virtualization.info

Yesterday Cisco published the first VMware VMmark benchmark obtained with its Unified Computing System blade platform B250 M2 and VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

The B250 M2 machine, powered by the just released Intel Xeon quad-core X5680 CPUs (codename Westmere) at 3.33GHz and 192GB RAM, scored 35.83 with 26 tiles, a 42% increase over the previous best result obtained by Fujitsu with the RX300 S5 and VMware vSphere 4.0: 25.16 with 17 tiles.

The full configuration of this B250 M2 is described here.

CRN reports that new UCS systems with the impressive Intel Xeon 5600 CPUs, used for this benchmark, will be available in April. 

Cisco also announced that it has over 400 customers for UCS, and that “most of them” are using it in production.

Labels: Benchmarks, Cisco, VMware

William Lam, a UNIX Systems Administrator at Salesforce.com, popular in the virtualization community, develops a Perl script which scans VMware ESX/ESXi hosts and vSphere vCenter servers and reports the status of number of aspects.

Called VMware Health Check Report, it reached version 4.0 yesterday, offering very welcome new capabilities:

• Report is now completely modular in which categories to display via a configuration file
• Ability to specify specific ESX/ESXi host to query
• Ability to specify specific Virtual Mchines to query
• vCenter HA Advanced Runtime information
• vCenter HA Configuration (primary/secondary and node states)
• vCenter HA Advanced Configurations
• vCenter DRS Advanced Runtime information
• ESX/ESXi IP/HOSTNAME of vCenter Management IP
• ESX/ESXi Newly improved Hardware and System Health Stuats information
• ESX/ESXi Advanced Configurations
• ESX/ESXi NUMA information
• VM UUID,Bootime,Resource Statistics, Fault Tolerance, Thin provisioned and NPIV information

The list of aspects that it was already able to check is impressive

• vCenter Managed IP per ESX(i) host
• vCenter User/Group Permissions
• Added Host & SCSI LUN Model attribute
• Added Host boottime
• Additional LUN Mapping information including Datastore,VolumeUUID,DiskName and DeviceName
• VM portgroup + dvportgroup mapping
• Performance Stats for both Cluster + Hosts (cpu/mem avg + %)
• Performance Stats for VM (cpu/mem avg + %, ready & ballon)
• Email report capability
• Added additional command line options for including Cluster,Host and VM Performance stats (default: off)
• New licensing format/summary
• EVC Enabled information
• Cluster VM monitoring
• Cluster Host monitoring}
• # off VMotions within a cluster
• Datastore uncommitted info
• CPU power management info
• VM info (FT, Record/Replay, Clean Poweroff)
• Host IPv6, FT, SSL Thumbprint
• Host Profiles
• vApp information
• Distributed vSwitch information}
• vCenter Build/Release
• Active Sessions
• ESX/ESXi Build/Release
• Cluster(s) Name/Statistics (Hosts,CPU and MEM availabity, HA,DRS and DPM enabled, Resource Pools, Health)
• ESX/ESXi Hardware configuration (NICs/HBAs)
• ESX/ESXi Hardware Health Sensor via CIM
• ESX/ESXi State
• ESX/ESXi Configurations (for detailed information, use detail-hosts option)
• ESX/ESXi Multipathing Info (only available in host or detail-hosts option)
• ESX/ESXi Datastore summary
• ESX/ESXi LUN summary
• ESX/ESXi Portgroup summary
• ESX/ESXi Hostd logs
• CDP Summary
• Recent Tasks
• Virtual Machine summary
• VM Storage summary
• VM Network summary
• VM w/Snapshots
• VM w/Snapshot delta age
• VM w/RDMs
• VM w/NPIV enabled
• VM w/connected CD-ROMs
• VM w/connected Floppys

Here’s a sample report that the tool can generate.

Labels: Tools, VMware

Less than two weeks ago VMware launched a new online facility simply called Labs.
It hosts a number of R&D project developed by VMware engineers and not yet included in the official product portfolio (thus not supported).

The facility opened with 10 open source, downloadable tools. Yesterday a new one surfaced: Weasel.

Weasel is an Operating System installer similar to Redhat's Anaconda.

When you insert the ESX Installation DVD, this program guides you through the steps of network configuration, disk selection, etc. Or it can perform an automated install based on a script similar to Redhat kickstart scripts.

VMware published a video of it in action:

Labels: VMware

CRN reports that VMware just hired a couple of new sales executives in Australia and New Zealand.

The first one is Duncan Bennet, former Managing Director of ANZ region at Sun.
Bennet, who worked at Sun for almost 10 years, is now Director of Sales at VMware.

The second one is Steve Coad, former Sales Leader of ANZ region at XIV, a storage vendor acquired by IBM in January 2008.
Coad now is the VMware Enterprise Sales Director for Australia.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

virtualization.info reports today about another couple of high level departures at VMware: Wendy Perilli, former Director of Cloud Computing Product Marketing and Jeffrey Engelmann, former Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.

Perilli arrived in VMware in 2006, with the acquisition of Akimbi Systems. She has been in charge of the SMB product marketing first, moving to the Cloud Computing business in January 2007.
She left in December to join OpTier, a company focused on business transaction management, as Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing.

Engelmann has been in VMware at least since 2005 (we don’t have a complete curriculum about him).
He joined now EazyBusiness, a provider of cloud-based business applications, as its new Chairman and CEO.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

In perfect sync with the release of Citrix XenApp 6.0, VMware announces ThinApp 4.5, the application virtualization platform that acquired from Thinstall in January 2008.

After the acquisition VMware released only one major update for ThinApp: version 4.0, in July 2008.

