virtualization.info

This 2010 definitively started as the year to recruit talents.
After the news that Scott Lowe joined EMC, virtualization.info has just learned that Massimo Re Ferrè, is leaving IBM to join VMware.

Re Ferrè is one of the most popular professionals in the virtualization industry, leading the community since much before the launch of this publication (September 2003).
virtualization.info recognized his personal website as a top virtualization blog in 2008.

Re Ferrè worked in IBM for 15 years, most of them as IT Architect.
He will join VMware as Solutions Architect in the vCloud department in EMEA, working with other well-known talents (and bloggers) like Massimiliano Daneri, of VMBK fame, and Duncan Epping.

So while IBM is intensifying the competition with VMware, VMware recruits its best employees.
2010 is going to be an interesting year.

Labels: IBM, Leadership, VMware

IBM may have pioneered virtualization in the sixties, but it’s not a secret that it has no interest in dominating the modern x86 virtualization market.
So far, Big Blue has been happy enough to play the OEM role, distributing VMware platforms inside System x machines. And nobody will find hard to recognize that, compared to the HP and Dell efforts, the IBM commitment in this space has been less evident.

Behind the scene in fact, IBM perceives VMware and other x86 virtualization vendors as competitors which slow down the adoption of its PowerVM platform.

A good example of this comes from a paper released by the International Technology Group (ITG), which IBM often uses to prepare marketing papers, in April 2009: VALUE PROPOSITION FOR IBM POWER SYSTEMS - Comparing Costs of IBM PowerVM and x86 VMware for Enterprise Server Virtualization

ITG suggests that VMware virtualization is less secure and less performing than its own:

…One major difference is that PowerVM enables use of “hard” partitions, which provide greater partition isolation than software-based techniques such as VMware Virtual Machines. Firmware-based logical partitions (LPARs) reduce the potential for performance bottlenecks and contribute to higher levels of availability and security than may be realized with software-based partitions…

ITG also suggests that customers don’t deploy mission critical applications on VMware platforms, and that when they do, the applications serve a rather small user base:

…VMware is most commonly employed for what are, by Power server standards, comparatively light-duty applications and workloads. Where databases are employed, these are typically small, non-critical or both. This is also the case for business applications.

…

There are some installations of SAP, PeopleSoft and other mainstream ERP systems on VMware.
However, these are typically small and often involve development and test instances, or collaborative modules offered for these suites rather than transactional systems. Oracle, for example, does not support VMware for SAP production environments…

The best part of the paper of course come with the cost comparison, where ITG claims that IBM PowerVM has IT costs ranged from 23% to 49% less, and averaged 34% less than those for VMware equivalents over a 5-years period:

Similarly, ITG claims that IBM PowerVM has a cost of downtime ranged from 59% to 77% less, and averaged 72% less than those for VMware equivalents.

Obviously the paper doesn’t even contemplate the obvious fact that over 90% of worldwide virtual machines are powered by Windows, and that IBM doesn’t support Windows guests on PowerVM.
The customer that wants to use the Power platform has to face the cost of dropping all its Windows applications and adopt *nix counterparts. This massive cost is not considered in the paper.

IBM may want to become more aggressive as soon as its upcoming Power7 architecture will be released (some times during Q1 2010).
The company is in fact highlighting that this new platform will offer two to three times the performance of its predecessor for the same energy (albeit it’s unlikely it will support Windows anytime soon).

But while IBM is increasingly targeting VMware, another company is targeting IBM: Oracle, which just received the OK from European Commission to close the acquisition of Sun, and can’t wait to tell the world its plans to use the SPARC architecture and the Solaris operating system.

Labels: IBM, VMware

Exactly one year ago IBM and Virtual Bridges announced a partnership to resell an end-to-end desktop virtualization solution based on KVM.
That solution includes VERDE, a subset of the Virtual Bridges VDI connection broker (Win4VDI) that only supports Linux guest OSes.

Eight months later, Virtual Bridges completely replaced Win4VDI with VERDE 2.0, introduced support for Windows guest OSes, and added a lightweight Linux distribution which features KVM which customers can install on clients.

