virtualization.info

Just in case the entrance in the server market and the alliance with EMC and VMware were not clear enough, Cisco decided to clarify even better that taking over HP market share is the primary goal:

And it's not a secret that EMC and HP compete in the enterprise storage space.
The only problem is that HP is one of the strongest VMware partners today.
The two could move from partnership to fair "co-opetition", as the Industry likes to call it today, but for how much time?

Labels: Cisco, HP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Alliances, Cloud Computing, HP, Microsoft

In the past months virtualization.info documented how the Cisco entrance in the server market with its Unified Computing System (UCS) is having a major impact on the landscape.

The move is especially dangerous because it involves powerful allies like EMC and VMware, and delivers a platform that is designed from scratch to be a virtual data center in a box.

The most nervous among its competitors seems HP, which openly criticized the UCS and then acquired 3Com to strengthen its networking offering.

HP also released a competing platform, called BladeSystem Matrix, which doesn’t bundle yet with any specific virtualization platform (VMware vSphere support is still experimental).

The first public comparison between the two blade systems comes from Steve Kaplan, Vice President Data Center Virtualization Practice at INX.
his technical analysis is well worth a read.

Labels: Cisco, HP

HP always offered a basic capacity planning tool to its customers that want to use ProLiant servers for virtualization.
In November 2005 it released one for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. In March 2007 it released one for VMware VI 3.0.

Yesterday the company released also one for Microsoft Hyper-V R2. This one is not a web tool like the previous versions, but a 50MB Windows application that customers can download and use without restrictions.

To collect data from physical servers, the Sizer tool interacts with the Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit (both 3.x and 4.x are supported) or the Windows Performance Monitor, but it can also import information from other tools.
Once data is available, this tool produces a detailed Bill of Materials (BoM) that includes servers and storage equipment, with pricing specified for the customer’s country.

It also includes an update engine which automatically downloads new inventory parts and refreshes prices.
A check of this engine shows that the capacity planning engine is marked as version 4.0:

Labels: Capacity Planning, HP, Microsoft, Releases

So far virtualization.info highlighted how the Cisco entrance in the server and virtualization markets is influencing the strategy of HP.

A couple of weeks ago we suggested that HP may want to acquire a series of companies (where 3Com is just the first one) to enrich its portfolio and be able to better compete, in the long run, against the VMware/Cisco/EMC merge-non-merge (the so called VCE coalition). 

Specifically, if Cisco, leveraging its investment in VMware and its new partnership with EMC, starts to erode the HP market share, a possible scenario is that HP decides to offer its own virtualization layer, by acquiring an existing vendor.

On top of that, there’s the never abandoned feeling that VMware is morphing into an infrastructure management company, that one day may compete with HP (and CA, BMC and IBM) to rule the physical layer as much as the virtual one.
If HP considers this as a concrete scenario, it may want to act now to limit the VMware actions in the future.

A possibility is that HP comes out with its own hypervisor.
An article published on the corporate blog in February, unveils that the HP R&D department is actually working on this.

The research effort is primarily focused on developing a (Xen-based) hypervisor what works with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology to offer secure desktop virtualization.
The project may never turn into a commercial platform, and its current purpose is far away from what is needed to compete against the VCE coalition.

Nonetheless the project shows that HP is active in this area.
Citrix is about to give away its XenServer product as open source. And the upcoming XenClient plaform may arrive as open source too.
How helpful this would be for HP to build their own virtualization stack?

Labels: HP

Can HP just stay and look at Cisco that merges-without-merging with EMC and VMware slipping into the customers data centers that it dominates today? Of course not.

So it buys 3Com. So it starts to push a little more the partnership with Microsoft and the value of Hyper-V on its hardware.

Part of this effort includes the release of a new reference architecture for customers that are interested in installing a Hyper-V virtual infrastructure inside a BladeSystem c7000 and c3000, with ProCurve networking and EVA storage.

To be honest the 23-pages paper seems much more a marketing brochure than a reference architecture.
HP has to do much more than this to compete with comprehensive documentation that VMware/Cisco/EMC are releasing.

Labels: HP, Microsoft, Papers

In the last two years Cisco made at least two long-term key investments in the server market: invested over $150 million in VMware and became a player with its own blade system Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco wants to sell and interconnect next generation data centers. To do so it needs servers, storage, networking, software abstraction and software management.
EMC is helping with storage and software management, VMware is helping with software abstraction.

The three worked together for some months and then announced a formal coalition, that will sell these integrated data centers through channels and direct relationship with customers (through a company called Acadia).

The joint effort of these three companies may be just an elaborate (yet remarkable) marketing exercise, but it certainly had an impact on the market.

It may have forced IBM to attempt the acquisition of Sun (which ultimately went to Oracle).
It may have forced HP to buy 3Com for $2.7 billion.

HP is the company that has the most to lose because of the VMware-Cisco-EMC coalition considering that it currently sells 36% of all physical servers that will run virtualized workloads, and that it’s the leader in this segment, ahead of Dell and IBM.

