virtualization.info

So far we have dedicated a lot of space to Oracle, in terms of what virtualization offering it could provide and what mistakes may compromise its presence as a relevant player.

The Sun acquisition has not closed yet, so the company cannot disclose any specific plan. Without concrete information about that, what we have published so far, and what follows below, is pure speculation.
Nonetheless it’s worth spending some more time evaluating the strategy that Oracle may put in place and how it may impact the current players.

As already said many times, now the company is in the unique position to offer an entire computing stack, including servers, storage, the hypervisor, the operating system, the middleware, some of the most used business applications, thin clients, a VDI connection broker and an enterprise management software to coordinate all of the above.
Leveraged in the right way, and assuming Oracle may become a credible virtualization player, it represents a remarkable competitive advantage for some customers (while others can clearly see it as a painful way to lock themselves in).

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and now Red Hat, have to deal with multiple vendors and support thousands of different hardware and software components (VMware just launched a certification program for software. Why did they have to do that?). And a lot can go wrong when your hypervisor is the glue that keeps together servers, storage, network, guest operating systems, enterprise management agents, guest middleware and guest applications.
Oracle is the only one, in the virtualization market, that could say, “We know exactly what happens at every level of the stack, because we provide all the components; we can guarantee the behavior and the performance of our virtual infrastructure because there are no 3rd parties involved.”

There’s another company that is in a similar position, but in a completely different market: Apple.
Apple develops its software and its systems, and is fully in control. Steve Jobs considers this one of Apple’s biggest assets:

We're the only company that owns the whole widget -- the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can't do.

It is a lock-in, the growing number of issues around the iPhone App Store approval process confirms this, but it’s a huge success.

Of course the consumer market and the enterprise market are different worlds, but Oracle may well pitch its virtualization offering in the same identical way.
If so, Oracle is going to compete with the just born Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a nice acronym that also means VMware Cisco EMC, the three companies that founded it.

The value of VCE products, the self-contained virtual data centers called Vblocks, is not only in the hardware and software that make the units. It’s in the fact that VMware, Cisco and EMC design, produce, test and certify the units to serve a specific amount of virtual machines, for a specific amount of users, interacting with specific workloads, that perform in predictable ways.

In other words the VCE coalition saves the customer the huge investment of designing his own data center and the costs of designing it in the wrong way.
When the customer buys a Vblock, he is not just buying the hardware and the software. He is also buying the know-how that these three companies put in the machines. A know-how that he would have to produce by himself or buy somewhere else.

To validate this approach, VMware Cisco and EMC had to form a new entity and share investments, because none of them controls the full stack. Oracle does, and if the future of IT will be dominated by modular data centers, where a single vendor provides self-contained units that customers just stack up together, then Oracle now has the opportunity to become a leader in that future just as much as Cisco.

The difference between Cisco and Oracle is that the former has already clarified its interest in doing so and took several steps to change its current image of networking provider, while the latter… well, the latter still is the well known database giant. And no more than that.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, Oracle, VMware

Last week VMware finally released the much awaited View 4.0, which supports vSphere 4.0 and introduces the software-only version of the Teradici remote desktop protocol PCoIP.

VMware is offering two versions of View 4: Enterprise (which includes vSphere and View Manager 4.0), priced at $150 per concurrent user, and Premier (which also includes View Composer and ThinApp), priced at $250 per concurrent user.

Of course the key aspect of this release is how well PCoIP performs on LAN and WAN scenarios.
Unfortunately the product will be available for download on November 19, so for now it’s impossible to make a performance analysis and comparison with Microsoft RDP 7, Citrix ICA/HDX and the other tens of  alternatives that are flooding the VDI market.

The major problem with PCoIP is if its performance is so great to justify the adoption of a new proprietary remote desktop protocol at its 1.0 release (the protocol is more mature than that but so far relied on hardware components).
Many customers may want to be careful here, mostly considering that VMware and Teradici just have a co-development agreement, which is not even exclusive.
What happens if Teradici is acquired by a VMware competitor or if the company suffers major issues?
And most of all, what happens if one year from now VMware consider this protocol unpractical and too expensive to optimize and decides to replace it, for instance, with the just ratified Net2Display standard? 

Anyway a lot has been already said.