Version 4.5 (238809) released today introduces a number of new features that the former CEO of Thinstall, Jonathan Clark, discusses in details on the corporate blog. The list includes:

• Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
  Existing packages can be upgraded through a new Relink utility. Need to rebuild or repackage applications.
• Support for MSI packages larger than 2GB without requiring multiple CAB files
• Support for capturing on partially non-clear PCs (experimental)
  When installing an MSI based application ThinApp 4.5 can automatically detect files and registry entries that the application requires even if those entries already exists on the capture PC. This results in correct captures even in the case where some libraries are installed on the PC.
  VMware solution for detecting dependent registry keys and files is generic and should work with other libraries but at this point the company only tested the VMware Tools scenario and using a clean PC is still best practice.
• Quality Reporting
  Virtualized applications can be configured to report anonymous information to VMware once every 10 days.
  This includes: application vendor, name and version; OS version; the number of time the application was executed and the number of crashes detected over time; total execution time of the application and more.
• Journaling of Virtual file system meta data and virtual registry
  Actually introduced in ThinApp 4.0.4, VMware decided to unveil it with 4.5.
  The purpose of journaling is to support the ability to recover gracefully in the event disk writes are incomplete or the disk state becomes inconsistent when sets of disk writes are not flushed atomically.

The Quality Reporting feature is rather interesting. VMware says that its goal is to build a database of applications that work well on ThinApp and understand where to focus more their support effort. But the intelligence provided could be extremely useful well beyond that, considering that the company has started to make acquisitions in the application market.

ThinApp 4.5 also introduces a number of improvements in different areas, including:

• I/O performance for VDI
• Memory sharing for suites of applications and Terminal Server
• Startup time
• Application white listing

Labels: Releases, VMware

VMware just closed an OEM agreement with Likewise to embed its technology in future versions of vSphere.

Likewise is a US company that offers several products for enterprise authentication. The most popular is simply called Open and it’s available free of charge as open source (GPL and LGPL licenses).
Likewise Open uses Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) and Name Service Switch (NSS) to authenticate non-Windows machines to Windows domains.
It supports Kerberos. NTLM and SPNEGO authentication. It also offers single sign-on for SSH services.

This partnership will allow Microsoft Active Directory users to seamlessly log-in on ESX/ESXi hosts.

virtualization.info received unconfirmed tips that this feature may appear within vSphere 4.1, currently in private beta.

Labels: Alliances, Likewise, VMware

In mid-February virtualization.info missed the release of View 4.0.1 (build 233023).

The maintenance version introduces support for VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5, but it mostly introduces new support for virtual printing.

VMware has an ongoing OEM agreement with ThinPrint which allows it to include its .print driver inside several products. One of them is View.

So far .print has been supported in View environments only when thin clients use RDP protocol. But with View 4.0.1 the ThinPrint technology support has been extended to thin devices that use PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol.

Labels: ThinPrint, VDI, VMware

Yesterday VMware announced that hired the founder and lead developer of Redis: Salvatore Sanfilippo.

Redis is an open source, journaled key-value data store.
By some degrees it can be considered a database server what can operate in two modes: it can keep its entire dataset in RAM and save it on disc asynchronously from time to time, or it can save every change in the dataset as it happens, using an append file.  

Redis is not yet fault tolerant. It should get clustering capabilities after version 2.0 is released.
It’s written in ANSI C and supported in a number of programming languages, including Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, C# and Java.

The announcement come from Derek Collison, hired in August 2009 as Software Architect for Cloud Services at VMware. Collison is a former Technical Director at Google, and before that he was Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at TIBCO Software.

VMware sees Redis as a key component for future cloud-oriented applications and cloud computing infrastructures, associating this move to the acquisitions of SpringSource (August 2009) and Zimbra (January 2010).
By hiring Sanfilippo, VMware is de facto funding the development of Redis.

At the end of January, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz explicitly declared its interest in middleware technologies, so VMware may act similarly with other projects that fits its new strategy to build a complete software stack.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Spiceworks is a private US-based company founded in 2006 that offers a completely free system management platform for hardware/software/licenses inventory, change management, helpdesk, OS remote control and network mapping.
The platform is aimed at the SMB market (over 1,000 monitored it starts to be slow) and is supported by advertising that is displayed inside the console.

Over the last four years the company made notable progress, extending its discovery capabilities to Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS X physical machines as well as network devices, supporting mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Active Directory.

The company just released version 4.6 which introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0.
The platform now can discover ESX/ESXi hosts and track down all their virtual machines, populating the inventory with virtual hardware details like vRAM, vCPUs etc.
Spiceworks already announced forthcoming additional capabilities to monitor virtual infrastructures.

Many may be skeptic about the chances to sustain the business through advertising, but Spiceworks seems to run pretty well so far. Additionally, the company is smart in the way it promotes advertisers: for example, if an helpdesk operator is working on a support ticket that requires new hardware, the product suggests to use a search bar with CDW offers, and the purchase can be completed without leaving the application.
This business model gives this company a significant opportunity to conquer the SMB market over time, offering multi-host (and hopefully multi-hypervisor) monitoring capabilities that virtualization vendors don’t offer for free.

Labels: Spiceworks, VMware

Five months after the release of Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and Fusion 3.0, VMware is ready to launch the public beta program for .1 version of its desktop virtualization platforms.

New features included in this first beta build (240242) of Workstation 7.1 / Player 3.1 and ACE 2.7 are:

• OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests
• 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size
• OVF 1.0 support
• Fedora 12 guest OS support
• Direct Launch (integration between guest and host OSes start menu)
• Guest OS autologon (for Windows guests only)

Some of the above also apply to Fusion 3.1 beta:

• OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests
• 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size

On top of this Fusion 3.1 (build 240138) introduces over 200 bug fixes.

