virtualization.info

The Novell increased focus on KVM didn’t pass unnoticed.
Several news outlets suggested that this may the first step before Novell abandons Xen, following the Red Hat path, which will ultimately turn into the end of Xen as a community-driven open source hypervisor.

The whole idea is not useful to Citrix, which wants as many partners as possible on its side to validate Xen, and certainly it’s not useful to Novell, which needs to avoid that customers start looking elsewhere (read VMware, Citrix, Oracle).

So while Citrix helped to explain why KVM makes sense in some cases but it’s not a full Xen replacement, Novell somehow clarified its intention to support both virtualization platforms.

Nonetheless, the buzz around AlacrityVM must have pleased the company which felt the urgency to (informally) announce the upcoming full support to KVM in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, to be released later this year.

If the market is really interested in KVM, Novell may leverage the opportunity more than others: the acquisition of PlateSpin gave the company some of the best P2V/V2V migration tools on the market, which will be an easy sell anywhere enterprises want to switch from Xen to KVM.

Labels: KVM, Novell

A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced a new partnership with Novell on virtualization.

The deal includes two parts.
The first one is focused on providing joint technical support to those customers that run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a XenServer guest OS.
The second one grants the use of Platespin Recon for Citrix and its Solutions Advisors partners.

While Novell could be considered a Citrix competitor because of its implementation of Xen, the reality is that, at the moment, Citrix has no interest in competing with anybody at the hypervisor layer.
The Citrix strategy is focused on placing XenDesktop on top of every possible hypervisor. And this includes ESX, Hyper-V and of course as many Xen flavors as possible.
So the Novell version of Xen is just an additional opportunity to sell VDI for Citrix.

At the same time the Novell commitment on Xen validates the hypervisor that Citrix is using as main foundation, keeping developers and customers engaged, and Citrix has all the interest to not disrupt it.
The increasing focus that Novell has on KVM must be clarified before customers start to think that yet another vendor (after Red Hat) is abandoning Xen.
This is probably why the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby offered a surprising insight about the value and shortcomings of KVM, the reason behind the Novell and Red Hat decision to invest on it, and the increasing interest for Oracle VM:

…

It's important to realize that for a Linux vendor, KVM significantly simplifies the engineering, testing and packaging of the distro. KVM is a driver in the kernel, whereas Xen, even with paravirt_ops support in the Linux kernel, requires the vendor to pick a particular release of Xen and its tool stack, and then integrate that with a specific kernel.org kernel, and exhaustively test them together - rather than just getting a pre-integrated kernel and hypervisor from kernel.org. So it is entirely reasonable to expect that over time the distros will focus on KVM as a hypervisor. I think KVM is extremely powerful in this context. But ultimately the choice depends on how the end-user wants to acquire/consume virtualization.

If the use case involves the customer buying, installing and running Linux to achieve virtualization, KVM will eventually do a fine job. If on the other hand, the user expects to deploy a virtualization platform that is entirely guest OS agnostic, using a complete virtual infrastructure platform then a type-1 hypervisor that is OS agnostic (xen.org Xen Cloud Platform, Citrix XenServer, OracleVM, VMware vSphere) is what they will go for. I have previously made the case that OS-bundled hypervisors have both inherent advantages and disadvantages in penetrating the market: The opportunity is to supplant the existing OS footprint with a new version of the OS that includes virtualization. The disadvantage is that no OS vendor has yet done a good job of virtualizing its competitors' products, and indeed strategically is never likely to do so. Let's be blunt: thus far they have done a mediocre job at best…

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, KVM, Novell, Xen

When Red Hat announced its decision to switch virtualization technology, moving from Xen to KVM, in June 2008, it generated a lot of buzz.

It was a dangerous move, considering that the platform was pretty new, that its creator and maintainer was a young startup, Qumranet, and that no ISV was actually supporting its applications inside it.
On the other side KVM was integrated in the Linux kernel after just six months of development, and Red Hat eventually acquired Qumranet to get the knowledge, the people and the influence to return the most on its risky investment.
Nobody followed Red Hat: Citrix, Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun and of course its primary competitor Novell continued to work on Xen.

Fast forward to late 2009: Red Hat is finally ready to unveil its commercial implementation of KVM, introducing Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) and Virtualization Manager for Servers (REVMS).
Red Hat continues to be the only virtualization player to offer a commercial implementation of KVM, but but things may change soon.

