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In September 2009 VMware announced an OEM agreement with RTO Software to offer its Virtual Profiles product as part of View.
Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a virtual desktop infrastructure.

The most interesting part of this deal is that RTO Software has the same agreement with Symantec, which competes in the VDI space with VMware.

Now Brian Madden is reporting that Symantec has suddenly stopped selling Virtual Profiles (called Workspace Profiles in their portfolio) and that every reference to the product disappeared from the corporate website.

Madden suggests that this is a sign that VMware acquired RTO Software. The standard answer he received from the company PR department is that the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.
Of course not.

Labels: Acquisitions, RTO Software, Symantec, VMware

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

After what appeared to be an endless timeframe, Symantec finally updates its application virtualization platform acquired from Altris in January 2007 and once called Software Virtualization Solution (SVS).

The product name changed from SVS to Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) and jumped from version 2.1 to version 6.1.

This first public build of the platform (6.1.4108, dubbed as Maintenance Pack 1) introduces a number of interesting features:

• Layer isolation granularity
  The administrator can define what portion of the real OS can be seen inside each virtual layer
• Reset Point
  Like in hardware virtualization with virtual machines snapshots, the administrator can define checkpoints and revert to them if something goes wrong inside the virtual layer. The changes made after a reset point can be integrated back into the persistent part of the virtual layer.
• Cloned layers and dependent layers
  Both the persistent part and the customizations of a virtual layer can be cloned on demand.
  Like in hardware virtualization with clones and linked clones, the cloned virtual layer can depend on its parent.
• Layer Patch
  Updates for applications inside a virtual layer can be delivered without repackaging and reshipping the virtual layer.
  The update happens through a Layer Patch which is the delta between the original virtual layer and the updated virtual layer.
• Autorun from Layer and Deactivate on Last Processes Exit
  Any real application can be obliged to run inside a virtual layer every time it starts.
  The changes that are produced by the user during its use can stay inside the virtual layer or can be destroyed by resetting the virtual layer as soon as the real application is terminated.

The product is made of two components: the Workspace Corporate Server, which supports Windows Server 2003 32 and 64bit, and the Client Workstation, which only supports Windows XP 64bit.

Worldwide customers will appreciate that Symantec saved the Free for Personal Use edition, which is not timebombed despite you must download it from the Trial Ware section of the website.

Labels: Releases, Symantec

The long awaited new virtualization platform that Symantec is developing since over one year, Endpoint Virtualization Suite (EVS), is still in Release Candidate phase, but its general availability may be imminent.

The company has in fact released the SDK for one of the suite components: Workspace Streaming, the application streaming technology that Symantec acquired from AppStream in April 2008.

Jacob Hammons, a Technical Writer at Symantec, clarifies some details about the SDK:

Since the SDK uses WSDL and web services, you don't need to be an advanced programmer to use it (I'm definitely not!). You can let your development tool do the heavy lifting by generating proxy classes, then you can access the Streaming functionality the same as any other library (you can even rely entirely on intellisense like I do). This is a big change from the days when you needed C or Java experience to write to a product's SDK.

So, what exactly can you do with the SDK? You can assign applications to users, update package values and provisions, view current sessions, generate reports, and about every other task you perform in your day-to-day management. More importantly, you can integrate these tasks into self-service portals, scripts, and workflow tools to save time.

Labels: Symantec

After a long period of silence, in February some new information about the Symantec strategy in the virtualization space emerged.

The company is working on a new platform, called Endpoint Virtualization Suite, which will include the AppStream (Symantec Workspace Streaming), Altiris (Symantec Workspace Virtualization), nSuite (Symantec Workspace Corporate / Remote) and RTO Software (Symantec Workspace Profiles) technologies and which will be released somewhere this spring.

Today we learn that the suite is now in Release Candidate status. The news has been published on a corporate blog along with some screenshots.
The article unveils other interesting details:

• Symantec changed again the name of this platform: from Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite (EVS) to Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV).
  The arbitrary version number set to 6.1 is still there.
• The free version of SVS may still exist
• The platform will have a SDK

Interestingly the post ends with the following warning:

Note to the competition:

The battle in Software Virtualization will start now and you should all be aware that Symantec is now a real player in the market.

Thanks to DABCC for the news.

Labels: Symantec

So far Symantec has been almost non-existent in the virtualization market.

The company acquired Altiris in January 2007 and AppStream in April 2008.
In more than two years the application virtualization suite SVS was updated a single time, reaching version 2.1 in June 2007.

In this timeframe not a single word was spent to detail the long-term vision and strategy for the virtualization market, despite the company made additional moves like the acquisition of a VDI connection broker provider called nSuite in August 2008.

Towards the end of last year anyway, some details about a renewed commitment emerged: Symantec renamed Altiris SVS in Workspace Virtualization (SWV), unofficially launching version 6.1 beta program.

Today, finally, we know where all of this will end out.

Symantec is repackaging the acquired technologies in a Endpoint Virtualization Suite, which includes:

• Symantec Workspace Streaming (the AppStream technology)
• Symantec Workspace Virtualization (the Altiris SVS technology)
• Symantec Workspace Corporate / Remote (the nSuite technology)
• Symantec Workspace Profiles

As the offering may sound complex for those customers that never interacted with the three companies above, Symantec released a brief summary that is worth a check.

This suite will be released somewhere in Spring 2009, except the Profiles module which will be available at a later time.

Labels: Symantec

While the virtualization community is still intensely discussing the benchmarks around XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V used for VDI scenarios, provided by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and confuted by VMware, a new study surfaces.