Evaluation keys for both betas expire on May 15, 2010, so it’s safe to assume that RTM versions of these products will see the light of day within the next two months.

Labels: VMware

Somewhere in Q4 2009 VMware lost a significant amount of people in PR and AR departments.

The first one is Melinda Marks, former Senior PR Manager, who left the company in October 2009, after 6 years in VMware.

Marks was one of the key interfaces with the press world and one of the early developers of the VMware’s Global Customer Reference program.
She now has a role as Director of Communications at Qualys, the security vendor that also hired Robert Dell’Immagine, former Director of Community Program at VMware.

In the same period VMware also lost Amber Rowland, Group Manager of Exec and Global Communications.
Rowland is now a consultant for Unity Technologies, a startup focused on 3D and gaming.

The list goes on with Dawn Giusti and Bobbie Laccabue, both former Senior Analyst Relations Managers. Giusti just landed at NetApp, where she is a Senior Manager for Worldwide Analyst Relations.

While VMware continues to use external PR firms in US and Europe to deal with press, analysts and other influencers, it’s not clear yet who replaced these resources inside the company.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Dave Convery, VMware vExpert and Virtualization Architect at Anexinet, published a short but very interesting report on current limitations of vShield Zones, the firewall that VMware acquired from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008 and that offers for free as part of vSphere 4.0 Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

He specifically mentions three shortcomings related to:

• Networking
  …there is an unprotected Port Group (ORIGINAL Network). This needs to be added to the vSwitch AFTER the vShield Agent is installed. If the ORIGINAL Network is already a part of the vSwitch, it will need to be removed BEFORE installing the vShield Agent. In order to avoid an outage, you will need to disable DRS and manually vMotion all VMs off of the ESX/ESXi host before installing the vShield Agent and modifying the port groups.
• DRS/HA
  …with HA disabled for the vShield Agent, there is no facility for automatic startup. There is an automatic startup setting in the startup/shutdown section of the configuration settings. First, this is an all-or-nothing setting. Second…if a host fails, HA will restart all protected VMs on different hosts. If the host comes back on line, you risk having DRS migrate protected VMs back to that host. This will cause those VMs to become disconnected because the vShield Agent will not automatically start. If a host fails, hope that it fails good enough so it won’t restart.
• Maintenance Mode
  …you cannot power the vShield Agent off because the protected VMs would become disconnected. You cannot migrate it to a different host because it would cause a serious conflict and cause protected VMs to become disconnected. The only thing you can do is place the host in Maintenance Mode, then MANUALLY (*GASP*) migrate all of the protected VMs and then power the vShield Agent off. So much for automated patch management

Convery closes his (very welcome) report by saying that vShield Zones is a 1.x product, implying that some of the issues above are expected in a first generation product. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem the case: well before VMware acquired Blue Lane Technologies, vShield (formerly VirtualShield) already was at its 4th generation (Sep 2007). VMware acquired the startup one year later (so it’s safe to assume that Blue Lane made significant progresses in that timeframe) and had from October 2008 to May 2009 to deliver a more integrated platform.

Labels: Security, VMware

VMware’s activity on competition is intensifying in this period of the year: after last month’s comments on Citrix HDX performance and Essentials for Hyper-V sales volume, as well as the cost of managing Hyper-V, they focuses on Microsoft hypervisor’s stability.

Eric Gray, Senior Engineer on the VMware Competitive Team, writes on the topic on its personal blog vCritical, suggesting that ESX has a critical advantage over Hyper-V (and Xen and KVM) because Microsoft relies on 3rd party general-purpose drivers while VMware offers hardened, stress-tested drivers — ready for your toughest enterprise workloads.

Gray mentions a presentation performed by the Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, who confirmed that Windows crashes largely depend (70%) by 3rd party driver code (while Microsoft code is responsible only 5% of times).

The benefits vs shortcomings of relying on generic Windows drivers for Hyper-V is a old theme and while this specific article doesn’t add anything new to the discussion (despite it quotes a couple of real-world examples) the comments offer something new.

Ben Armstrong, Program Manager on Core Virtualization at Microsoft, jumps in and offers a different perspective on drivers quality and how it impacts hypervisors stability. He suggests that Microsoft drivers receive more thorough testing and validation than VMware drivers do:

…what is missing here is some scope. Yes, 70% of crashes are caused by drivers – without understanding the % of systems crashing compared to systems deployed this number is accademic.

Think of it this way (leaving out company names):

Company 1: Of 10,000 deployments 1,000 crashed in our code and 700 crashed in the drivers.

Company 2: Of 10,000 deplouments 300 crashed in our code and 700 crashed in the drivers.

Company 1 says: ~40% of crashes happen in the driver code on our system.
Company 2 says: ~70% of crashes happen in the driver code on our system.

Given all of this data – we can actually see that the driver quality is the same (in this hypothetical scenario). Unfortunately in this case we do not have the full numbers on how many deployments VMware / Microsoft has, how many crashes there are total, etc…

The purpose of this presentation (when originally given) was to talk about the health of the Windows ecosystem and platform as a whole. This is why the figure is a comparision of driver crashes to total crashes.

To make an assertion about the quality of drivers on one platform versus another platform – which you need is the percentage of driver crashes compared to total number of deployments.

Neither Microsoft or VMware have provided this information…

The entire comments thread is worth a read.

Labels: Microsoft, VMware

Secure Network is an Italian consulting firm focuses on network and application security assessment.
One of its partners, Claudio Criscione, is a long time columnist here at virtualization.info.

Secure Network is working on the first security assessment toolkit for virtual infrastructures, VASTO, and Criscione announced today the public beta at the Troopers conference.

