictable ways.

In other words the VCE coalition saves the customer the huge investment of designing his own data center and the costs of designing it in the wrong way.
When the customer buys a Vblock, he is not just buying the hardware and the software. He is also buying the know-how that these three companies put in the machines. A know-how that he would have to produce by himself or buy somewhere else.

To validate this approach, VMware Cisco and EMC had to form a new entity and share investments, because none of them controls the full stack. Oracle does, and if the future of IT will be dominated by modular data centers, where a single vendor provides self-contained units that customers just stack up together, then Oracle now has the opportunity to become a leader in that future just as much as Cisco.

The difference between Cisco and Oracle is that the former has already clarified its interest in doing so and took several steps to change its current image of networking provider, while the latter… well, the latter still is the well known database giant. And no more than that.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, Oracle, VMware

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

At the end of the last week Reuters broke the news about an upcoming joint venture between EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco.

The three should announce a new product portfolio this week, called vBlock, probably gluing together Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus, EMC V-Max and VMware vSphere, which the joint venture will sell as a hosted service.
And if the customer wants it, the vBlock gear can be moved inside the company’s boundaries.

At the end of September virtualization.info published an article about the strong alliance that these three companies are building and how it’s going to impact the VMware partnership with the other OEMs and how it’s going to influence the perception that customers have of the VMware position in the market.

We expect the official announcement before publishing further comments, but it’s clear that this joint venture is going to modify the landscape in some serious way.

Update: In an interesting interview with John McCool, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Switching and Services Group at Cisco, that Network World published today, the joint venture (codename Alpine) is mentioned but the executive refuses to comment about it.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

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

At the beginning of July virtualization.info reported how VMware, Cisco and EMC (the VCE triumvirate?) are working together to execute virtual machines live migrations across data centers that are 80 km (50 miles) away from each other.

Well, what was considered an impressive yet experimental configuration in July became an officially supported scenario in September.

The three companies discussed three different scenarios for long-distance VMotion at VMworld 2009 and announced the joint validation for one of them, where VMware supports a 200 km live migration (assuming you can satisfy some pretty demanding requirements):

Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, has as usual provided a comprehensive coverage of the session that is really worth a review.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

For months now HP had to tolerate the coverage that press, blogs, forum and newsgroups dedicated to the Unified Computing System (UCS) that Cisco officially launched in March.
Even virtualization.info, which never considered the blade technology as strongly related to virtualization, has closely followed the UCS announcements, believing to see a new paradigm of integration between a virtual infrastructure (VMware vSphere in this case) and the physical layer below it (but this is something that Cisco still has to demonstrate).

Cisco just entered the x86 server market, and while it already appears in a very strong position thanks to its partnership with VMware and EMC, it still is a newcomer,
No customers would easily jump on the new bandwagon without a careful evaluation of the Cisco strategy, capability to execute, technology value and ROI.

But the word is that the network giant has closed a deal with VMware to replace HP as the server provider at the upcoming VMworld 2009. And there more than 10,000 potential customers will see the UCS in action there.
Additionally, the way VMware is pushing the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch inside its new vSphere Enterprise Plus packaging may drive many customers away from the HP ProCurve networking equipment over the long term.

So HP must be feeling the pressure if decided to dedicate the July issue of its The Real Story newsletter to UCS, criticizing the Cisco blade system on many fronts.

The content of the message is relevant to the virtualization.info audience as it includes criticism about the virtualization aspect of UCS:

…Before considering a giant switch to a giant switch vendor please consider the following issues:

…

When a customer adds the Cisco Nexus 1000v for VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus with 24x7- 3 year support it adds an additional $1138.70 per processor. This extra cost adds up fast, considering that a rack of 48 two-processor servers would cost an additional $109,315.20 just for the Nexus 1000v software.

…

it appears that traffic even between two virtual servers running next to each other on the same physical would have to traverse the network, making an elaborate “hairpin turn” within the physical switch, only to traverse the network again before reaching the other virtual server on the same physical machine. Return traffic (or a “response” from the second virtual machine) would have to do the same. Each of these packet traversals logically accounts for multiple interrupts, data copies and delays for your multi-core processor.

…

Cisco has defined a new proprietary frame protocol; VNTag, for UCS’s Network Interface Virtualization model such that an attached physical switch, according to Cisco, cannot be connected to just any IEEE 802.1D compliant Ethernet switch.
Another example: If a customer wants to connect an existing blade environment, such as an HP BladeSystem with a Cisco 3120 switch integrated in it, a Nexus 1000v soft switch would be unable to pass a VN-Tag to an upstream Nexus 5000 switch. In other words, Cisco’s VN-Tag approach doesn’t even work with their own switches!…

The other non-virtualization-related issues described in the message are important as well, and well worth a deeper analysis of the HP claims.

Labels: Cisco, HP

In December 2008 a new startup called iCore Software entered the almost empty OS virtualization market, where Parallels is a leader (and potentially a monopolist if Oracle will kill the Solaris Containers technology as soon as it completes the acquisition of Sun).

At the moment iCore targets the consumer market but, as often happens in IT industry, as soon as the first investment will come in (and with it a bunch of seasoned board advisors), the strategy may change quickly.

At the moment their product, Virtual Accounts, is still in private beta and may appear hopeless in a highly competitive market where VMware (Workstation/Fusion), Parallels (Desktop) and Sun (VirtualBox), and soon VirtualPC embedded in Windows 7, are pretty mature and already address most of the customer needs. Anyway Cisco seems to have a different opinion.

The networking giant recently hold a global Business Plan Competition for university and business school students. Over 1,000 students applied, including the graduated PHDs that funded iCore in 2007: Artem Prokopenko and Nikita Parfenov.

iCore didn’t win the competition but Cisco selected the company as one of the 16 finalists.
As result Cisco will work with them in “leading the next wave of disruptive technologies by providing mentorship and professional assessments regarding their submissions”.

Labels: Cisco, iCore Software

It’s not a secret that virtual machines live migration is perceived by most virtualization professionals as a must-have feature.
After trying to dismiss its value for months, even Microsoft is putting a major effort in promoting it now that its upcoming Hyper-V R2 finally offers it.

The problem with VM live migration is that it doesn’t work beyond a single network segment where two or more virtualization hosts share the same SAN space.
The first vendor that will be able to offer such feature over a WAN link will change forever the way we think disaster recovery.