This performance analysis, committed by VMware, shifts the focus from VDI to application virtualization, comparing Citrix XenApp 5.0, Microsoft App-V 4.5, Symantec SVS Pro 2.1 and VMware ThinApp 4.0.1.

The measurements were performed using the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) Clarity Suite: the Clarity Tracker Agent is deployed on the benchmarked Windows machines, the Clarity Studio produces workload simulation, and the results are uploaded for further analysis to the Exo Performance Network.

The conclusion are rather interesting:

• Application virtualization solutions that use an embedded virtualization model (ThinApp) deliver the best application throughput. Only ThinApp delivers the combination of excellent raw performance plus low overall CPU utilization, making it the better solution for organizations seeking to minimize the performance “hit” typically associated with virtualization technology.
• By contrast, solutions that employ a kernel-mode driver or service (App-V, SVS, XenApp) introduce additional layers of software complexity – including significantly higher kernel-mode activity – which translate into runtime overhead that slows the application and/or places an additional burden on the CPU. These agents also consume a considerable amount of memory, both directly – as part of the agent’s process – and indirectly, through expansion of the application’s working set.
• Agent-based solutions also introduce a new and potentially catastrophic single point of failure (kernel mode execution) that IT organizations must factor into the testing and certification of their desktop computing stacks. Functional limitations, such as the lack of support for locked-down environments and/or inability to run on specific Windows versions (x64), further complicate the application virtualization equation, forcing IT shops to invest additional resources into designing infrastructure around these planning and deployment hurdles.

Read the whole document here.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware

Yesterday Symantec announced a new partnership with VMware to integrate its much appreciated Veritas Cluster Server with VMware Infrastructure.

As first step Symantec has enhanced VCS to cluster vCenter.

Additionally, the two companies may bundle together VCS with Site Recovery Manager (SRM) as the announcement mentions a very vague complementary HA/DR solutions as part of the joint operation.

Labels: Alliances, Symantec, VMware

Just five days ago Symantec went under fire for its supporting policy about VMware VMotion.

Basically the company refused to support two of its core products in a VMware environment where VMotion was used because some of its customers reported several kind of problems.

Thanks to the power of the blogosphere, to the massive negative PR, or more likely to the powerful influence that VMware can exercise, Symantec immediately changed the offending knowledge base article, taking the responsibility of any odd behavior for its products after a VMotion:

At this time running the Symantec Endpoint Manager (SEPM) is considered an alternative configuration and will be handled with "Best Effort Support".

Customers have reported problems with Symantec AntiVirus Server and Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager with VMware VMotion ESX server. These problems may or may not be related to the presence of VMware VMotion or the presence of the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager.

…

Symantec is investigating each support case and will update Symantec products where necessary.

Labels: Support, Symantec, VMware

In January 2007 Symantec started its slow entrance in the virtualization market acquiring Altiris, a company mostly known for its enterprise management products than for its brand new application virtualization product SVS (Software Virtualization Solution).

After the acquisition Symantec released just a minor update of SVS (that became the acronym of Symantec Virtualization Solution), still using the Altiris brand, in June 2007 and then nothing else.

For a long time the security giant strategy for the application virtualization market has been totally obscure, until March 2008 when a dedicated Endpoint Virtualization Business Unit was created. Then Symantec went silent again.

Now, maybe, the company is ready to move forward and tell the world its plan to compete with Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Novell and the plethora of startups that populate this market segment.

On what it seems to be the official blog of the former Altiris SVS business unit, somebody announced the upcoming beta program for Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV), the new name for SVS.
It’s worth to not that, along with the name, also the product versioning has a significant refresh, jumping from 2.1 to 6.1.

The features that will be introduced in this new version are remarkable anyway:

• Layers dependency (users can define chain of layers that are activated as soon as the main layer is)
• Application isolation (this point requires further clarifications as the application virtualization layers are supposed to be already isolated)
• Layers patching (users can patch layers without replacing them through incremental deployments of new bits)
• Support for multi-users (which means support for Microsoft Terminal Services)

No words on when SWV 6.1 will be available.

Labels: Symantec

As most loyal virtualization.info readers know, this website publishes a report detailing the top 10 challenges in virtualization adoption.
The report didn’t change a single bit from 2007 to 2008: the report still lists ISVs support as the top issue in embracing virtualization.

Of course things change in two years, so we wanted to verify how our readers rate such issue at the end of 2008.
To do so not one but two questions of our Hardware Virtualization Adoption Survey 2008 were dedicated to this very topic.

Surprisingly enough, on over 1000 responses received in less than one month, a very small percent of people indicated the ISVs support as the biggest obstacle in adopting virtualization (just 9%) or as the biggest challenge in implementing a certain virtualization project (just 2%).

(don’t worry: virtualization.info will publish the complete results of this survey in the next few weeks)

We were ready to drastically change the report for 2009, moving support to the last position, when a remarkable issue was highlighted by the guys at vinternals.

Symantec just published a knowledge base article stating that the company doesn’t provide support for two key products, Symantec Antivirus (SAV) and Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP), when used inside VMware ESX virtual machines with VMotion in use.

The official reason for this support denial is:

There have been many issues reported a few examples are,

• Client communication problems
• Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) communication issues
• Content update failures
• Policy update failures
• Client data does not get entered in to the database
• Replication failures

As vinternals guys say (with some vivid words):

I urge every enterprise on the planet who are customers of both VMware and Symantec to rain fire and brimstone upon Symantec (I've already started), because your entire server and VDI infrastructure is at this time officially unsupported.

So let’s ask this again: is ISVs support for the hypervisor of choice still a top issue or not?
Oracle customers can avoid to complain on this, we know their answer…

Labels: Symantec, VMware