Brian Madden already published a brief FAQ list, which includes a couple of interesting details:

• The PCoIP client only supports Windows at the moment. Linux and Mac OS versions are expected next year
• View 4.0 will fully support Microsoft Windows 7 as guest OS in early 2010

Chad Sakac already published a blueprint to design a View 4.0 architecture with the recently announced VMware/Cisco/EMC hardware called VBlock.
The solution (a VBlock 1) fits over 2,048 virtual desktops and costs $750 per seat all inclusive:

The paper includes some performance analysis. It doesn’t clarify if the numbers are obtained when using the RDP or the PCoIP protocol (assuming this will make any difference) but it’s really worth a check.

Labels: Releases, VDI, VMware

As expected, today VMware, Cisco and EMC announced a special alliance, a coalition as they call it, dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE).

This entity will share investments to sell the components, training and consulting for a number of bundle packages called Vblocks.

The VCE will also count on a partners ecosystem, which already counts on six system integrators: Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.

The Vbocks can be deployed at customers data centers or hosted online. 
To design them, operate them on behalf of the customers, or just transfer them from the hosting facility to the customers data centers, Cisco and EMC created a special joint venture called Acadia
VMware and Intel invested in Acadia too, and the company will start operating in 2010. 
It’s not clear why the system integrators above cannot do that instead of Acadia.

At its launch VCE will offer three Vblocks:

• Vblock 0
  entry-level configuration available in 2010
  supporting 300 up to 800 virtual machines
  leveraging Cisco's UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC's Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
• Vblock 1
  mid-sized configuration (undisclosed launch date) 
  supporting 800 up to 3,000 virtual machines
  leveraging Cisco's UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC's CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
• Vblock 2
  high-end configuration (undisclosed launch date) 
  supporting up to 3,000-6,000 virtual machines 
  leveraging Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC's Symmetrix V-Max storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform

VCE will develop and offer additional bundles over time for shared services, applications and vertical industry solutions.
“Shared Services” and “Applications” is where the interest should focus the most. There, it’s possible to see popping up the hosting provider Terremark, where VMware invested $5 million, and SpringSource that VMware acquired in August for $420 million.

All Vblocks will be ISO 27001 compliant.

To manage these data-centers-in-a-box as a whole, EMC is offering a new management product called Ionix Data Center Insight.

Ionix will not replace the vSphere and UCS management consoles, but will coordinate them, gluing them with an application management stack that controls what happens inside the virtual machines:

The most important question around this partnership is: why these VMware, Cisco and EMC have to form a coalition to validate and sell their products as a commercial bundle?
Their architects already produce jointly validated infrastructure blueprints that customers can use to design new data centers. 
Part of their channels already sell their solutions together where it makes sense, and more will do if the products works better together.
Their customers don’t need a new brand and marketing brochures to buy the idea of cloud computing and private cloud. Cisco alone (in terms of selling servers) is new enough to generate interest and concerns.

VMware is taking a lot of risks with this move.
HP alone sells 36% of all virtualized servers. And it has EDS.
Dell just acquired Perot Systems, which is one of the biggest consulting arms in the world to sell the VMware-centric Dell virtualization portfolio.
IBM just has to think about Red Hat and its new KVM-centric offering, and it could be a dangerous competitor on a global scale.

Months ago virtualization.info published an article suggesting that VMware may be slowly morphing into an infrastructure management company that will compete with BMC, CA, HP and IBM.
Maybe it’s not VMware, it’s EMC that has this ambition. Ionix seems to imply so.
And because Cisco may have a similar ambition too, and both can’t afford to become an infrastructure management company in 2010 without controlling the virtual layer, VMware is the mandatory addition.

Maybe the VCE coalition is just an attempt to generate significant results that can validate a future merger.
VMware, Cisco and EMC all have a neutral position in the market today. 
All have a solid relationship with the entire ecosystem (except their direct competitors), including Microsoft (except of course for VMware).
While this coalition doesn’t change much, apparently, an actual merger would drastically change the way these companies behave. And the shareholders may not consider the move worth losing the current market alliances.
But, if a coalition could produce amazing results in 12-18 months of work, then it would much easier to justify the new Ciscoware.

While waiting to see if the merger will take place or not, it’s worth to consider once again how this coalition will impact the other OEMs that so far preferred VMware over Microsoft and Citrix.
A number of smart people suggested that this partnership will not change anything, but it’s worth to remind that Cisco has a significant stake in VMware, that Intel and VMware just invested in the new Acadia joint venture, and that VMware just sent out a message to its sales channel that says:

…The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses. As a result, organizations will no longer have to choose between best-of-breed technologies and end-to-end vendor accountability…

Who knows if HP, Dell and IBM consider this a non-problem.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, VMware

At the end of the last week Reuters broke the news about an upcoming joint venture between EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco.