VMware is working on long-distance VMotion since a while now, but the last time we checked (at the VMworld 2008 analyst briefing) the company was skeptical about delivering the technology in a short timeframe (like 12-18 months) because of complex technical issues.
Nonetheless a long-distance VMotion was demonstrated just last week with the help of Cisco.

The two companies showed how a VM live migration is possible between two data centers away 80km (50 miles) from each other, “fighting” against a 400us latency for each fibre cable.

A long time may pass before this technology reaches the production stage, but VMware and Cisco are really innovating here and deserve maximum attention.

Labels: Cisco, Disaster Recovery, VMware

VMware, Cisco and EMC are really putting a massive effort in promoting the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform that Cisco unveiled in March.

One of the most interesting things produced in this effort is the whitepaper that Cisco just published on his website: Scalability Study for Deploying VMware View on Cisco UCS and EMC V-Max Systems.

The triad managed to setup and document a VDI environment based on VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 4 with 640 virtual desktops (Windows XP with 512MB vRAM and 8GB vHD), served by four UCS blades (160 seats per blade), each with 96GB RAM and the new Intel Xeon 5500 Quad Core CPUs.
Which is four times what was achieved on Dell M600 blades.

The description of the environment is extremely detailed and goes deep into the configuration setup and the performance analysis. It’s really worth a read.

Thanks to Virtual Geek for the news.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, Papers, VDI, VMware

Now that Nexus 1000V, the first virtual switch for VMware vSphere is out for sale (and we know everything about it), Cisco is free to publish detailed demos of the product in action.

The company just uploaded two new HD videos on Facebook that cover how vEthernet interfaces relate to VMware vNICs, what are port-profiles, how to create them with a SSH console and how to apply them with the vSphere client, how to monitor the network statistics of a virtual machine despite its migration from a host to another with vMotion.

Both are worth a check:

• Nexus 1000V Demo - Part 1 (10:59 min)
• Nexus 1000V Demo - Part 2 (10:43 min)

Labels: Cisco

The Register just broke the news about the price of some Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) prices.

The details about the blade system that will turn the networking giant into a x86 server vendor, and potentially into a virtualization vendor as well, are very limited and pricing has been barely mentioned so far.

The Register is now reporting that:

…the UCS B200 M1 blade server, the base two-socket box without the memory extension technology that Cisco hopes will give it differentiation against other providers of blade servers using Intel's "Nehalem EP" Xeon 5500 processors, has a list price of $2,954…

The original article has additional prices about different components. Unfortunately none of them is related to the software side of the thing, like the UCS Manager (that a company slide seems to list at $0), the BMC automation layer or the VMware vSphere 4.0 platform.

Labels: Cisco

The new, much discussed Unified Computing System (UCS) is not here yet, but it’s clear that Cisco is very serious about becoming a major player in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

To further clarify its intention, the company announced that it just hired Christofer Hoff as the new Director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions.

Hoff comes from Unisys were he was the Chief Security Architect, but he’s mostly known because of his tireless evangelism activity on his personal blog, declared a Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info.
We had the pleasure to see him in action as speaker and panelist during the Virtualization Congress 2009 US, the virtualization.info’s independent conference about virtualization technologies.

Cisco has the appeal and the pockets to attract other major talents in the virtualization space, and build the dream team it needs to become a relevant and trusted vendor in a market that is so different from the networking one.

Labels: Cisco, Leadership

In the past months virtualization.info highlighted several times how Cisco is silently using KVM as an alternative virtualization platform to VMware.
We always wondered why, considering the investment that Cisco made on VMware.

Now, finally we have an answer to give: Cisco invested in Qumranet too.

Qumranet is the startup that developed and maintained KVM up to the moment it was acquired by Red Hat.
And that’s why Red Hat had a minor but very relevant position during the launch of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) despite its virtualization offering is pretty weak now.

The fact that Cisco invested in Qumranet is not widely known and we had to admit that even virtualization.info overlooked this key information so far.
How the investment links Cisco to Red Hat is not clear but it’s easy to guess that the upcoming Red Hat new virtualization portfolio based on KVM will have an early chance to be bundled with UCS.

Now VirtualLogix, the mobile virtualization startup where Cisco invested along with Intel, is the next most interesting company to watch.

Labels: Cisco, KVM, Red Hat

The long awaited virtual switch for VMware, the Cisco Nexus 1000V, is finally available for the broad public.
In the past months virtualization.info published details of its architecture, its features and its implementation. Now it’s time to try it with the free 60-days trial that is available here.

Cisco priced the virtual switch at $695 per CPU, which has to be added to the vSphere 4.0 license.
To plug into the new VMware platform, Nexus 1000V in fact needs the vNetwork Distributed Switch feature that it’s only available in the new vSphere Enterprise Plus license.
Some VMware customers are arguing that the current packaging and price may negatively impact the sales of Nexus 1000V, which becomes now much less attractive.

Starting May 21, we’ll see if the customers will really consider the Cisco virtual switch a must-have and will gladly pay the premium price to replace the basic VMware virtual switch they used for so many years now.
As usual in virtualization, it really depends on who’s your interlocutor inside the corporate. The guys at the security department may have a slightly different opinion on this product than the virtualization guys.

Labels: Cisco, VMware

It took almost two months to finally unveil the software layer that manages the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system, but Cisco finally made it.

On its corporate Data Center Networks blog Cisco shows the GUI details and workflow in two parts videos.

UCS Manager seems very complex and granular, it exposes the full hardware for each blade, it exposes the logical servers that you want to create aggregating multiple blades in the system, it exposes the networking and the storage layer, and of course it exposes the virtual machines inside each blade.

Each of these layers can be restricted by a role-base access control system.

Unfortunately, and this seems done on purpose, Cisco doesn’t show the details of the virtual machines administration functions. Nonetheless the videos are well worth watching:

• Part 1 - Overview [9:27] (low quality / high quality)
• Part 2 - Service Profiles [10:19] (low quality / high quality)

As usual Chad Sakac, VP of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, has further details about it.

Labels: Cisco

One month ago Cisco announced its plan to enter the x86 market with a blade system (Unified Computing System or UCS) that is specifically tailored for virtualization and fabric computing.

Trying to clarify that this is not just marketing hype the company also unveiled its key partners: BMC (for the automation layer), VMware (for the virtualization layer) and EMC (of course for the storage layer).