Today the company releases version 3.0, which introduces several new features like:

• Capability to replicate a virtual desktop gold image across WAN links
• Integration of VoIP capabilities (Skype) into the client-side KVM platform
• Support for Microsoft Windows 7 virtual desktops
• Support for Apple Mac hardware

Labels: IBM, Releases, VDI, Virtual Bridges

IBM and VMware recently released a new performance analysis of SAP NetWeaver 7.01 and ERP 6.0 on Windows Server 2008 on vSphere 4.0 on a System x 3850 M2.

The IBM machine, equipped with four 6-way Intel Xeon X7460 CPUs @ 2.66GHz and 128GB RAM, executed up to 12 virtual machines (each with 2 vCPUs), in different scenarios with different virtual hardware configurations.

The benchmark shows that this system supports 8 times more users than a single 2 vCPUs virtual machine.

Labels: Benchmarks, IBM, SAP, VMware

More than one year ago IBM signed a partnership with the startup Desktone to implement a 1,400 seats VDI architecture powered by their technology at the Pike County Schools.

That move cleared the IBM plan to become a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud provider which became a reality at the end of last month.

Two weeks ago in fact IBM announced the upcoming availability of its new Smart Business Desktop, a IaaS architecture powered by VMware, Citrix, Desktone and Wyse products.

The company website doesn’t clarify which vendors will provide which components but it’s pretty easy to guess (Citrix helped with a specific announcement): VMware will provide the hypervisor (ESX) and management layer (vCenter), Citrix will provide the connection broker (XenDesktop) and remote desktop protocol (HDX), Wyse will provide the thin clients and Desktone of course will glue the whole thing with its self-service portal for customers and policy manager for the cloud provider.

IBM plans to launch the Smart Business Desktop offering in October 2009 with a subscription model.

For the very first time a hardware virtualization architecture will be an alternative to the web-based architectures that Google represents so well. Hopefully virtualization.info will be able to access the IBM cloud and report about it after some extended use.

Labels: Citrix, Desktone, IBM, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technology

At the end of April, a Russian business magazine reported about a $11M investment that Parallels secured from Almaz Fund, and unveiled how the company contemplated an IPO one or two years ago.

Now Bloomberg further confirms the interest to launch an IPO, reporting the words of Serguei Beloussov, the Parallels founder and CEO:

Parallels Chief Executive Officer Serguei Beloussov says he wants to take the software maker public in about two years, striving to stay independent.

More interestingly, Beloussov reveals how IBM and Microsoft started a discussion to acquire his company:

Companies including Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. have “casually” approached him about an acquisition, Beloussov said in an interview last week.

The interest of Microsoft for Parallels isn’t surprising at all: in May 2006, at the Microsoft conference WinHEC, Bob Muglia clearly said during his keynote that Microsoft was going to provide all three major virtualization tecnologies in the Longhorn wave: server (or hardware) virtualization, OS partitioning and application virtualization.

Microsoft now has every piece of the virtualization stack: the Hyper-V hardware virtualization engine, the App-V application virtualization engine, a VDI connection broker, the security wrapper MED-V.
The only missing part is the OS partitioning technology, and Parallels is the only enterprise company that offers it at today.
So unless Microsoft changed its plans or what to develop it from scratch, Parallels is the company to acquire.

The fact that IBM is interested in acquiring Parallels is much stranger. It may mean that the big OEM is finally reconsidering its market strategy and may soon start to focus on the x86 virtualization market.

If the IBM interest for Parallels is real, it means that the Big Blue may move to acquire more than just the OS partitioning layer. And Red Hat would probably be much happy to demonstrate its new KVM-based platform.

Labels: Funding, IBM, Microsoft, Parallels

In December 2008 Virtual Bridges closed a major deal with IBM to bundle a Linux-friendly version of its Win4VDI connection broker (called VERDE) with Canonical Ubuntu Linux and the IBM Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS), which includes Lotus Symphony, Notes and other IBM products.