The three should announce a new product portfolio this week, called vBlock, probably gluing together Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus, EMC V-Max and VMware vSphere, which the joint venture will sell as a hosted service.
And if the customer wants it, the vBlock gear can be moved inside the company’s boundaries.

At the end of September virtualization.info published an article about the strong alliance that these three companies are building and how it’s going to impact the VMware partnership with the other OEMs and how it’s going to influence the perception that customers have of the VMware position in the market.

We expect the official announcement before publishing further comments, but it’s clear that this joint venture is going to modify the landscape in some serious way.

Update: In an interesting interview with John McCool, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Switching and Services Group at Cisco, that Network World published today, the joint venture (codename Alpine) is mentioned but the executive refuses to comment about it.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

No, VMware doesn’t really want to compete with Google, but with what Google represents today: a major vendor that believes in a web-centric IT.

At this point of its history, the VMware ambition goes well beyond leading the virtualization space.
VMware wants to be the mandatory platform that customers need to offer and consume business services. Something that is not just what the industry calls today cloud computing.

VMware wants to be inside the data center, inside the home and business workstations and thin clients, and even inside portable devices like smartphones, tablets and netbooks.
When the industry will be ready, VMware will probably want to be inside home appliances too.

Maybe this was the original plan since the beginning. Maybe it became the new mission once VMware recognized that, because of Microsoft and others, its hypervisor would become a commodity in a few years.
For sure such plan (partially) explains the acquisition of SpringSource.

The problem is that the IT world already has a platform that it’s used to deliver business services and that is available in every computing device the users have access to. It’s the Web.

So if VMware wants to become the definitive platform for service delivery, then it has to fight the ongoing, global effort of the IT industry to turn any piece of software into a web application. And has to compete, in the long run, against those vendors that lead this effort, like Google.

Of course it’s not cheap and not desirable to turn all the existing applications into web apps. And this is where the VMware mantra is focusing right now and will focus more and more over time.
But what will happen ten years from now if the whole industry will follow the Google example and embrace the web development 100%?

Will VMware be confined to the role of a platform provider that allows to run legacy software in a way that it seems a brand new web application? This is exactly how server virtualization was sold at the beginning of the VMware history, well before everybody started to recognize its value for server consolidation.
And what will happen to VMware when next generation web applications will be about to replace everything?

It VMware really envisions its virtualization platform as the best way to deliver business services, then Google is the one to fight, not Microsoft.
And maybe this explains why the company CEO didn’t waste time to criticize the Google approach to cloud computing.

Labels: VMware

Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and Fusion 3.0

Beyond the support for Windows 7 and its Aero interface inside the virtual machine, Workstation 7.0 (build 203739) includes a number of remarkable features. For example:

• Autoprotect
  The product automatically takes snapshots of any virtual machine every half hour, every hour or every day
• Encryption
  The product encrypts any virtual machine with the AES 256-bit algorithm
• CPU release
  The product frees CPU resources instantaneously without powering off or suspending if the virtual machine is paused.
• Virtual disks manipulation
  The product can expand and compact a virtual disk (Windows 7/Vista only) without the use of any 3rd party product
• Virtual Hardware version 7
  Support for up to 4 vCPUs, up to 32GB vRAM, up to 10 vNICs
• Support for ESX 4.0
  customers can run VMware ESX 4 inside Workstation 7 as long as their physical hardware features an Intel EM64T CPU with VT-x or an AMD64 10H CPU (and later) with AMD-V, and as long as the virtual machine has assigned two or more CPU cores
• Support for IPv6

Player 3.0 (build 203739) shares with Workstation 7.0 the same engine, so many of the features above are also available here.
On top of that VMware introduce a fully featured virtual machine editor, which turns Player into a Workstation Light:

The last product of this wave is ACE 2.6 (build 203739).
There’s no much to say. Pretty much every feature is about the virtualization engine and not the policy engine, which fully integrated inside Workstation.
It’s not really clear what VMware is waiting for to kill the brand.

Labels: Releases, VMware

Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and of course Fusion 3.0.