Cisco may use VMware to slip into the enterprises where HP reigns, like it attempted to do on the VMworld 2009 data center.
If Cisco becomes a real threat, HP will need servers, storage, networking, software management and software abstraction to counter it.
The question is not if HP wants or not to adopt a strategy that is similar to the Cisco one. The question is how long before the Cisco plans will allow HP to play nice with all three major virtualization vendors instead of buying the only one it can?

Labels: 3Com, Acquisitions, HP

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

A couple of weeks ago HP announced its support for the StorageLink technology that Citrix is offering inside the Essentials management suite.

StorageLink allows the XenServer and Hyper-V administrators to manipulate the SAN LUNs directly from inside XenCenter and Hyper-V MMC console.
HP is supporting this technology on its StorageWorks SANs, including EVA, MSA and LeftHand Networks arrays.

With this move HP may be trying to consolidate its position in the SMB market, as the announcement comes just a little before the Citrix one about a free version Essentials for Hyper-V (called Express Edition) that includes the StorageLink layer.

Labels: Citrix, HP

At the end of April virtualization.info broke the news about the HP plan to stop the development of its high-performance remote desktop protocol, RGS, and its connection broker, SAM, to leave the VDI market as a software player.

The information we published is based on an internal, official and very updated HP presentation that we received from trusted sources.
Despite that, both HP and several anonymous claimed our article as false and misleading.

Because we don’t want to damage our sources, we didn’t (and will not in the future) publish that presentation. We believe that the credibility we built over the years will be enough for most of our readers.

Nonetheless, because we have no interest in discredit HP, we were happy to reach the company by phone yesterday to understand their official version of the story.

The first point is that HP fully acknowledges the existence of the internal presentation we saw and declares it a “draft strategy” that was being “tested” across the company and a few customers.
It doesn’t matter if the information contained inside it tells the opposite of what will follow, the HP leadership told virtualization.info that the presentation was far away from describing the finalized strategy.
Of course the DRAFT label didn’t appear anywhere inside the slide deck and our sources reported it as the new go-to-market strategy, otherwise virtualization.info would never publish the article in the way it went out.

The second point is that the HP finalized strategy is to continue to develop and support RGS and SAM for the future.
The company will continue to offer both its remote desktop protocol and its connection broker, side by side with the Citrix, Microsoft and VMware alternatives.
In the future HP will increase the R&D investments with these three vendors to integrate their protocols (Citrix HDX, Microsoft RDP + Calista enhancements, VMware PCoIP) with RGS and the RDP enhancements that it’s already offering through the OEM partnership with Quest/Provision Networks.
At the same time HP will work to integrate SAM with the next generation VDI technologies, like the client hypervisors that will come from vendors like Citrix and VMware, or the virtualized GPUs that will arrive from chipset vendors in the near future.

In the last few weeks HP briefed the industry analysts on this strategy and reassured virtualization.info on the destiny of RGS and SAM, so whatever has happened before the company is now fully committed to keep going its VDI software technologies.

Labels: HP, VDI

After trying for years to impose its high-performance remote desktop, Remote Graphics Software (RGS), the company has finally given up and will phase it out by the end of this year.

virtualization.info has learned from very trusted sources that HP will not only drop RGS but it will also exit the VDI market completely, stopping the development of its connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM).

Starting 2010 the company will rely on third party offerings provided by Citrix, VMware and Microsoft. HP is especially looking at two protocols: the Citrix Prism/HDX and the software implementation of the PCoIP protocol that VMware and Teradici are developing.
Same story for the connection broker: HP is working to adopt Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.
Of course HP will continue to develop thin clients/blade workstations for SBC/VDI environments where it has a serious profit.

The HP moves in the VDI market started to seem strange already in December 2008 when the company closed a major OEM deal with Quest/Provision Networks.
It will be interesting to see what Quest has to say about this radical change in the strategy.

The company is already informing its customers about the decision as confirmed by an anonymous comment we just received on another article:

I have heard that HP is cancelling the RGS product. Does anyone else have information about this? My information comes from a colleague who is the IT director at a company which is a large HP customer. They have been using RGS and are now politely being asked to look elsewhere.

Update: The HP public relations department promptly contacted virtualization.info to provide a completely different perspective. We are happy to republish it to demonstrate that there is no interest at all in discredit HP:

As a leader in thin client solutions and virtualization, HP is committed to the development of VDI technologies, as well as continued innovation in the client virtualization market.  We are also continuing ongoing development of HP RGS and SAM into 2009 and beyond, in addition to extending our long-standing relationships with industry partners with expanded support for their protocols and brokers. This broad support strategy will ensure that the HP client virtualization portfolio delivers the broadest customer choice as this market continues to mature. In addition, we offer a number of VDI infrastructure and solution services that enable customers to build a reliable desktop infrastructure that reduces total cost of ownership, increases security, simplifies technology management and readily adapts to new business requirements with improved flexibility. 