Despite that after one hour and a half the company didn’t disclose a single technical detail about how the platform works and how the technologies above blend together.
Additionally, the network vendor acquired last week Tidal Software, a company that focus on job scheduling, application performance management, and automation software, but didn’t say if it will be or not part of the UCS strategy.

The only concrete information emerged so far about UCS come from the blogosphere and are mostly about the hardware specifications.

Today finally Cisco talks about some more features of the blade system.

The first point is about the performance.
Using VMware ESX 3.5 (build 151628) with the VMMark benchmark UCS scored 24.14 with 17 tiles.
The performance analysis is not yet available online so there’s no way to know the technical specifications of the actual system to compare these numbers with the ones scored by HP, IBM, Dell and the others.

The second point is about the consolidation ratio.
Cisco claims that UCS can provide up to 3 times more virtual machines per server (probably meaning per blade).

The Cisco IT department is using UCS in production and reports up to 28,000 virtual machines deployed, with a minimum of 76 virtual machines per kilowatt of power.

Third point is about the hardware components.
Cisco has special memory modules optimized for the Intel Xeon 5500 CPU: each one is made of 4 standard DIMMs, so the processor can manage up to 48 DIMMs @ 1066 MHz (348GB) per blade.

Cisco claims that this approach saves a lot of money:

Fourth point is about pricing.
Cisco says that UCS is less expensive than a competitive blade system. One of the costs that is slashed is about the management software.
This point is confusing.
If Cisco gives away its management console, then it means that there is nothing more than a standard OEM agreement with VMware and BMC.
If instead Cisco is deeply integrating UCS Manager with vSphere and the BMC automation suite, it’s hard to believe this special package will be available at no cost.

Cisco stay mum on the software probably because the company can’t show VMware vSphere until VMware releases it, and this will not happen before April 21.
By that time Cisco will have to show where the real innovation is in managing the huge virtual data center that it wants customers to build inside UCS.

Labels: Cisco

Even if the amount of technical details about the upcoming Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system are scarce, it’s clear that Cisco has a plan.
And this plan doesn’t contemplate to just sell x86 servers against HP, IBM and Dell.

It doesn’t matter what Cisco believes it can deliver on the market, the hardware part doesn’t seem the most relevant thing.
The biggest question about UCS is how the network vendor is gluing together BMC and VMware products with its UCS Manager.
Whatever is the the method, Cisco has already found it cause UCS is set to be launched this month, very likely the same day of VMware vSphere 4.0, expected for April 21.

So why Cisco has to buy Tidal Software for $105 million in cash and retention-based incentives?

Tidal does job scheduling, application performance management, and automation software products. But these things should already come with BMC and VMware products.

Maybe Cisco is preparing to offer an orchestration suite for 3rd party platforms that will come in the second wave of supported solutions for UCS (namely Microsoft, Red Hat, etc.).
Maybe Cisco doesn’t fell secure enough with just a technology partnership with BMC and wants to have its own toolbox.
Maybe some limitations in the current UCS software stack emerged during the beta phase and Cisco is trying to fill the partners gaps on its own.
Maybe the Cisco plan is much more complex than what appears today and its competitors should pay attention.

We were at the HP Campus in Houston earlier this week and the company executives didn’t seem to underestimate the newcomer.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco

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

Just yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is bidding to acquire Sun.

Many believes that IBM may want Sun to consolidate its position in the virtualization and cloud computing space before Cisco Systems gets any market share with its upcoming Unified Computing System. But the Cisco involvement in this bid be be much deeper than that.

Several rumors (none of them coming from trusted virtualization.info sources anyway) suggest that Cisco was already in discussion to acquire Sun before IBM came in.

Many have spotted a similarity between the Sun server chassis and the new Cisco UCS chassis (here an example) and started wondering if between the two have an OEM agreement in place to manufacture the UCS hardware.

Design analogy or not (it doesn't seem so evident honestly), at least one of the rumors that confirms the discussion between Cisco and Sun comes from inside Cisco itself.
And this would have forced IBM to enter the bid to block Cisco.

A number of people (like the influential Om Malik at GigaOM) believes that Sun belongs to Cisco much more than to IBM.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco, IBM, Sun

At the beginning of this week Cisco finally announced its long awaited blade system once known as California.

The company unveiled an impressive list of partners (VMware, EMC and BMC are the key ones) that will provide the building blocks of this new platform called Unified Computing System (UCS), and provided some scarce information about some of its hardware components. But it didn’t unveil anything about the most important part of the system: its control center, the UCS Manager, that will have to integrate everything in a seamless way.

Anyway in the last three days a lot of information about the platform were leaked.

Scott Lowe summarizes some of them in his last post:

…there are three different CNA families targeted at different markets: high-performance Ethernet, compatibility with existing driver stacks, and virtualization.

…

[the virtualization CNA] will utilize SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization), a PCI SIG standard for allowing a physical network adapter to present multiple virtual adapters to upper-level software, in this case the hypervisor. This eliminates the need for the hypervisor to manage the physical network adapter and allows VMs to attach directly to one of the SR-IOV virtual adapters.

It will utilize Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (Intel I/OAT) to minimize bottlenecks in the hardware and allow the server to better cope with massive dataflows like those generated by 10GbE adapters.

It will use Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) to improve traffic management within the server and decrease the processing burden on the VMM, i.e., the hypervisor…

Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, adds more details on his personal blog:

…[The Cisco] VN-Link can apply tags to ethernet frames -  and is something Cisco and VMware submitted together to the IEEE to be added to the ethernet standards.

…

It allows ethernet frames to be tagged with additional information (VN tags) that mean that the need for a vSwitch is eliminated.   the vSwitch is required by definition as you have all these virtual adapters with virtual MAC addresses, and they have to leave the vSphere host on one (or at most a much smaller number) of ports/MACs.   But, if you could somehow stretch that out to a physical switch, that would mean that the switch now has “awareness” of the VM’s attributes in network land – virtual adapters, ports and MAC addresses.   The physical world is adapting to and gaining awareness of the virtual world…

More to come.

Labels: Cisco, VMware

Finally, after more than three months since virtualization.info broke the news, Cisco is ready to unveils its much rumored blade system codenamed California, dubbed as Unified Computing System (UCS).