The new version of Fusion (build 204229) introduces a notable number of features, including:

• 64bit engine
• Virtual EFI (to replace the legacy virtual BIOS and grant full compatibility with Mac OS X)
• Embedded P2V migration tool (Migration Assistant for Windows)
• V2V migration from Microsoft VHD format
• Support for 4-way CPUs
• Support for Aero (Windows 7/Vista), OpenGL 2.1 (Windows XP) and DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3
• Support for Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit and 64bit, host and guest OS)

Labels: Releases, VMware

Three months after the launch of one of its newest products, vCenter Chargeback, VMware is ready for the first minor update.

The new version 1.0.1 (build 204097) fixes a number of bugs and introduces a few welcome features:

• Support for Windows Authentication
• Additional computing and billing policies
• APIs (technical preview)

Labels: Chargeback, Releases, VMware

Last week both VMware and Citrix announced their Q3 2009 earnings.

VMware reported its US revenue in decline for 1% (to $246 million) from Q3 2008.  International revenues instead grew 9% (to $244 million) from the same period of 2008.
Services revenues (software maintenance and professional services) increased 33% (to $250 million) from Q3 2008. 

Citrix instead reported a global decline of its license revenue for 18% (-15% in EMEA, -5% in APAC and +5% in Americas) from Q3 2009, while the revenue generated from license updates increased 7% for the same period.
Technical service revenue (consulting, training and technical support) increased 20%, while online services revenue (most likely the GoTo product portfolio) increased 21% from Q3 2008.

The two competitors are performing pretty well in the stock market if we look at the year performance:

Labels: Citrix, VMware

Citrix is not the only company listening to customers feedbacks. After much debate around the decision to kill the vSphere Enterprise Edition by December 15, VMware decided to keep it, as confirmed by Computerworld.

Those customers coming from VI3.5 were entitled to keep their existing Enterprise license while moving to the new vSphere 4.0 platform. But VMware originally planned to kill this upgrade option by the end of the year.
This way the company probably hoped to accelerate the adoption of vSphere or drive slow customers towards the more expensive (and future rich) Enteprise Plus Edition.

VMware reconsidered its strategy after receiving negative feedbacks (here’s an example).
For sure the decision was made well before the Citrix attempt to lure away VMware customers with the Open Door program as virtualization.info has learned.

Labels: VMware

Yesterday VMware released the first version of its new capacity planning product: vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0 (build 199314).

As the name suggests, the product performs capacity planning on virtual infrastructures, applying continuous what-if analysis to figure out the best arrangement for virtual machines in different scenarios.
It offers reporting and recommendations.

CapacityIQ is made of two components: a vCenter plug-in and a virtual appliance that collects data about the virtual infrastructure in a dedicated database.

The product is unable to automatically reconfigure the virtual infrastructure according to its own recommendations, which is probably fine for most customers.
Anyway some companies may find attractive the idea to review the recommendation and just approve them.

CapacityIQ price starts at $1,204 for 1 CPU plus 1 year of Gold support.

The choice to release the product now is strange. Originally announced in January, the version of CapacityIQ that VMware ships today doesn’t support vSphere 4, so customers that are interested in it already know that the adoption will oblige them to stick VI3.x still for some time.

With this product VMware introduces yet another front of competition (and friction) with its partners: Novell/PlateSpin, CiRBa, VKernel, Lanamark, newcomers like Liquidware Labs and 5ninee, indirect competitors like ManageIQ, Embotics and Fortisphere, may be, or will be, impacted over time.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases, VMware

A week ago virtualization.info introduces a new comment system powered by Disqus.
It has a number of features we were really keen to offer: it allows our readers to log-in with their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID profile, it allows threaded conversation (and subscription to them by email and RSS), it allows to vote and flag for review comments, etc.
It even exposes a trackback URL so that our readers know which websites are continuing the discussion started here.

There's no way to know if this new system helped or if it’s just because of the articles we recently published, but for sure the number of comments we are receiving skyrocketed. 
Some of the last ones are very interesting like one coming from Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

In our article titled Citrix joins The Linux Foundation, looking for a Xen-powered kernel?, Crosby answers to Jagane Sundar, founder of Thinsy, and exposes a very interesting information about the competition with VMware that we don’t think Citrix ever published:

…is certainly true that lots of folk have not made money out of Xen - that is, it has become a competitive tool rather than a profitability tool. That is, none of Red Hat or Novell or Oracle or Citrix with XenServer, charge for the base platform. However Citrix XenServer is 100% a revenue generator for Citrix. First, it represents approximately $300MM in lost revenue for VMware per year…

This is probably an esteem that Citrix made internally, considering the amount of XenServer installations that customers report. It remains a claim until there are some numbers and 3rd party verification.
Nonetheless it’s interesting to report because it gives a raw idea of how much Citrix may be disturbing the VMware activity.