Novell is in fact researching a new hypervisor built on KVM called AlacrityVM:

AlacrityVM is a performance focused hypervisor based on the Linux KVM project. Virtualized environments often impose significant performance penalties against a given workload when compared to native "bare-metal" equivalents. This project is motivated by the belief that it doesn't necessarily have to be this way, nor do we need exotic hardware to achieve it. AlacrityVM demonstrates that most of the existing performance bottlenecks in today's system are simply the result of suboptimal software stacks. By systematically identifying and fixing the weak links in the guest/hypervisor equation, near native performance from a virtualized environment is realistically achievable.
We also aim to add new features, such as the ability to express real-time constraints, network qos, virtual filesystems, etc.

AlacrityVM is in a very early stage (the first public build appeared in March 2009) but it seems that Novell already submitted it to the Linux maintainers for inclusion in upcoming kernel 2.6.33.
Linus Torvalds rejected it saying that there was not enough interest around the project.

Part of the kernel or not, it demonstrates that Novell is considering and investing on Xen alternatives. And this is particularly interesting considering that the company announced its plan to release a lightweight version of their virtualization platform (read: with a stripped down version of SUSE Enterprise Linux) in March 2008 and never delivered so far.

Labels: KVM, Novell

This morning ZDNet released a surprising interview with the Novell CTO Moiz Kohari, where he took a completely distant position from the virtualization market leader and competitor VMware.

While the VMware CEO opens its company’s premiere conference by saying that at today there’s no workload that cannot be virtualized, the Novell CTO says instead:

…virtualization has yet to overcome I/O (input/output) latency issues at the hypervisor level, as compared to provisioned servers. As a result, virtualization is not the choice in cases where service providers and businesses need to ensure as little latency as possible…

Even more surprising, considering that Novell is a long-time virtualization player, is Kohari skepticism about a fully virtualized cloud infrastructure:

"For the next five years, most machines will still be provisioned," noted Kohari.

He said Novell's engineers are working to resolve latency issues related to virtualization. However, until such technical barriers are overcome, cloud infrastructure providers need to operate hybrid data centers in order to support apps that run on both virtualized and non-virtualized servers.

The idea of running hybrid infrastructures as foundation of IaaS cloud computing is definitively far from the fully virtualized computing stack that VMware, Cisco and EMC are pushing with the VCE Coalition and the Vblock equipment.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Novell

Despite its huge potential, it’s pretty evident that the market is not embracing the application virtualization approach (to not be confused with presentation or desktop virtualization) anytime soon.

All the biggest vendors in the IT industry invested in application virtualization: Microsoft acquired Softricity in May 2006, VMware acquired Thinstall in January 2008, Symantec acquired Altiris in January 2007 and AppStream in April 2008, Novell distributes XenoCode with an OEM agreement since September 2008, and Citrix has its own engine as part of XenApp since a long time.

Regardless of this massive commitment, the top players above spent almost zero effort to push for application virtualization adoption.
The startups that were not acquired in the last three years are struggling to make any impact. See AppZero (formerly Trigence), Ceedo or Trustware.

Microsoft, which owns a large part of the application ecosystem, and can deeply influence the rest of it, doesn’t seem to have any interest in winning the race, even if it owns what was considered one of the best application virtualization engine in 2006: SoftGrid (now App-V).
This year we are going to see a virtualized and stream version of Office 2010, which is good start but nowhere near the kind of effort required to facilitate a mass adoption.

Or the industry is still too busy pushing for the adoption of hardware virtualization and its related applications (VDI, IaaS cloud computing), or the application virtualization technology is not mature enough to be useful outside specific niches, or simply there’s no need for application virtualization, and all the companies above just went deadly wrong with their investments.

On top of these options there’s another one: customers are looking for alternatives to application virtualization that are perceived as more flexible.
One of them may be the so-called offline VDI, powered by client hypervisors that expected later this year.

Labels: AppZero, Ceedo, Citrix, Endeavors Technologies, Microsoft, Novell, Symantec, Trustware, VMware, XenoCode

So far, the Novell strategy about virtualization has never been too clear.
The company offers its own version of Xen since October 2005, made more appealing thanks to a multi-year agreement with Microsoft to support Windows guest OSes and interoperate with Hyper-V.
It has a feature-rich orchestration framework, ZENworks, which supports multiple hypervisors but that is almost unknown in the virtualization community.
In February 2008 it acquired the Canadian startup PlateSpin, which now enriches the Novell portfolio with a P2V migration, disaster recover and capacity planning tools.
It also plans to release additional products for performance monitoring and configuration management.