The announcement was made a few minutes ago by John Chambers, Cisco CEO, and top notch executives from Intel (Paul Otellini, CEO), VMware (Paul Maritz, President and CEO), EMC (Joe Tucci, CEO), BMC Software (Bob Beauchamp, CEO) and Microsoft (Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business).

For Cisco “unified computing” means data center networking, unified fabric as well as private and extranet-intranet clouds (Cisco calls this “inter-cloud).

To deliver this architecture the company is calling a number of partners, not just the ones above: Accenture, BMC Software, CSC, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, Net App, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, SAP, Tata, VMware and Wipro.

Intel collaborates with Cisco on this project not only for the Nehalem CPUs, but also for the 10Gb Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) part.

Besides FCoE, UCS will access the storage (provided by EMC) will be accessible through Ethernet, Fibre Channel and iSCSI.

Easy to guess VMware is going to certify the upcoming vSphere 4.0 for this platform and ship it with Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Microsoft is going to do the same, with an OEM agreement to ship Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V (or Windows Server 2003 or SQL Server 2008).
Anyway the involvement of Microsoft is limited as their System Center Virtual Machine Manager (or other components of the System Center family) is not going to ship with the hardware.

On top of the hypervisors and their management tools UCS will ship with BMC software management and automation technology.

The whole thing will be orchestrated by the new UCS Manager (available as GUI and command line interface).
Additionally, Cisco will provide an open API for management, to simplify the transition from “legacy” data center infrastructures.

But for now Cisco is not yet showing what UCS Manager can really do, so there’s no way to measure the level of innovation and the capability to compete with Egenera on the software stack integration.

The only public things right now are the fact the platform can be segmented to simulate up to 320 isolated servers, with thousands of virtual machines, and its components:

• Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects is a family of line-rate, low-latency, lossless, 10-Gbps Cisco Data Center Ethernet and FCoE interconnect switches that consolidate I/O within the system. Both 20-port 1RU and 40-port 2RU versions accommodate expansion modules that provide Fibre Channel and/or 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.
• Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis supports up to eight blade servers and up to two fabric extenders in a 6RU enclosure without the need for additional management modules.
• Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders bring unified fabric into the blade-server chassis, providing up to four 10-Gbps connections each between blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management.
• Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers based on next generation Intel Xeon processors adapt to application demands, intelligently scale energy use, and offer best-in-class virtualization. Each blade server utilizes network adapters for access to the unified fabric. Cisco's unique memory-expansion technology substantially increases the memory footprint, maximizing performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-dataset workloads. In addition, the technology offers a more cost-effective memory footprint for less-demanding workloads.
• Cisco UCS Network Adapters are offered in a mezzanine-card form factor. Three types of adapters offer a range of options to meet application requirements, including adapters optimized for virtualization, compatibility with existing driver stacks, or efficient, high-performance Ethernet.
• Cisco UCS Manager provides centralized management capabilities that serve as the central nervous system of the Cisco Unified Computing System. Cisco UCS Manager is the embedded software that unifies system components into a seamless, cohesive, system

No specific word on pricing or availability, but is providing the general availability for Q2 2009 (during the Q&A session Cisco mentioned April 09), which means that VMware vSphere will be likely available in Q2 2009.

Update: As usual, Scott Lowe has some brief but very interesting details to add to the UCS story.

Labels: BMC Software, Cisco, EMC, Intel, Microsoft, VMware

By now every virtualization.info reader should know that Cisco is about to enter the x86 server market with a brand new blade system codenamed California.
We broke the news in early December 2008, unveiling that the product will feature a massive hardware set and an unprecedented (for the company) unification of server, networking and storage resources.

Anyway so far nor virtualization.info neither the mainstream press that confirmed the news really clarified how this unification is implemented and why Cisco should be especially relevant in the virtualization industry.
Bundling the new blade system with the upcoming VMware vSphere 4.0 and the upcoming virtual switch Nexus 1000V is notable but not something the company could call Unified Computing like it’s doing since months now.

There’s a good chance we’ll know next Monday, when Cisco is expected to announce its new strategy. But for now we can speculate on what codename California will really be.

First of all, it’s unlikely that Cisco decides to invade a mature and highly competitive market like this the x86 server one unless it strongly believes it can find an untapped opportunity. There’s plenty of niche and emerging markets where Cisco is and will earn much higher profits at a fraction of the effort (the portable HD cameras is one of them).

Secondarily, it’s unlikely that Cisco really believes it can compete against consolidated leaders like HP, IBM, Dell, etc. in this market by offering VMware vSphere 4.0 through an OEM agreement.
All of the are doing exactly the same since a long time.

So the Cisco blade system, specifically designed for virtualization, must do something more, much more than what it’s currently disclosed.
As suggested in a previous article, the most probable scenario is that Cisco is integrating in a seamless way its very old VFrame Data Center orchestration platform (a product acquired from TopSpin in 2005) with vSphere, maybe using the vCloud APIs that VMware is about to offer in the new platform.

The resulting platform is far away from what HP and IBM offer today and much, much closer (actually competing) with the Egenera solution.

Egenera offers a software/hardware cloud-in-a-box platform called BladeFrame that blends together an orchestration product (PAN Manager) with a leading hypervisor (Citrix XenServer).
The blade system is OEMed by Dell under the name of PAN System and by Fujitsu Siemens under the name of Primergy BladeFrame.

So if Cisco is going to compete with somebody in the x86 market that is not HP or IBM, but more likely Egenera, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and all the other partners that will OEM the PanManager solution.

And this will validate the Egenera approach more than a hundred of case histories.
The company, which is reportedly under scrutiny for acquisition, may sell in the blink of an eye.

Labels: Cisco, Dell, Egenera, Fujitsu Siemens

At the beginning of December 2008 virtualization.info broke the news: Cisco is about to enter the x86 server market launching its first blade system in collaboration with VMware and possibly with EMC.

The platform, codenamed California, will feature a massive amount of memory, data center automation tools, a Nexus 5000 networking module, and deep integration with VMware Infrastructure.

It doesn’t matter if Cisco will really merge with EMC or if it will just acquire VMware (or none of these options): California is real and its launch is near.

InformationWeek just published additional details about the hardware specifications:

• Intel Core i7 CPUs
• up to 192GB DDR3 RAM
• PCI-Express bus

The news magazine also unveiled the planned launch date: March 16, 2008.