Labels: Citrix, VMware

A few weeks ago the well known virtualization expert and author Mike Laverick decided to offer for free its first book about VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0.

The 298-pages book is available online at Lulu (you pay only if you want a printed copy).

While it’s true that VMware just released SRM 4.0 (which should be 2.0), the book is certainly worth a read, at least to have an independent point of view on the product before adopting it.

Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager covers everything about the implementation and has a couple of interesting additional chapters, the first one on the LeftHand Networks Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), that Laverick used for his research, and the last one on how to do site recovery without VMware SRM.

Labels: Books, Disaster Recovery, VMware

In July VMware released a must-read 51-pages paper that is definitively worth a read: Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 and ESX 4.0.

The document, which is continuously updated, doesn’t just describe all the aspect of the product (CPU, memory, storage and network) that should be checked to troubleshoot performance. It also provides a much needed troubleshooting methodology:

Labels: Benchmarks, Papers, Tech, VMware

In July VMware attempted to win those Virtual Iron customers left in the cold by Oracle with an aggressive discount program.

Now it seems that VMware has to defend against a similar move from Citrix, which launches today the Open Door program.

The rules are simple:

The Project Open Door promotion will be effective worldwide from October 1 – March 31, 2010. Customers who decommission five or more VMware vSphere 4 or VI3 servers and replace them with XenServer or Hyper-V plus the Citrix Essentials solution, receive the following: 

• A free five incident support pack (5 by 8 hours) for every five servers converted
• A voucher for six hours of online training for every five servers converted
• Free migration tools for seamlessly transferring virtual machines from VMware to XenServer or Hyper-V

The attempt doesn’t seem particularly aggressive and in normal circumstances we won’t cover it on virtualization.info. But there’s one thing that makes the announcement worth the mention: Citrix is investing its support and training money even if customers switch to Hyper-V (plus Essentials).

At this point it’s clear enough that Citrix wants to replicate the profitable synergy “Microsoft Terminal Server plus its Metaframe/Presentation Server/XenApp” with “Microsoft Hyper-V plus its Essentials”. 
But it is still notable that Citrix is now actively encouraging the adoption of a hypervisor that is not XenServer.

Of course the logic behind this move is always the same: “Both hypervisors are free. If the customer wants XenServer we are there to make money with Essentials. If the customer prefers Hyper-V, well, we are there to make the money with Essentials as well.”

The point is that who’s winning the most here is Microsoft. Citrix in fact may turn into a giant promotion and sales machine for Hyper-V. 
The Citrix sales force may not have any incentive to push for XenServer if the customers is more inclined to adopt Hyper-V. And if the customer feels that Citrix doesn’t XenServer at heart itself, then he will build no trust on it and will more likely go to Hyper-V.

Labels: Citrix, VMware

By now every virtualization.info reader knows that VMware and Citrix are completely focused on competing in the VDI space rather than on “simple” server consolidation.
For now most of the discussion is mostly around their connection brokers (and their remote desktop protocols), but in a matter of months it will be extended to their application virtualizations solutions and their upcoming client hypervisors.

Now, a question: What is one of the most viewed threads on the VMware VMTN forums dedicated to the connection broker View?

Answer: A thread titled “What made you chose VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop”, which was started at the end of April and so far collected almost 3,000 views.

The thread is full of interesting comments. Of course it’s impossible to say if all of them come from real customers. For sure many come from well-known VMware users.
Also, not every comment, even the genuine ones, reports correct information. Nonetheless the sum of them contributes to clarify the customers sentiment about both products, and most of all about VDI as a technology.

Some of the things they said so far are well worth a mention here and should be considered along with the architectural reference blueprints that both VMware and Citrix released so far (our emphasis):

…I have found View very easy to install, configure and manage, from bare metal to delivery of 4 nodes less than a day. you have two consoles, vCenter and View Administrator.

Now compare this to XD the same 4 node deployment was over a week of shoehorning etc, bear in mind this is on Tier one hardware. Also to get similar functionality you will be presented with I think 6 different management consoles. you also have the added benefit of Offline Desktops (albeit experimental) with view that is not available with XD.