The deal was especially relevant because this bundle was designed to deliver a VDI solution based on the KVM virtualization platform that Ubuntu embeds. And IBM was the first major ISV to support its enterprise products inside KVM virtual machines.

Eight months later Virtual Bridges, IBM and Canonical are back with VERDE 2.0.

The first new thing in this release is the product strategy: Virtual Bridges completely replaces Win4VDI with VERDE, avoiding to market and sell two different versions of the same connection broker.

The second and most important news is related to a new key component of the package: a client-side virtualization platform.

The press announcement mentions the term client hypervisor, but in this case we are talking about a lightweight Linux distribution with KVM (which is not a hypervisor architecture).
Like over client hypervisors, this one requires Intel VT enabled so it won’t work on some laptops (courtesy of Sony and Intel).

The virtual desktop can be checked out and copied on the local KVM platform, allowing the mobile user to work in a so-called offline VDI mode.
At that point VERDE 2.0 uses a new Self-Managing Auto Replicating Technology (SMART) protocol to synchronize the local virtual desktop image with the primary one that resides inside the corporate virtual infrastructure.

Labels: IBM, KVM, Releases, VDI, Virtual Bridges

IBM just announced VMControl, a plug-in for the Director management suite, which is free for the IBM customers.
VMControl, available in two editions (Express and Standard) adds management capabilities for multiple hypervisors on top of the Director 6.x platform:

The Express edition just offers very basic management capabilities and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) cold migration and it is free.
The Standard edition also offers a template library (Image Manager), which supports the OVF format, and the support for additional virtualization platforms (AIX NIM and System z z/VM).
This richer version costs money (the price is unknown at the moment) and comes as a 60-days trial.
If the tool is worth the money is something that customers will have to verify carefully anyway.

What IBM calls today VMControl is a Director plug-in launched in December 2004 that the company keeps renaming and renaming.
The original name of it was Virtual Machine Manager, released as a free extension for Director 4.20.
IBM took an entire year to upgrade it to version 2.0 and when it was released it only had bug fixes and support for the new Director 5.10.

The plug-in was then renamed one year later, in November 2006, as Virtualization Manager 1.0.
The only new feature that IBM implemented at that time was the experimental support for its own Virtualization Engine on System p and the Novell implementation of Xen.

Now it’s back, almost three years later, under the name of VMControl 2.1.
The experimental support for non-x86 virtualization platforms is now official and the few capabilities that IBM added over 5 years now costs money.

Labels: IBM

Last week every major IT news portal (like NetworkWorld) quoted the words of Joshua Corman, Principal Security Strategist at IBM Internet Security Systems (aka ISS, the popular security firm that IBM acquired in 2006 for $1.3 billion).

At the Interop conference in Las Vegas Corman said something that other security and virtualization experts are saying since a long time:

x86 virtualization is often a risky proposition for highly regulated, mission-critical applications, because people and processes are not ready for virtualization and the security risks it introduces

Corman also recommended to not use a Type-2 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) for production use, and only rely on hypervisors.
It will be interesting to see the KVM and Linux community reaction to this claim.

Labels: IBM, Security

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Alliances, IBM, Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Alliances, IBM, KVM, Virtual Bridges

IBM announced today its intention to acquire Transitive, the company that offers an emulation layer (billed as cross-platform virtualization) to run applications on non-native hardware platform.

The company’s engine is behind the Apple Rosetta software that runs Mac OS applications for IBM PowerPC CPUs on Intel x86.
Transitive is also able to translate Sun Solaris applications developed SPARC architecture in a way that they can run on Linux on any x86/x64 or on Intel Itanium architecture.

In January 2008 Transitive also powered a special PowerVM Lx86 software offered by IBM, which allows to run Linux applications developed for any x86 architecture on IBM System p platforms with Power CPUs.

Probably IBM found the solution so interesting that decided to acquire the company.
The entity of the acquisition is unknown.

Labels: Acquisitions, IBM, Transitive

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

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

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

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

Labels: Alliances, IBM, Leostream