It sounds like a little late, considering that Cisco may announce the product at VMworld Europe 2009 (Feb. 24-26).
Maybe VMware doesn’t want to put this special partnership under the conference spotlight as it would be disturbing for at least a couple of its Platinum sponsor: HP and IBM.
Or maybe Cisco prefers a US stage to make the major announcement.
Or maybe the InternetNews date is wrong.

Labels: Cisco

Rumors of a possible EMC/VMW acquisition by Cisco has resurfaced.

virtualization.info has discovered some circumstantial evidence which combined could mean that something huge is about to go down.

• Cisco is raising cash for possible acquisitions, as reported earlier today.
• Yesterday’s SEC filing is evidence that someone is hoarding VMware shares.
• At Cisco Networkers 2009 a tighter Cisco/VMware/EMC strategy was evident.

Monday’s SEC filings shows that Cisco posted a prospectus on raising $4 billion in senior bonds. The book building is run by all the major investment banks and is closing on February 17.
Cisco must be really confident for such a major issuance in these market conditions, but Standard & Poors is giving the senior unsecured notes an A+ rating with a stable outlook.
Cisco will use $500 million of the $4 billion to repay short term debt.  When combined with sizeable cash holdings, this leaves them with with $4.7 billion in cash at the US parent company. According to CNET that amount excluded cash holdings at subsidiaries overseas.

That is not enough for a full takeover as the market cap of EMC is around $25 billion and VMware about $10.5 billion, but a possible stock swap with a cash settlement sprinkled on top could certainly interest EMC investors (Cisco currently hold 1.7% of the total outstanding stock).

VMware holds about $1.8 billion in cash, so a possible deal could be $6.5 billion in cash and $6-7 billion in Cisco stock (Cisco would have to pay at least a 20% premium here).

EMC holds about $5.8 billion in cash and $1 billion in short term investments,for a combined $8.2 billion (with 84% VMware ownership) in cash equivalent. A possible deal could then be $13 billion in cash and $15-17 billion in Cisco stocks.

Another piece of the (possible) puzzle is some interesting moves in VMware stock holders lately.

When a company acquire above 5% of the outstanding shares in a public company, US laws require them to file a SEC 13G form, reporting their interest to the stock market.
It must also be clearly understood that the party acquiring the stake in the company is only a passive investor, and does not intend to exert control.

The 13G must be filed within 10 days after acquiring the stocks.
On February 10 UBS filed on behalf of several accounts.
These are usually anonymous investment accounts so we do not know who is hiding behind UBS, but surely someone thinks VMware is a good investment.

The holdings made public are:

This is a total of 26,078,227 shares, representing 6.7% of the outstanding shares.

The reason for the different percentages is due to EMC chose to split the VMW shares in two stock classes when it took VMware public in 2007.
The shares have different voting rights and are divided in class A and B common shares.
Even though just 90,448,000 shares are listed on NYSE, there are a total of 389,602,066 outstanding.
EMC still owns 327,000,000 shares, representing 83,4% of the company.
This means UBS clients are currently controlling about a quarter of the NYSE listed shares.

VMware had a profit of $290 million on revenues of $1.9 billion in 2008.
With a valuation of $10.5 billion that represents a P/E in the low thirties, a very high number.
If we look at the pure financials and EMC's controlling stake, VMware is simply not worth this even with a projected 50% growth rate.
It is still far better than the P/E the company had when it was valued at $45 billion in October 2007.

But for Cisco, both VMware and EMC would have a significant strategic value.
With cloud computing portrayed as the future of computing, a merger with EMC would be a perfect match.

Cisco are already partnering with Dell, EMC and VMware, they would be able to provide a single vendor solution of the entire stack with an OEM deal with Dell.

Cisco have already very thigh integration between Vframe and VMware vCenter. They could provide the 10,000 feet management and automation platform, with a unified I/O fabric with some distributed storage at the back end from a single vendor.
So maybe the upcoming Cisco blade system codename California is more than just the result of a business partnership.

A Cisco/EMC/VMware entity would offer a very compelling cloud computing platform, even though they don't control an API like Amazon web services, Google Apps or Microsoft Azure.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco, EMC, VMware

Last week mainstream news magazines Network World and Business Journal suggested that two major IT vendors, Novell and Dell, are ready to make some acquisitions in the virtualization space.

Network World is reporting the Novell President and CEO’s words:

...Novell is now planning to extend the technology to provide tools to users that will enable them to move workloads from virtual environments to a cloud computing model…

Business Journal instead is speculating that Dell may want to acquire Egenera, countering the HP’s acquisition of Opsware:

Dell officials have suggested that it’s time for the company to do more deals to expand its revenue base to compete with rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
The question is: Will it gamble on large acquisitions or continue with a track record of relatively conservative deals?

On top of the rumors above, this week CNET is reporting that Cisco plans to sell $4 billion in bonds to raise some cash.
Part of this money ($500 million) will be used to pay floating rate debt. The rest could be used to buy some somebody at the virtualization shopping mall.

CNET goes as far as suggesting that Cisco may want to buy EMC, but that’s definitively more expensive than $3.5 billion.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Novell

One of the biggest enhancements expected with the next version of VMware Infrastructure (possibly called vSphere 4.0) is the new pluggable virtual infrastructure, which will allow customers to replace the standard VMNet virtual switch with 3rd party software switches.

The first company to offer such product will be Cisco, which announced the Nexus 1000V at VMworld 2008 last September.

After seeing the virtual switch command line for in action and its architectural diagram, we now have extensive details about its features, thanks to an exclusive virtualization.info interview with Paul Fazzone, Product Manager of Nexus 1000V at Cisco.

Fazzone also provided a key information about the release date of the virtual switch: H1 2009.
This date makes very likely that both ESX 4 and Nexus 1000V will be released at the imminent VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes.

Labels: Cisco, Interviews, 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

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

There is no doubt that Cisco has seriously reconsidered its strategy in the last few years, taking several steps to extend its brand well beyond the image of a network vendor.

Obviously the most significant move so far has been the massive investment in virtualization: the company first invested $150 million in VMware IPO, then extended by another $13 million (buying 500,000 Intel’s shares), and now it’s preparing to release the first virtual switch for VMware ESX.