VASTO comes as a set of components for Metasploit, one of the most popular frameworks for penetration testing in the security industry.
The framework consists of tools, libraries, modules, and user interfaces. The basic function of the framework is a module launcher, allowing the user to configure an exploit module and launch it at a target system. If the exploit succeeds, the payload is executed on the target and the user is provided with a shell to interact with the payload. Hundreds of exploits and dozens of payload options are available.

What Secure Network released today is a number of open source modules that perform a number of different attacks: from hijacking a connection to the virtual infrastructures web-based management consoles (against VMware VI/vSphere, Server 1.x, Converter and even Citrix XenCenter) to password bruteforcing (against VMware and Xen platforms), up to a path traversal attack (against VMware ESX, ESXi and Server web interfaces).
The toolkit even includes an attack against VMware Studio.

The first round of beta version of the modules can be downloaded here. Secure Network promises more to come.

Labels: Citrix, Security, Tools, VMware

Now that VMware owns a technology that is far away from its primary business, the Spring Java framework and a couple of application servers, one of its primary challenges is building awareness among its customers.

To do so, the company is offering complimentary and perpetual licenses (2 CPUs) of its Tomcat application server called tc Server to any customer buying other VMware products, including vSphere and View.

VMware is not offering the existing editions of tc Server but a new one that integrates with the Spring framework and supports Spring applications.

It’s pure speculation, but customers would rather prefer to have for free the third piece of the SpringSource acquisition: the Hyperic monitoring suite.
Interestingly enough, not only VMware is not offering any special deal for Hyperic, but it even removed Hyperic components from tc Server. While previous versions of the application server in fact included some of them to provide insight about the application performance, the new Spring Edition doesn’t.

This means that either VMware is confident in its capability to sell Hyperic tools without incentives or the monitoring suite is not robust enough for VMware standards.

Labels: SpringSource, VMware

Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year.

The list includes:

• Transparent Memory Compression
  This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region. VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks. 
• IO-Resource Manager (IO-RM)
  This will allow the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to assign shares based on disk performance. The more shares a virtual machine will have, the higher priority it will get in accessing a shared VMFS volume.
• Eight concurrent live migrations
  Next version of VMotion will raise the default limit of concurrent live migrations from two to eight.

Labels: VMware

The imminent launch of Intel octal-core CPUs (codename Nehalem-EX) and servers with up to 48 cores (powered by AMD codename Magny-cours CPUs) will dramatically increase the virtualization hosts density but will highlight how the network layer is becoming one of the weakest point of high-capacity virtual infrastructures.

Anandtech just published a very interesting article on this topic, testing the performance of a couple of copper cable 10GBase-CX4 network interface cards against the popular quad-port gigabit NICs we use today in most virtualization hosts.

The benchmark measured dual-port Intel PRO/1000 PT Server adapter (82571EB) against a Supermicro AOC-STG-I2 dual-port 10Gbit/s Intel 82598EB and a Neterion Xframe-E 10Gbit/s.
Both NICs were tested with VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and CentOS 5.4 guest OSes with appropriate drivers.

While NICs tested by Anandtech are not the lastest available on the market, the research still is a valuable reading for most virtualization administrators.

Labels: VMware

The well-know virtualization professional (and blogger) Eric Sloof just released a tool called vmClient.

vmClient is a minimal management console that appears as an empty window frame.
It features a menu bar where the virtual machines hosted by any VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host are listed.
Each virtual machine in the list can be powered on/off, suspended and restarted. When the user tries to connect to them, the empty vmClient frame gets populated by the VMware MKS console (VNC) session with the guest operating system.

Labels: Platform Management, Tools, VMware

While Intel prepares to launch its first octal-core CPU (codename Nehalem-EX) , which will potentially trigger a price increase in vSphere licensing, VMware publishes a new benchmark on current Xeon 5500 servers.

This time the company focuses on high throughput web performance, running the SPECweb2005 benchmark against a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 machine equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 CPUs @ 2.933GHz and 96GB memory.

The system above, powered by vSphere 4.0, run four virtual machines with 4 vCPUs and 21GB vRAM each, hosting a copy of paravirtualized 64bit Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 plus Rock Webserver and Rock JSP server.

Such system, thanks to paravirtualization drivers, the VMware NetQueue technology, the Intel VMDirectPath technology (part of VT-d) and the Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit AF network interface cards, recorded a benchmark score of 62,296, equal to 85% of native performance.

The four VMs were able to serve  from 60,000 to 100,000 simultaneous users:

Labels: Benchmarks, VMware

At the beginning of January virtualization.info published a long overview about the VMware’s approach to cloud computing, covering the vCloud APIs, the vCloud Express implementation and the five partners that are currently offering it.

One of them, BlueLock, just sent an email to its customers announcing that its vCloud Express offering will (tentatively) move from beta to general availability (GA) on March 25.

As far as we know none of the other providers is out of beta yet (this article will be updated if necessary).
So, while it’s entirely possible that BlueLock wants to be the first to announce vCloud Express GA, it’s much more likely that all the early adopters will make GA announcements in the same timeframe.
And this may mean that VMware is about to release some additional information or bits about its cloud computing platform. Like for example a version 1.0 of the APIs, or the public version of project Redwood, the software that will allow customers to migrate their virtual machines from their private virtual infrastructure to public clouds like the BlueLock one.

Labels: Cloud Computing, VMware

Last week Reuters and other news outlets reported that the VMware’s board approved a plan to buy back $400M in Class A shares.

The operation will happen over the months, through the end of 2011.

EMC said it has no intention to modify its ownership of the subsidiary, keeping it at around 80%.

In another note, the VMware’s CFO, Mark Peek, sold 15,000 shares at an average price of $46.72 a share in mid-February.