In its emails HP is suggesting that our article above is disseminating false information.
Unfortunately the official HP document that virtualization.info reviewed and the feedbacks received by several unconnected sources tell a completely different story. And we have the evidence to prove it.

If HP changed its strategy again and decided to continue the development of RGS and SAM for the years to come, we are happy about that.
Or, if the official HP document that we reviewed contained completely wrong information, then virtualization.info will promptly write a new post to clarify the whole thing, as soon as HP will provide an official explanation about the discrepancy.
Of course HP is also very welcome to comment directly on this post so that our audience will have the opportunity to read all the perspectives.

Meanwhile if any reader has further evidence of the story is welcome to write a comment like the anonymous that we quoted inside this article.

Labels: HP, VDI

Last week virtualization.info published an article titled VMware is becoming an infrastructure management company, suggesting that the virtualization vendor is morphing into something much bigger, getting ready to compete, over the long term, with the big four infrastructure management companies: BMC, CA, IBM and HP.

Peter Spielvogel, Product Marketing Manager of Operations Center at HP, believes that this scenario is worth at least some discussion and mentions the article on the corporate blog.

He’s quick and subtle in remarking that HP current leadership in the infrastructure management depends on the strategy to support physical and virtual servers in the same way, no matter what the vendor is.
But how hard would be for vCenter to manage 3rd party hypervisors and physical servers?

Isn’t true that VMware already offer some interesting and innovative management capabilities for physical servers like Distributed Power Management?
Isn’t true that VMware already offer some basic hardware monitoring capabilities for ESXi hosts through the new Common Information Model (CIM)?

Labels: HP, VMware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, HP, VDI

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

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

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

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

The VDI market gets more crowded every day. All the biggest players in the space are developing, releasing, or rearranging their solutions to offer an end-to-end VDI platform to make the client consolidation through virtualization a viable option.

This is a space where Citrix, VMware and Quest/Provision networks lead, followed by aggressive newcomers like Red Hat (which acquired Qumranet and plan to use KVM), Pano Logic (which has its own platform), Leostream, Ericom (which supports many hypervisors but seems to bet on Oracle VM), Propalms and more.

Each one is trying to working to offer some sort of performance booster for the RDP protocol (while we all wait for Microsoft to enhance it with the technology acquired by Calista), or to completely replace it.

HP has some technology to push in this space so yesterday with a notable marketing exercise it relaunched its offering under the name of Virtual Client Essentials.

The new platform includes the connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM), a brand new Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Enhancements package, and its own remoting protocol called Remote Graphics Software (RGS).
The bundle doesn’t include a specific hypervisor as HP doesn’t own one but SAM supports both VMware and Citrix ones.

Update: virtualization.info just received multiple confirmations that the new HP RDP Enhancements package is a licensed version of the Quest/Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack launched in September.
The product can score up to 8x compression for RDP sessions and it’s remarkable that HP decided to use it despite the existence of its RGS protocol.

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

Labels: HP, Provision Networks, VDI

Today the analysis firm IDC released some surprising numbers about virtualization vendors market share:

• VMware: 44% (combining ESX and Server)
• Microsoft: 23% (combining Hyper-V and Virtual Server)

Isn’t clear how much of these market shares translates in production deployments and how much is about test & development or shelfware, but one thing is for sure: the Microsoft gain is remarkable (and its growing case studies library confirms it) even if VMware still leads with 78% revenue share.

Besides the numbers above there is something else that is interesting: worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year, compared to a 72% year-over-year increase the previous quarter.

Who ships more servers for virtualization duties? HP (34% market share) followed by Dell (25%) and IBM (16%).

Update: Easy to guess the report above generated a huge number of reactions (and complains from VMware).

Specifically IDC is questioned on several obscure points:

• In its previous report about virtualization market shares, about Q1 2008, IDC assigned 20% to Microsoft.
  Hyper-V was formally released on June 26, 2008, which is two days before the end of Q2. So it seems unlikely that Hyper-V could get 3% in just two business days.
  As some virtualization.info pointed in the comments it’s very likely that IDC included in this count also beta and RC deployments. If so the numbers couldn’t reflect the real state of the market because VMware tents to keep ESX betas private (like for the upcoming ESX 4.0).
• Unlike the past, this time IDC didn’t compare its findings with VMware and refused to break out the reported numbers for each product.
• There’s an incongruence between the VMware estimated year over year growth (52%) and the real one reported by VMware to the SEC (39%) for the Q2 2008.

For all these reasons we expect an official statement from IDC clarifying the methodology that provided the market shares.

Meanwhile it’s worthwhile to answer a question that Mike DiPetrillo raised in the comments: why a 23% market share for Microsoft should be considered remarkable? The answer we can give:

• Because it didn’t go lower despite ESX 3.5 Update 2 introduced a huge advantage in terms of features and most VMware efforts in marketing is focused on highlighting such difference
• Because one would assume (maybe incorrectly) that customers started to dismiss Virtual Server in the last few months. In such case Hyper-V may have some more than 3% market share.

Labels: Dell, HP, IBM, Market Trends, Microsoft, VMware