But Cisco may go much further than that: virtualization.info is collecting rumors from several sources that the company is preparing to fully enter the x86 server market by producing and selling a blade system  which embeds its new Nexus 5000 switches.

The company already sells a physical server, the Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), but so far the equipment has been pitched for a specific purpose: deploy a set of core enterprise services (like the DNS and the DHCP) to the branch offices.
And this is why the server comes with Windows Server 2008 preinstalled (and recently with an unveiled virtualization engine).

Of course offering a general purpose x86 blade system with integrated networking is a much different story and would put Cisco in direct competition with the biggest OEMs in the market: Dell, HP, IBM, etc.
All of them has a tight business relationship with VMware, but none of them currently invests in the virtualization vendor.

Cisco may surprise the market and release a blade system with VMware Infrastructure 4.0, its new virtual switch Nexus 1000V, its new physical switch Nexus 5000 and its virtual center automation suite VFrame Data Center.
The fact that EMC owns VMware would do the rest…

Update: virtualization.info continues to receive confirmations from additional sources that this more than a rumor. The platform is called codename California and Cisco may announce it in early 2009, possibly at VMworld Europe 2009.

Second update: virtualization.info has a final confirmation of the existence of this Cisco blade system currently called codename California.
The platform is going to feature a massive amount of memory, data center automation tools and deep integration with VMware Infrastructure.

Cisco is definitively going to shift its position in the IT market. Expect some serious consequences in the ecosystem.

Labels: Cisco, VMware

It’s more than one year that the virtualization community waits to puts its hands on the first 3rd party virtual switch for VMware Infrastructure. At that time Cisco was reported as the networking provider but the company never confirmed.

Finally, at VMworld 2008, Cisco and VMware unveiled such piece of software, called Nexus 1000V, but so far nobody gave a precise release schedule.

Now trusted sources informs us that Cisco will start the Nexus 1000V beta program in December.
VMware Infrastructure 4.0 beta testers will be able to join even but it’s not clear if this will be a public beta or not (probably not considering that VI 4 beta itself is private).

Labels: Cisco, VMware

With much surprise yesterday Cisco announced a new investment in VMware, buying 500,000 shares from Intel for a value of $13,3 million.

The networking giant already invested $150 million in July 2007 just before the VMware IPO.
With this new equity stake acquisition Cisco owns 1,7% of the virtualization vendor.

The relationship between the two has progressively tightened because Cisco is developing the first virtual switch for VMware Infrastructure 4: the Nexus 1000V.

A lot of things are interesting in this move:

• Intel gave away its shares despite it’s rumored interest to acquire VMware (which may be the reason behind the removal of Diane Greene as CEO).
• Cisco continues to invest in VMware despite it’s rumored interest to acquire Citrix
• Cisco still doesn’t tell what hypervisor is using for its new WAAS 4.1 appliance but it seems unlikely that it’s ESX or ESXi.

Labels: Cisco, Funding, VMware

It’s not a secret that one of the most wanted innovations coming with VMware Infrastructure 4 is the new pluggable virtual network. Many customers are specially waiting for the first 3rd party virtual switch that Cisco will offer to leverage the new opportunity: the Nexus 1000V.

Tomorrow the company will host a public webcast where several new technologies related to virtualization are discussed and demoed. The Nexus 1000V is among them and will be shown in action while networking a bunch of VI 4 virtual machines:

Cisco just published a small preview clip about this part:

The Nexus 1000V is not the only interesting thing that will appear in the show. Cisco will also present its new Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) 4.1, that we know is featuring an hypervisor.

Maybe during the webcast we’ll finally discover what hypervisor is.

Labels: Cisco, VMware

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

The Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), officially launched in June, continues to raise a lot of interest because of the members that currently adheres it.

Cisco appeared in the list in August but so far nor the company neither Microsoft clarified the reason as Cisco doesn’t seem to have a hypervisor. But last week Cisco and Microsoft made a joint announcement unveiling Windows Server on WAAS.

WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) is a network appliance that Cisco offers since a while.
It’s designed to run at branch offices, offering optimization for most protocols (including mail, file transfer, web, backup, video streaming, etc.).

The newest version, 4.1, of WAAS, also introduces a hardware virtualization engine labeled WAVE (Wide Area Virtualization Engine), which places several instances of Windows Server 2008 Server Core into virtual machines (called Virtual Blades here).

The adhesion to the SVVP program allowed Cisco to run Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and Print Services roles as validated virtual machines on WAVE, but the company stay mum about what virtualization engine is really powering the solution.

In March Information Week suggested that Cisco was using the open source KVM (now indirectly controlled by Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet) to virtualize two redundant instances of the IOS inside the new ASR 1000 routers, but this rumor was denied by Cisco in the following weeks.

Maybe this time (even if it’s very hard to believe that Microsoft validated a Windows Server 2008 guest hosted by Linux and KVM)?

Labels: Cisco

This year, instead of invading VMware opening keynotes, the Platinum sponsors have their own presentations, at different times, and delegates can decide to attend instead of VMware breakout session.

One of the most awaited partner keynote is the Cisco one, because today Cisco is expected to unveil its virtual switch for the upcoming ESX 4.0.

Ed Bugnion, VP and CTO of Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco (and former VMware co-founder and CTO), first clarifies how the network challenges are changing: customers need network access control defined per virtual machine, consistent policies across all the networking equipment and all virtualization hosts (even if you move a VM with VMotion), higher capacity links for highly consolidated environments, etc.

To address these new challenges Cisco announces the VN-Link initiative.

VN-Link is delivered through the new virtual switch Nexus 1000V, a piece of software built on NX-OS, that plugs into ESX and that can be configured through the familiar Cisco command line interface.

Cisco will deliver this product in 1H 2009.

Even if Bugnion didn’t say it, there’s a beta program available for this product: enroll for it here.

Steve Herrod, Vice President of Technology Development at VMware, takes the stage.

He announces that Nexus 1000V will be open for 3rd party plug-ins, and that the two companies are working together to integrate Cisco TrustSec and VMware VMsafe.

Herrod says that more details will be revealed tomorrow in the second day keynote.
So stay tuned for the live coverage tomorrow!