Labels: VMware

New month, new rebuttals in virtualization-land.
Evidently, virtualization players still consider the marketing skirmish very helpful to increase sales (virtualization.info has a slightly different opinion) so this March we have VMware leading three major campaigns against competitors.

Two of them are defensive, one is not:

• VMware View PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX
• Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales
• Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX

At the beginning of February Citrix sponsored a competitive analysis performed by Miercom.
The 7-pages report compares protocol performance of Citrix XenDesktop 4 (with ICA/HDX) and VMware View 4 (with PCoIP) and these are the conclusions:

In a comparison of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations, Citrix XenDesktop 4 provided better overall performance when compared to VMware View 4

XenDesktop 4 used 64% less bandwidth than View 4 with PCoIP for typical tasks

Flash video was delivered with an average of 65% less CPU usage, 89% less bandwidth, and excellent Quality of Experience by XenDesktop 4 compared to View 4

Overall, XenDesktop 4 uses system resources more efficiently and is capable of scaling more effectively

VMware answered last week, informing that they were not contacted by Miercom and that they have no insight about how test were conducted.
Of course VMware offered its point of view on each point,

At this point customers just have to decide which company has the nicest logo and which guy has the brightest smile to believe to one set of claims over the other. 
Luckily, Brian Madden jumps in and provide an impartial, long, detailed analysis that definitively is worth a read.

Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales

At the beginning of March, a blog independently run by VMware employees published interesting speculations about the sales volume of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V.

The article, written by Michael Hong, Senior Product Marketing Engineer, suggest that Citrix so far sold a very, very low number of Essentials for Hyper-V, because he apparently was the first one to recognize a major bug in the Workflow Studio setup.

Workflow Studio is part of the Essentials suite and the issue Hong encountered prevents its installation, but the Citrix support didn’t solve the issue and closed Hong’s support ticket without reasons.

Hong also notes that Citrix doesn’t have more than a bunch of posts on the its support forum about Essentials for Hyper-V.

For sure readers can’t wait to hear what Citrix has to answer on this…

Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

This is an old classic.
At the beginning of March VMware decided to cover a cost comparison table that Microsoft recently published.

The table compares several vSphere editions against a System Center bundle called System Center Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD), showing how the Microsoft way is significantly less expensive than VMware offering (at least half the price):

Of course there are a number of issues in the comparison that VMware pointed out.

In some cases VMware is completely right in highlighting how Microsoft doesn’t detail enough the difference between implementations of the same feature (vSMP support for example).
In other cases VMware wants Microsoft to drop comparison between some features because they are too different (VMware DRS vs Microsoft PRO for example) but here’s the a lot of room to debate.

While totally misleading, the sense of those marks is more like “We have this feature. The customer can use it in some way”.
Is it possible to pretend that a simple comparison table like this one (or the ones that VMware produces) offers an insightful qualitative analysis of implementation cost for each listed feature?
The customers that are looking for such in-depth side-by-side analysis aren’t going to research more on their own? Are they supposed to make their purchase decision just looking at this chart?

This is way the whole “my product is better than yours” marketing effort is a complete waste of time.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

VMware just launched a new online facility called Labs.

It seems a sort of R&D website that exposes company’s engineers pet projects before they turn into real products, similarly to what other companies like Microsoft and Google do.

At the moment Labs hosts ten projects, all released as Technology Previews, under open source licenses, without any support and without any indication about future inclusion in the VMware product portfolio.

Some of them, like the previously covered VMware Guest Console, are extremely interesting:

• Apache Pivot
  Like most modern development platforms, Pivot provides a comprehensive set of foundation classes that together comprise a "framework". These classes form the building blocks upon which more complex and sophisticated applications can be built.
• Dynamo RIO
  DynamoRIO exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc. Unlike many dynamic tool systems, DynamoRIO is not limited to insertion of callouts/trampolines and allows arbitrary modifications to application instructions via a powerful IA-32/AMD64 instruction manipulation library. DynamoRIO provides efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of unmodified applications running on stock operating systems (Windows or Linux) and commodity IA-32 and AMD64…
• esxplot
  Esxplot is a GUI based tool that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program loads files of this data and presents it as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel of the tool, graphs of the selected metrics are plotted in the right panel.
  Esxplot allows you to "browse" the contents of these somewhat unwieldy files. You can plot up to 16 metrics on the same canvas and export the graphs to a gif, jpg, png or bmp file format. Subsets of the data can be worked with by using the regex query box which will produce a subtree that can be browsed or exported as a csv file which can, in turn, be loaded into esxplot, PERFMON or Excel…
• Onyx
  Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.
• SVGA Sonar
  VGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen. Sonar was designed to use the devtap API to visualize application drawing patterns by rendering a scaled-down view of the desktop replacing pixel data with color-coded rectangles. As applications update the screen, Sonar presents it's scaled version of the screen using colors to denote different types of rendering commands and whether this rendering caused a visible change to the screen…
• vApprun
  …vApprun, these features becomes available to both Workstation and Fusion users. The vApprun tool implements the same vApp/OVF feature set as the vSphere 4 release. Thus, Workstation/Fusion can be used as a development environment for advanced OVF packages, and it can be used to evaluate and test OVF packages on your desktops and laptops…
• vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA)
  VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) - vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.
• VMware Guest Console (VGC)
  A new management console able to independently monitor and manipulate files and processes inside any guest operating system. See virtualization.info coverage.
• VI Java
  vSphere Java API is a set of Java libraries that sits on top of existing vSphere SDK Web Services interfaces. It provides full managed object model and run-time type checking, resulting dramatic productivity boost.
• Virtual USB Analyzer
  The Virtual USB Analyzer is a free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools. As far as we know, it's the world's first tool to provide a graphical visualization along with raw hex dumps and high-level protocol analysis.