Despite that, it’s still unclear where Novell will be in the virtualization market within the next few years.
One of the PlateSpin products, Forge, still uses VMware ESX rather than SUSE Linux with Xen to host the P2V’ed virtual machines for disaster recovery.
The stand-alone Xen platform that was announced in March 2008 never came out.
A lot of former PlateSpin executives left the company, the development of virtualization products has been moved to India, and just a couple of weeks ago Novell definitively phased out the subsidiary website (the brand still leaves in the products’ names).

So, where the company is going from here? In those companies where customers adopt multiple hypervisors is the answer.
Or at least this is the answer that Novell’s President and CEO gave during the last earnings call.

Answering to a question about changes in the go-to-market strategy and opportunities for PlateSpin products, Ron Hovsepian said:

…Yeah, some of the packaging was on the planning tool, in particular, and from that perspective, some of that was getting bundled into the market, as you appropriately put it. The good news is we were able to get Dell's professional services organization to standardize on our tool and begin to use our capacity planning tool for literally thousands of assessments, virtualization assessments that they do.

In terms of the PlateSpin migrate product, you are also correct -- some components to that have been bundled inside of other packaging routines. The real key for us in that market is the multiple hypervisors showing up at the customer sites, or the multiple virtualization platforms is really where that part of the product was designed for. And what the team has done is we've improved some of our cycle times and focused on improving where we can go with that product and some of the bundling of how we package those pieces up, so I think as we go into next year, calendar next year, I do expect as we hit those releases that that will aid in our ability to sell more of that product.

…

Yeah, we are definitely seeing more penetration by multiple vendors. Obviously Microsoft being the other big one, you know, VMware has got the lead position and again, our desire is to work with all the hypervisors out there, all the virtual platforms out there. And Microsoft definitely is having a -- playing a role in the market, obviously VMware continues to play a role. And Zen continues to play a role in certain segments within the marketplace, so we see those pieces out there. So we are starting to see them show up in some of the larger shops for the customer and starting to see some of that positioning that we want to happen occur now in the market. So it's still early, in my opinion -- we were probably a little early with that product set…

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin

Yesterday Novell announced the future launch of two new products with the PlateSpin brand.

The first one, codename Atlantic, will be a self-service provisioning portal, while the second, codename Bluestar, will be a configuration management and monitoring solution.

Novell also plans to release another product, part of the ZENworks portfolio (which has been merged with the PlateSpin one twelve months ago), codenamed Workbench, a master repository and change/control system for workloads, from which they can be deployed on-demand to any environment.

With this move Novell is going to have a remarkable number of new competitors, considering the amount of startups and leading players that already saturate these segments.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Configuration Management, Novell, Performance Monitoring, PlateSpin

Last week Novell released version 3.7 of its capacity planning tool PlateSpin Recon.

This new version focuses much on storage (local disks as well as FC/iSCSI arrays), tracking its usage over time in physical and virtual machines.  
Even if the available documentation doesn’t clarify much about the new feature, the effort in this area is always welcome because of the strong investment in storage required to build a virtual infrastructure.

Recon 3.7 also introduces support for AIX workloads.
This is probably the only tool on the market able to analyze AIX machines and include them in the capacity plan.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Novell, PlateSpin, Releases

In December 2007 PlateSpin launched Forge, a hardware appliance which embeds VMware VI 3.x and uses the company’s P2V migration technology to simplify the way customers do disaster recovery.

The company updated the platform to version 2.0 exactly one year ago, months after being acquired by Novell.

Earlier this month Forge reached version 2.5, introducing the following features:

• Support for Windows Server 2008 & Windows Vista
  (both file-based and block-based live replication)
• Support for Block-Based Transfers with 64bit protected systems
• Server Sync Block-Based Transfers
• Physical Machine Server Sync
• Support for replications longer than 24 hours
• Role-Based Access & Multi-Tenancy

Novell offers the following unit packages:

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

After the release of Migrate 8.1, Novell releases Protect 8.1.

Both Migrate and Protect come from the original PlateSpin PowerConvert. Novell split it in these two products after completing the acquisition of its subsidiary.
The idea behind this move is that customers may want to use the P2V migration engine for disaster recovery (something that PlateSpin evangelized for years) and so they want to have specific features for this task.

The new Protect 8.1 introduces the following features:

• Live incremental replication with block-based transfers
• File-level restore
• Support for live incremental replications in V2P migrations
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

After the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell made several changes inside its subsidiary.
virtualization.info already published some of them, like the migration of the development team in India and the replacement of several members that left after the acquisition.

Novell also split the original PlateSpin PowerConvert in two products: Migrate and Protect.