Labels: Cisco

Over the last few months the speculations around Cisco entering the server virtualization market were supported just by rumors. Below a list of news related to the topic:

• March 2008 - Cisco puts KVM in its IOS (the company denied that this ever happened)
• April 2008 - Cisco or IBM may acquire Citrix
• June 2008 - Cisco doesn’t want to buy VMware
• July 2008 - Cisco may be interested in hypervisors more than what it seems

Rumors or not, today something concrete happened: Cisco signed as member of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program.

The program simplifies the relationship between Microsoft and the other members so that the software giant can easily support its products on participants’ hypervisors:

The Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) is open to any vendor who delivers a virtualization machine solution that hosts Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and subsequent service packs. The virtualization solution can either be hypervisor-based or a hosted solution.

Cisco doesn’t have any hypervisor so there’s no reason to adhere this program.

At this point it’s hard to believe that the company will stay away of the server virtualization market for much more.

Labels: Cisco, KVM

In June 2008 Microsoft formally launched its Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to extend the support on its products when they run as virtual machines on 3rd party virtualization platforms.

Today the company announces that 31 back-end servers are now supported on Citrix XenServer, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron thanks to this program.

The effort that Microsoft put on this operation is remarkable and has been noted by many like Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at the Burton Group:

Other vendors should take note of Microsoft’s support model, as Microsoft supports more virtualization platforms than any other vendor by a hefty margin.

But this is not the most important part of the news: Microsoft has announced that two new vendors are participating this program: VMware and Cisco.

(note: VMware doesn’t appear nor in the press announcement neither in the official SVVP page because of a late confirmation)

While a notable achievement, the fact that VMware signed for the SVVP shouldn’t surprise anyone but the presence of Cisco is something truly unexpected.

Update: VMware officially confirmed its participation to the SVVP.

Labels: Cisco

The Cisco involvement in the hardware virtualization has always been very unclear:

• the company invested $150 million in VMware before its IPO last year ($78 millions of those 150 were retired just last week, after the VMware CEO was removed)
• the CEO claimed an entire keynote at VMworld 2007 (despite he talked about everything but virtualization)
• the latest high-end router, ASR 1000, may embed the Linux virtualization platform KVM to offer cheap fault-tolerance (Cisco never confirmed this news)

While these certainly are some signs of concrete interest, so far Cisco never clarified if it wants to become or not a virtualization vendors a la VMware. But something is changing in the last months.

First of all a rumor started spreading in April saying that Cisco may be interested in acquiring Citrix.
No less than two months after that, John Chambers felt the need to highlight that Cisco is not interested in buying VMware (which doesn’t mean that Cisco is not interested in buying someone else).

And now, during an interview with NetworkWorld, John McCool, the new company’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center, Switching and Services Group, gave a surprising answer:

Q: Do you plan to invest in another hypervisor vendor, similar to your relationship with VMware?

A: No announcements to date. We're continuing to work with all the hypervisor vendors. We are interested in virtualized data centers and to the extent that hypervisor and virtualized servers exist in the data center we think that's a very powerful construct for customers and one that's going to take network support.

McCool didn’t say “no” but “no announcements to date”.
Despite we try to not read too much into such short sentence the selection of words is rather interesting.

Labels: Cisco

In a panel at Cisco Live! conference the company CEO, John Chambers, stated that Cisco doesn't need to buy VMware, as NetworkWorld reports.

Chambers had to discuss such scenario because of the many, persistent rumors of a VMware acquisition in early 2009.
The only problem is that the rumored bidder is not Cisco, but Intel as far as virtualization.info heard from many different sources.

Labels: Cisco

A Wall Street financial analyst is spreading the rumor, picked up by CRN, by Network World, by Brian Madden and several others, about the possible acquisition of Citrix by Cisco or IBM.

At the moment virtualization.info cannot confirm if any of the two deals is really in discussion, but both of them are realistic.

Cisco heavily invested in VMware just before its IPO, demostrating a strong interest in extending its dominance beyond the networking and security worlds.
A hypervisor would fit the dynamic datacenter strategy that Cisco is already pursuing with its VFrame, and would provide a new space where to place its networking devices (even if in virtual format).

IBM is deeply involved in virtualization technologies since ever, contributing to the Xen and KVM hypervisors code development.
Considering that Big Blue invented virtualization 40 years ago, the company must be uncomfortable in its current marginal role in this industry.
Additionally, IBM would be able to enrich XenServer with several critical components: the enterprise management solution (IBM Director, Tivoli), the high-availability solution (Systems Director Virtual Availability Management), the capacity planning solution (CDAT), the security solution (codename PHANTOM) and others.

During the last few years IBM certified its hardware for the Citrix hypervisor, and integrated its solutions with Xen for different projects (like a VDI platform or a general-purpose grid computing solution).
Acquiring Citrix, IBM would be able to offer (and certify) one of the most complete virtualization stack available on the market, pretty much like Sun is trying to do with the upcoming xVM Server.

(or maybe somebody just took seriously the idea that HP may buy Parallels)

Labels: Cisco, Citrix

KVM is the youngest virtualization platform on the scene but the strategic positions it occupied so far beat any competitor.

First, it was included in the Linux kernel after just six months from the launch, and thus today any distribution sporting kernel 2.6.20 or higher can offer it out-of-the-box.

Then it was chosen over Xen for one of the most popular consumer distribution ever: Ubuntu.

And now Cisco includes it in the new IOS-XE, the Linux-powered operating system for its highest-end router: the ASR 1000.

The Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 1000 is the first Cisco router that replaces its traditional in-house developed IOS with Linux and targets service providers and biggest enterprises.
Among the exclusive features offered by this new equipment there is the operating system redundancy, achieved without any hardware module: a first in the networking industry.

How Cisco is able to provide a redundant IOS image? Through KVM virtual machines as Information Week reports.
At this point is still unknown which version of Linux kernel is used for IOS-XE and which version of KVM as well, but the company must be absolutely sure of its reliability to use it in such high-end product.

It's interesting that fact that Cisco chosen KVM for this task, while it's very busy with VMware, investing in VMW, occupying its keynotes, and maybe (it's still an unconfirmed news) releasing a software switch for ESX Server.

Update: This news is bigger than expected, despite few online magazines reported it.

virtualization.info contacted KVM Lead Developer about the story and received a No Comment answer. Other inquiries to Cisco and Qumranet returned no answers at all so far.

Second update: virtualization.info received a second No Comment from Qumranet.