Thanks to NTPRO.NL for the news.

Labels: VMware

A few minutes ago a couple of videos of a new VMware product called Guest Console (VGC) surfaced.

Guest Console, currently in Technology Preview phase, is a new management console able to independently monitor and manipulate files and processes inside any guest operating system.

It can connect to any guest OS, it doesn’t matter if the VM is hosted on ESX, Server and Workstation.
Once connected to the host, VGC provides a task manager, a file system explorer, a snapshot manager and a virtual machine manager that work with Windows and Linux guests.

With these tools an administrator can perform simple tasks like ending a running process or start a new program, as well as more complex things like copying the same file to multiple guest OSes at the same time.
In similar fashion, it can manipulate snapshots of multiple virtual machines at the same time or store the information coming from multiple guest OSes for inventory purposes.

Here’s the videos:

Thanks to Eric Sloof for the news.

Labels: VMware

One of the biggest assets VMware has, excluding of course its product portfolio, is its VMTN Forum facility, which hosts a large and incredibly active community of professionals that quite often are more knowledgeable, faster and way more efficient than the company’s paid support.

Any new customer that wants to learn VMware technologies inside out, well beyond what the official training class can provide, should consider investing at least 6-9 months just to follow the threads on the VMTN board in passive mode.

There’s a large number of VMware employees that contributed the success of VMTN. The first one that comes to mind for sure is John Troyer, Senior Social Media Strategist, who definitively is the VMware front man for everything related to the community.

Behind the scenes there’s at least another one: Robert Dell’Immagine, Director of Community Program, who just left VMware after almost six years.

Dell’Immagine joined the security vendor Qualys, where he’s covering the same role since February.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Last week the virtualization security startup HyTrust announced its second round funding: $10.5M, led by Granite Ventures and Cisco.

The first round was equal to $5.5M, provided by Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.

Only Len Rand, Managing Director at Granite Ventures and former General Manager of Strategic Marketing and Global Alliances in Intel, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Director. Nobody from Cisco.

On top of this, HyTrust also announced that Jim Gannon, the former Director of Global Accounts at VMware, joined the company as its new Vice President of Sales.

Labels: Cisco, Funding, HyTrust, Leadership, Security, VMware

At the end of January VMware released a couple of minor updates for its desktop virtualization platforms for Windows and Linux: Workstation and Player.
For some reasons we missed this product update, so we are reporting about it now.

The new build (227600) is primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces support for a number of guest and host operating systems:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 (host and guest)
• Windows Vista SP2 (host and guest)
• Ubuntu 9.10 (host and guest)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (host and guest)
• CentOS 5.4 (guest only)
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 (guest only)

Labels: Releases, VMware

Last week VMware released a patch specifically for the version of Update Manager (VUM) that is included in vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

The new version (build 231675) is needed to fix a couple of bugs affecting capability to upgrade the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch and the time required to scan and patch hosts in a cluster.

Thanks to Yellow Bricks for the news.

Labels: Releases, Security, VMware

Last week VMware updated its disaster recovery solution Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to version 4.0.1.1 (build 236215).

The new version is primarily for bug fixing and features enhancements. There are no new capabilities. Yellow Bricks published the complete list.

This version of SRM supports storage replication adapters from:

• 3PAR
• Compellent
• Dell | EqualLogic
• EMC (for CLARiiON, Symmetrix, Celerra and RecoverPoint)
• FalconStor
• Fujitsu
• Hitachi
• HP (for EVA, LeftHand and XP)
• IBM (for DS, SVC ad XIV)
• LSI
• NEC
• NetApp (both NAS and SAN products)
• Sun (acquired by Oracle)

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, VMware

A couple of weeks ago, VMware released the second minor update for its desktop virtualization platform for the Apple market: Fusion.

Fusion 3.0.2 (build 232708) only fixes a bug that prevents latest build of Mac OS X 10.6 Server from running as a guest OS.

The interesting thing anyway is that with this release VMware introduced two versions of the product:

• Fusion, that includes a 12-months complimentary subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus 2009
• Fusion Light, that doesn’t include any 3rd party bundle

Labels: Releases, VMware

Last week, along with the acquisition of RTO Software assets, VMware also announced the acquisition of several assets from its parent company EMC.

The $200M deal includes Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and Service Manager (formerly Infra), all parts of the EMC Ionix infrastructure management portfolio.

• Configuresoft, acquired in June 2009, was a configuration management company founded in 1999 (with the name of Fundamental Software) and originally focused on the physical layer. The firm shifted its attention to the virtual infrastructures and VMware only in early 2008.
• FastScale, acquired in August 2009, was a startup launched in 2007 and specialized in optimizing operating systems, deploying them on bare-metal hardware or virtual infrastructures, and managing them as a single application fabric.
  The firm originally promoted its capability to work with VMware infrastructures and then progressively exposed its support for the physical layer.
• nLayers, acquired in June 2006, was a startup founded in 2003 and focused on network discovery and performance troubleshooting.
  It primarily supported physical infrastructures and it’s easy to see similarities with VMware AppSpeed (which used to support physical hardware too – acquired from B-hive in May 2008).
• Infra, acquired in March 2008, was founded in 1991 and focused on Service Desk management (including Incident Management and Problem Management), Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management (including Federated CMDB), Availability Management and Service Level Management.

Exactly one year ago, virtualization.info suggested that VMware was slowly morphing into an infrastructure management company and that it would soon compete against BMC, CA, HP and IBM for the control of physical layer.

At that time, HP, which would be severely impacted by a direct competition with the virtualization vendor, somehow suggested that VMware is missing a universal configuration management database (UCMDB) to aspire to become an infrastructure management behemoth.
There we go: VMware now has the Infra one, courtesy of EMC.