Migrate gets a new update this week, reaching version 8.1.
The product now supports Windows Server 2008 (it’s not clear if this includes the imminent R2 edition but probably not), Windows Vista and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. But the major new feature of this release is the support Sun Solaris 10.

This support is very specific: the P2V migration can be performed only from a physical Solaris box with SPARC architecture to a Sun Solaris 10 Container (aka Zone).
The other way around is not available at the moment, and it’s not possible to perform a live migration.

The capability is supported through a dedicated version of the product called Migrate for UNIX, which Novell prices at $1,495 for a flat, perpetual license.

PlateSpin is the first company to offer such capability and it certainly is a welcome addition to the already rich feature-set that PowerConvert always offered. Anyway it’s worth to note that Sun offers a free P2V migration tool that perform a similar task since October 2007: it migrates Solaris 8 and 9 physical SPARC boxes on a Solaris 10 container (of course still on SPARC architecture).

The time of the announcement is not casual: now that Oracle acquired Sun, nobody exactly knows what will happen to the Sun Solaris operating system and the SPARC architecture.
If Oracle wants to kill SPARC as some are predicting, Sun customers may have to drop their systems sooner rather than later, and in many cases the mandatory, intermediate step is to consolidate them into fewer boxes.

Labels: Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

Right now Novell has a lot to clarify to its shareholders about its virtualization strategy: a remarkable number of executives are leaving its subsidiary PlateSpin after the acquisition, Recon (formerly PowerRecon) doesn’t get a significant upgrade since over one year and its development unit is being moved to India, the announced stand-alone virtualization platform based on Xen is not here yet, Oracle is probably building a powerful hypervisor to compete against Novell by merging its product and the Sun and the Virtual Iron ones.

Despite all of that Novell didn’t touch any of these topics at all during its Q2 earnings call, which took place on May 28, three days after virtualization.info broke the news about them.
The only thing that Novell had to say about PlateSpin was:

Turning to our newer SRM products, we remain excited about the opportunities for PlateSpin and Managed Objects, which provide cross-platform data center solutions. The market opportunity has moved towards large, complex, multi-site consolidation initiatives. We believe our premium virtualization and workload life cycle management tools provide superior solutions for companies seeking enterprise class capabilities for management of their mixed IT environments.

During the quarter several product updates were launched including PlateSpin Orchestrate, PlateSpin Recon and Business Service Management.

If this doesn’t shock anybody, it’s much more surprising that not a single analyst that attended the call asked for clarifications.
The call transcript kindly provided by Seeking Alpha demonstrates that the destiny of Novell in the virtualization space is something that nobody cares about. And this is even worse than losing a big number of executives.

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin

A few days before virtualization.info broke the news about the PlateSpin executives mass exodus and the move of the development in India, Novell released PlateSpin Recon 3.6.

There are no new features. Just a new report (about resource reclamation), the extended support to Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and Oracle/Sun Solaris Containers, and a new licensing scheme (which Novell doesn’t detail in the press release or elsewhere in the website).

PowerRecon doesn’t get a major update since over one year, when PlateSpin (still on its own) released version 3.0.
Version 3.1, released in September 2007, was significant in terms of new features, but after that one it seems that the amount of resources dedicated to this product were severely reduced.

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin, Releases

Along with Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008) and a very few others, PlateSpin was one of the oldest and most successful VMware partner in the history of modern virtualization. But after the Novell acquisition, which took place in February 2008, the company lost much of its popularity.

Novell never really clarified its virtualization strategy and this is severely impacting the PlateSpin brand.
Besides the November 2006 interoperability agreement with Microsoft, the Novell moves in the virtualization space have been very weak: the company announced plans to release a stand-alone virtualization platform in March 2008 but it never came out, and renamed its management solution ZENworks in PlateSpin Orchestrate in December 2008.

This doesn’t seem enough to counter the many challenges that the company is facing in the highly competitive virtualization space:

• Novell has no guarantees on the future of Xen development, which is deeply influenced by Citrix since the acquisition of XenSource in August 2007
• The best alternative to Xen which Novell may want to adopt, KVM, is deeply influenced by its worst competitor, Red Hat, since the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008
• In the near future Novell will have a new dangerous competitor in the Xen virtualization space: Oracle, which now owns three Xen-based hypervisors (Oracle VM Server, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron)
• The competitive advantage that PlateSpin accumulated is now matched by the newest products from Vizioncore and VMware, which also gives away for free a lot of technology.