At this point being a Cisco ASR 1000 potential customer or a VMware shareholder we'd like to have some detailed explainations about what Cisco is exactly doing with KVM and why there's an embargo on the story.

Third update: Colin McNamara provides some more details about the the ASR 1000 architecture and the use of KVM inside it.

Labels: Cisco, KVM

Saugatuck Technologies just released a study which pushes some odd predictions:

• Through 2010, all facets of IT Virtualization will see substantial enhancements in functionality and performance; however the most significant enhancements will be in microprocessor, hypervisor and operating system function for Server Virtualization.
• Through 2010, Server Virtualization will have the single largest impact on budgets for IT hardware and support. The second largest impact will be network virtualization.
• Through 2010, three vendors -- Cisco, VMware and XenSource (now Citrix) -- will dominate IT Virtualization, accounting for 60 percent of all new virtualization deployments.

While the first one is pretty generic (it includes every part of the computing stack) and definitively expected (it's unlikely there will be no technical improvements in the next 3 years), the last one is pretty hard to decode.

Saugatuck's analysts put on the same level two companies busy in the hardware virtualization market (VMware and Citrix) and one working in the today-called network virtualization (Cisco). So there are two chances: or this report is suggesting that Cisco will become a hardware virtualization player very soon (and succeed within 3 years), or this report is using a very arguable categorization model.

On top of that Microsoft is not present. Redmond guys may be wondering if the presence of Hyper-V in every single copy of Windows Server 2008 on the planet has been considered or not.

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

Labels: Cisco, Citrix

Interest in VMware-Cisco relationship increased since the surprising announcement that networking giant's CEO will deliver one of VMworld 2007 keynote.

Cisco just invested $150 million in VMware, and its working with virtualization leader since 2004 on its VFrame product. But there's something bigger, from a technical point of view, that John T. Chambers will unveil during its speech.

VMware will allow 3rd party vendors to develop their virtual switches for ESX Server virtual network, and Cisco is expected to be the first company announcing such product (Virtual Catalyst?).

With this move VMware hopes to address enterprise customers needs, which are greatly unsatisfied with current unmanaged virtual switches, and Cisco hopes to pioneer the new market of virtual networking.

First details about this new feature were disclosed at VMware TSX conference earlier this year, but without timeframes. A keynote during VMworld, which expects over 10,000 attendees this year, is for sure the best opportunity to make the announcement.

Labels: Cisco

After Intel also Cisco wants a piece of VMware.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc. today announced that Cisco Systems will acquire an equity stake in the company.

Cisco will purchase $150 million of VMware Class A common shares currently held by EMC Corporation, VMware's parent company, subject to customary regulatory and other closing conditions including Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) review. Upon closing of the investment, Cisco will own approximately 1.6 percent of VMware's total outstanding common stock (less than one percent of the combined voting power of VMware's outstanding common stock). VMware has agreed to consider the appointment of a Cisco executive to VMware's board of directors at a future date.

...

In addition, VMware and Cisco have entered into a routine and customary collaboration agreement that expresses their intent to expand cooperative efforts around joint development, marketing, customer and industry initiatives. Through improved coordination and integration of networking and virtualized infrastructure, the companies intend to foster solutions for enhanced datacenter optimization and extend the benefits of virtualization beyond the datacenter to remote offices and end-user desktops...

This move is part of a strategy, possibly started with VMware involvement in VFrame development, which may be further detailed during Cisco keynote at VMworld 2007.

Labels: Cisco

Cisco is well resoluted to make the most out of virtualization hype: it first declares Datacenter 3.0 initiative (more ambitiously than IDC, which claimed Virtualization 2.0), then it re-launches a technology obtained by TopSpin acquisition in April 2005 and offered since September 2005 under new brand: VFrame.

Obviously the press release doesn't even mention that VFrame just moved from 3.0 (which exist since May 2004, when TopSpin was developing it) to 3.1 in more than three years.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Cisco announced today VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), an orchestration platform that leverages network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. This industry-first approach greatly reduces application deployment times, improves overall resource utilization, and offers greater business agility. Further, VFrame DC includes an open API, and easily integrates with third party management applications, as well as best-of-breed server and storage virtualization offerings.

...

VFrame DC is a highly efficient orchestration platform for service provisioning which requires only a single controller and one back-up controller. The real time provisioning engine has a comprehensive view of compute, storage and network resources. This view enables VFrame DC to provision resources as virtualized services using graphical design templates. These design templates comprise one of four VFrame DC modular components: design, discovery, deploy, and operations. These components are integrated together with a robust security interface that allows controlled access by multiple organizations...

InternetNews reports VFrame will be available in August at a starting price of $60,000 dollars per appliance.

This should clarify why Cisco CEO, John T. Chambers, will perform second day keynote at VMworld 2007.

A further confirmation is given by fact that VMware is involved in VFrame development program since May 2004, as reported in a Cisco confidential presentation of 2005 (page 35).

Cisco old presentation also adds a detail about what probably will be announced at VMworld, and an interesting claim:

...VFrame can provision ESX Servers over SAN.

...

VMWare needs Cisco for scaling on blades...

In any case this move, along with Opsware acquisition by HP, also re-fuels interest in other automation solutions like Scalent and Dunes.

Labels: Cisco

VMware just published list of keynote speakers for upcoming VMworld 2007 conference.

As expected first day VMware President, Diane Greene, will welcome over 10,000 attendees in Moscone Center, while her husband Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, company's Chief Scientist, will close the event last day.

But a completely unexpected guest will perform second day keynote: John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO at Cisco.

Chambers presence possibly means announcement of a major partnership between VMware and Cisco, which may be related to network equipment virtualization or endpoint security support.

Many customers in these years prayed to have capability to use virtual machines as routers inside VMware virtual networks. So far this has been impossible: despite Cisco proprietary IOS relies on standard x86 hardware, it still requires a dedicated EEPROM to work, which VMware doesn't include in its virtual hardware set. Maybe Cisco is now ready to virtualize its hardware equipment.

On the other side VMware may have a deal in place with Cisco about its Assured Computing Environment (ACE) product: Cisco endpoint security solution called Network Admission Control (NAC) may work with VMware ACE as an endpoint security agent, eliminating any need to install more software inside host or guest operating systems.

In any case a partnership between VMware and Cisco may greatly enhance virtual infrastructures capabilities.

Labels: Cisco

Labels: Cisco

Labels: Cisco