Another interesting aspect of this deal is the fact that EMC is retaining control on the Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) that is being used to glue together the hypervisor, the network and the storage layers inside Vblocks, the VMware-Cisco-EMC approach to fabric computing.
VMware and EMC may have decided to exclude UIM from the deal to not further compromise the relationship with HP, but for how long this critical component will stay in EMC’s hands?

With the acquisition of Zimbra, back in January, VMware already started to advertise itself in a new way:

This acquisition will further VMware’s mission of taking complexity out of the datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.

The acquisition of the EMC assets provides the final confirmation that VMware is getting ready to control the physical layer. And just in case it’s not clear enough, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz is explicit in the press announcement (our emphasis):

“Customers are increasingly leveraging virtualization as the foundation for modern IT architectures and their path to Cloud Computing,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware.  “Essential to this evolution is the ability to provide visibility and compliance from virtualized applications down to the underlying physical infrastructure.  The acquisition of these Ionix products and expertise promises to further establish VMware vCenter as the next generation management platform for private cloud infrastructures.”

…

The acquired EMC products and expertise will complement existing VMware development efforts and expand the VMware vCenter product family with capabilities to meet stringent compliance standards in a dynamic virtualized environment.  This new capability will provide a holistic view of configuration compliance of complete IT services from underlying physical assets to applications…

Additional reference to the physical layer can be found in this post from Ben Verghese, Chief Management Architect, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms Business Unit:

We recently announced the ConfigControl product that works closely with vCenter to provide configuration management and compliance to policies in highly dynamic virtualized environments. Ionix Server Configuration Manager enhances this functionality in two important ways. First, it adds visibility of the guest OS and application configuration on virtualized and non-virtualized servers. Second, it provides built-in capability for Compliance Reports ranging from the ESX hardening guide to HIPAA and PCI. The Ionix Application Discovery Manager product (formerly nLayers) automatically discovers complex applications with components on multiple servers, virtual and physical. The combination of these three products, when integration is complete, will give us comprehensive configuration and compliance capability across a broad domain with virtual infrastructure at the core, but extending to the adjacent areas of the OS, complex applications, and physical hardware if needed.

So basically it’s time to forget “VMware, the virtualization (and, by the way, cloud computing) company”.
In a very short time (probably no later than H1 2011) it will be “VMware, the infrastructure management company, from the bare-metal to the applications, off and on-premises”.

This will have immediate consequences on the relationship with HP, IBM and Dell. But more than that, it will greatly extend the competition between VMware and Microsoft.
It’s no more just about the hypervisor and the management capabilities that Virtual Machine Manager offers. This is going to threaten the whole System Center family and the market share that Microsoft has inside the datacenter.

Labels: Acquisitions, EMC, Platform Management, VMware

Last week VMware announced the acquisition of RTO Software, one of the few companies in the presentation virtualization market that are focused on the so called persona management.

RTO Software was founded in 2000, today it counts 12 employees, and offers four products: Virtual Profiles, PinPoint, Discover and TScale.

Both VMware and Symantec OEM’ed the RTO Software flagship product, Virtual Profiles, in VMware View and Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) and since 2009. Then, at the beginning of February the Symantec version (Workspace Profiles) suddenly disappeared.

Now VMware confirms the acquisition of most RTO Software assets, which will become part of the company Desktop Business Unit, for an undisclosed amount.

The recently appointed VMware CTO for Desktop Virtualization, Scott Davis, summarizes what Virtual Profiles does:

…the technology seamlessly virtualizes, caches and synchronizes a desktop user's roaming profile, while improving both the performance and data integrity of the profile. When a user logs on, instead of monolithically delivering the entire user profile and making the user wait for all of it, Virtual Profiles performs a "just-in-time" delivery. Windows thinks the entire profile is present, however the contents of each segment or file is brought down and subsequently cached when accessed.  When files are updated and closed, Virtual Profiles automatically synchronizes the files  with the profile server, maintaining data integrity across user sessions in real-time and speeding up logoffs.  This  preserves user configuration integrity independently of the desktop image; and also propagates those changes to any other concurrent user sessions that may exist, maintaining data integrity across sessions as well. Registry updates are handled in a similar manner; but at finer granularity. Profile registry changes are automatically synchronized with the stored profile on the server. Since only what has been written to the registry locally is copied back, hive corruption is prevented…

The only RTO Software asset that VMware didn’t acquire is the TScale product, an application memory optimization technology for presentation virtualization.
Apparently, the reason why this one was not included in the deal is that Citrix is OEM’ing it inside Presentation Server with the name of Memory Optimization Management.
According to Brian Madden, who offered an extended insight about the acquisition, Citrix and RTO Software have a multi-year agreement (which seems harder to trash than the Symantec one), and so VMware didn’t touch the fourth component of the portfolio.
Madden also reports that RTO Software will continue to exist, selling TScale and working to release a TScale for Hyper-V.

Customers that are using the first three products and have their support contract expired will only have the chance to buy View. VMware doesn’t plan in fact to sell Virtual Profiles, PinPoint or Discover as stand-alone products.

This is the acquisition #15 for VMware (virtualization.info tracked the previous ones in this article).
Symantec may want to re-include persona management in its portfolio, looking for an alternative partner to deal with (AppSense is a well-known candidate for this. It doesn’t surprise their post about the acquisition).

Labels: Acquisitions, RTO Software, VMware

With an email to its VI and vSphere customers last week VMware announced the end of life (EOL) for its Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework.

The company informs that the next version of vSphere, due later this year, will not support VCB and will solely rely on the new vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) introduced with vSphere 4.0.