On top of these challenges Novell is facing an additional major issue as many of the minds behind PlateSpin left the company in the recent months:

• its CEO, Stephen Pollack, is now busy as advisor at Embotics and at Enomaly
• its CTO, Paul Philp, is now working as Vice President of Products at dna13
• its Director of Corporate Marketing, Mark Pileski, is now Vice President of Marketing at VMLogix
• its Vice President of EMEA, Patrick Malaperiman, is now working as independent business development advisor
• its EMEA Channel Director, Jason Jackson, is now working as Channel Director at Centrix Software
• its Regional Director of Central & Eastern Europe, Lothar Esser, is now a Channel Manager at Vizioncore
• its Senior Solutions Specialist, Jacob Ben-David, is now Technical Sales Engineer at VMLogix

Probably the are more that virtualization.info couldn’t track.

This exodus may depend on or may be the consequence of the fact that Novell moved the entire product development unit for PlateSpin Recon (formerly PowerRecon) in India, as virtualization.info has learned from trusted sources.

In both cases Novell has to stop this haemorrhage and describe its vision or its entire presence in the virtualization space will be soon questioned by partners, customers and prospects.

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin

In December 2008 Novell announced its plan to rebrand ZENworks Orchestrator as PlateSpin Orchestrate.
It was a good move considering the potential that ZENworks has in the virtualization space and the brand awareness that PlateSpin was able to build before the Novell acquisition.

Three months after, the first version of the rebranded product comes out: PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0.

Novell is marking as new features things like:

• Support for VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Xen
• Native VMware ESX support (no need for VMware vCetner)
• LDAP support
• Automation based on user-defined events and triggers

but as far as we remember pretty much everything was already included in ZENworks Orchestrator.

More concrete is instead the release of ZENworks Application Virtualization 7, the application virtualization platform that Novell  is OEM’ing from XenoCode.

The new version, which is probably based on the recently released XenoCode Virtual Application Studio 2009, offers the integration with ZENworks Configuration Manager.

Now virtualized applications can be packaged and published in a specific Configuration Manager zone directly from inside Application Virtualization.
At the same time administrators can restrict virtualized applications from running on devices that are not registered with Configuration Manager.

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin, Releases

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

In February Novell took its first major step to become a relevant player in the virtualization market by acquiring PlateSpin, one of the most famous VMware partner in P2V migration and capacity planning.

Novell anticipated a full integration of the new subsidiary by the end of this year, despite the two vendors use very different technologies to develop their products.

It remains unclear if PlateSpin PowerConvert and PowerRecon will ever be included in ZENworks Orchestrator, but today Novell at least unveiled its go-to-market strategy:

• ZENWorks Orchestrator is moved into the PlateSpin product portfolio, rebranded as Orchestrate
• PlateSpin PowerRecon becomes just Recon
• PlateSpin PowerConvert is forked in two products: Migrate and Protect

The four products now go under the portfolio name of PlateSpin Workload Management.

The rebranded version of ZENworks Orchestrator should be released in Q1 2009.

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin

In February the most popular virtualization company for P2V migrations , PlateSpin, was acquired by Novell for $205 Million.

In October, the founder and CEO Stephen Pollack left his own creature for personal reasons, but he couldn’t stay away of the virtualization market for much time: today the startup Embotics announces that he joined its Advisory Board.

Pollack certainly has the position to facilitate the acquisition of Embotics or at least the introduction to the thousands of PlateSpin customers.
For sure this is a good move from this young company focused on the so called VM lifecycle management market.

Labels: Embotics, Leadership, Novell, PlateSpin

Almost one year ago PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February) had the brilliant idea of using its popular P2V migration technology, PowerConvert, for disaster recovery tasks.
So they licensed VMware Infrastructure 3, put it into a physical appliance, and built the missing components to automate a continuous P2V migration of the protected physical servers into the virtual infrastructure. Such thing was called Forge.

PlateSpin didn’t say how many units has sold so far (it may be very complex for a virtualization firm to talk to the security department), but at least another company thinks its a good idea: Plan B DR.

This UK firm has just launched a physical appliance which is pretty similar to Forge but with an important difference: the virtualization platform is not there.
Instead of hosting the P2V’ed image locally as virtual machines, the Plan B DR appliance encrypts them and sends them to the company’s data center, where the VMware Infrastructure is waiting.

With this (very risky) approach seems to precede in time what VMware wants to offer next year: at VMworld 2008 in fact the company said that the first step for SMBs to embrace cloud computing would be by replicating production servers inside the cloud for disaster recovery purposes.

In the vendor’s plans this should happen with VI 4.0 and its new VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) feature but, details apart, Plan B DR seems to have the same identical goal.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Novell, Plan B DR, PlateSpin, VMware