VCB binaries will be still available and supported on VI 3.x and vSphere 4.0 according to the support policy, but they will not be included in the new platform.

VMware is saying its Data Recovery product already supports VADP, and that most partners focused on backup/restore already support it too (if you are one of those vendors feel free to list your product in the comments).
VMware also promises that more vendors will offer VADP-based solutions in time for the next vSphere release.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, VMware

TechTarget just published an article about the upcoming VMware View 4.5, expected later this year (virtualization.info heard unconfirmed rumors about this summer).

The most interesting part of that piece is that ThinApp will be released as part of it, and that it will support server-side applications.

So far no company except the US startup AppZero (formerly Trigence) has claimed capability to virtualize multi-tier, mission critical server workloads through application virtualization technologies.
Besides AppZero, the only other company that is known for working in this area is Microsoft, which disclosed its plan for a server-side version of App-V in January 2008 and showed a first demo in May 2009 at its MMS conference.
So far Microsoft didn’t disclose any release date for such version of App-V.

The fact that VMware is about to offer server-side application virtualization my accelerate the Microsoft move and most of all may push the ISVs to support the technology.
The only question is if there will be any real interest in the new feature, considering the limited traction that client-side application virtualization has today.

Labels: VMware

Exactly one year ago two well-known virtualization experts Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) released an independent, non-sponsored performance analysis comparing ESX 3.5, XenServer 5.0 and Hyper-V 2008.

The benchmark, specifically designed to measure desktop virtualization workloads (served by Terminal Services and VDI platforms), was so valid that Citrix decided to embrace the Virtual Reality Check methodology to measure XenDesktop 4 performance.

Twelve months later the two are back with a new comparison. This time they put side by side Citrix XenServer 5.5, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1, comparing them against their new workload simulator Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) 2.0.

The most interesting thing is that all tests were performed on HP hardware equipped with the new Intel Xeon 5500 Series CPUs (codename Nehalem), and compared to Virtual Reality Check 1.0 results obtained on previous generation processors.
Performance are almost doubled with both XenServer and vSphere, and with Hyper-V R2, performance are up 154%.

Once again, if you are involved in a desktop virtualization project this performance analysis is a mandatory reading.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, Papers, VDI, VMware

In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors voted to remove the founder Diane Greene as CEO of the company. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPO in the IT history.

Two months after her departure, his husband Mendel Rosenblum, left too.
Rosenblum co-founded VMware and was the Chief Scientist declining the company vision.

The board immediately replaced her with Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive that joined the EMC ecosystem after his startup Pi was acquired in February 2008.
Under the Maritz leadership VMware took an unexpected direction, extending beyond virtualization and cloud computing, to the realm of development frameworks and software-as-a-service applications.

Now Diane Greene is back on the IT scene, as TechTarget reports.
Greene appears as investor in a startup called Nicira, along with Andy Rachleff, Partner at Benchmark Capital.

Nicira, founded in early 2009, is in stealth mode at the moment but its website is clear about its mission to virtualize networks.
The company is managed by Steve Mullaney, who comes from Palo Alto Networks and Blue Coat Systems, where he was Vice President of Marketing.

That doesn’t mean that we’ll see Diane Greene leading another virtualization startup like she did with VMware, but it certainly means that Nicira may have some potential that may be worth to see in action.

Update: Nicira, formerly Nicira Networks, seems to be working on a “Network Operating System” or NOX.

A number of employees, along with Stanford and Deutsche Telecom researchers, in fact published a couple of research papers (one and two) about this topic in late 2009.

In the documents the team advocates the need for a centralized programmatic interface to observe and control large scale networks.
The NOX would provide such API while 3rd party vendors would build applications that leverage the API.

This suggests that Nicira may want to provide the NOX code as open source, playing a role as major contributor, while developing commercial applications on top of that.
This is a typical approach that has been proven successful in the virtualization market at least two times: with XenSource (maintaining Xen and selling XenServer), acquired by Citrix, and Qumranet (maintaining KVM and selling SolidICE), acquired by Red Hat.

A NOX-powered network relies on OpenFlow switches, a server running the NOX controller and a database:

Labels: Leadership, Nicira, VMware

Last month VMware lost Ganesh Mahabala, its Regional Director for India and SAARC region, CRN reports.

Mahabala has worked in VMware for almost three years and now has joined the system integrator Valuepoint Systems.

This is the third major change in the Indian executive team that virtualization.info reports.
In July 2009 VMware hired T. Srinivasan as its new Managing Director and in October 2009 Shrimathi Ambastha as its Director of Technology.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

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

The VMware | Cisco | EMC coalition is waiting for Acadia to start its business and begin the implementation, administration and delivery of their new datacenters-in-a-box.

Meanwhile the three companies prepare and publish key documents to understand how the VBlock computing stack is designed and how it can be used.

Specifically, the documents published online are:

1. The Deployment Guide
   Deploy a full Vblock (for delivery) as an integrated whole
2. The Rapid Provisioning Guide
   Simplify Rapid Provsioning across the entire stack whether you are a service provider or an enterprise customer
3. The Reference Architecture Guide
   Detailed configuration specification, how it is tested, etc.

Only the Reference Architecture is available for public access. It includes information about Vblock configuration type 1 and type 2.

The other two documents can be accessed only by VMware, Cisco and EMC partners.

Chad Sakac, the EMC Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance, reveals that customers are also looking for Vblock 0 configurations and even smaller than that.
The VCE Coalition anyway is not ready yet to publish details about Vblock 0 stack because “there are specifics that need working out”. Below you can see the prototype developed by the three:

Sakac also informs that the current Vblock roadmap developed by VMware, Cisco and EMC extends to 2012.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, Papers, VMware