True ICA is a better remote protocol that RDP, but form my opinion the pain points are too great for the product…

…Finally as for price, again, I can only tell you what we've gotten back and XD has come in more expensive than View and that includes purchasing Splitview as well.

…There is a learning curve for most who enter the Citrix world. There is a bit more complexity in the configuration as some has stated, but we are reaping the benefits…

…Basically the biggest reason is that most companies are a VMware shop. So it makes sense to only have to call one vendor for end to end support.

Also cost. View costs less per desktop compared to XenDesktop i.e licensing, more VM's per physical host, linked clones for storage savings etc. TCO is very important because desktop costs are already very low.

Stability. View has less components and VMware historically does great QA on the products that they release. Microsoft and Citrix, not so well.

Big reason, VMware views linked clone technology. SAN storage is not cheap, PC hard drives are. You need to be able to sell this to senior management. When you tell them the hard drive storage is going to be 4 times as much they will laugh at you…

…To be honest, we chose VMware for the cost. Presently we are having a few issues that have made us reconsider our choice.

One issue you need to closely look at is in regards to using remote virtual desktops, if that is your intended use, and the interaction with the OS of the clients who will be connecting in. Page 18 of the View Manager Administration guide is a must see if you want to use remote clients through the view portal. Information I wish I had during our evaluation…

…One of my vendors was giving me a lot of pressure to validate XD for my environment. I am PoCing View 3.1 right now. I'm not looking at XD for the following reasons:

1) I'm a VMware shop 1 throat to strangle.

2) Just because XD works with ESX backends now doesn't mean they will in the future…

…To be honest, the only advantage that Citrix has right now is their ICA display protocol. This is the only reason that Citrix is even being evaluated at most companies…

(please note anyway that all the comments above refer to View 3.x and XenDesktop 3.x and not the upcoming XenDesktop 4)

Citrix felt the need to address some of the points emphasized above, and published an article that covers the installation and management complexity, the RAM consumption, and the price.
This one is worth a read too.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

At the end of August, Sybex published the first book authored by Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead at ePlus Technology, and one of the most popular experts in the virtualization community.
His must-read website has been named Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info and he even presented as speaker at our own Virtualization Congress 2009.

Scott’s book, Mastering VMware vSphere 4, is a generous 700-pages tome that gives a lot about planning, installing and configuring the newest VMware virtualization platform.

One of the biggest challenges in writing a technical book about a product like this one, is writing something that can complement the official documentation and that is worth reading. And it may be a real hard challenge when the product documentation is as rich and extensive as the VMware’s one. 
This book accomplished the task by including tangible proofs of the Scott’s first hand experience in many chapters (mostly the ones about planning).
It’s not an architectural reference guide, it’s not meant to be, but it still provides guidance.

The heart of this book are Chapter 5, Creating and Managing Virtual Networks, and Chapter 6, Creating and Managing Storage Devices.
Both cover very complex and critical aspects of the virtual data center and both are amazingly extended beyond vSphere.
Chapter 5 for example includes a section dedicated to the installation and configuration of the first virtual switch for vSphere: the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Chapter 6 instead…Well, Chapter 6 is almost an entire book about storage. Alone, it is worth considering Mastering VMware vSphere 4, even if the reader already has other manuals on the subject.
This chapter was authored by Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, another top virtualization blogger included in our 2008 nomination.
If the reader has a limited knowledge of enterprise storage, well before a limited understanding of how vSphere uses and manipulates storage arrays, this 100-pages chapter includes an exceptional primer.

Like for every great product there’s always room for improvements.

In same parts, mostly in the initial chapters, the absolute beginners may find themselves a little confused because the book makes some assumption about the readers knowledge about the VMware world. Of course this is not “Introduction to Virtualization and VMware” so it’s completely acceptable.

More than that, some chapters may be greatly extended, like Chapter 13, Securing VMware vSphere, and Chapter 14, Automating VMware vSphere. When the book spoils the reader with Chapter 5 and 6, then the reader expect the same level of in-depth analysis everywhere, and mostly about critical topics like security and automation.

Hopefully, Sybex will work on a bigger and better second edition soon.
Meanwhile Mastering VMware vSphere 4 is a book that any VMware administrator should consider for his bookshelf.
You can check it at the virtualization.info Bookstore (powered by Amazon) or directly at Amazon.com

Labels: Books, Reviews, VMware

Over the last few months virtualization.info tracked a growing number of leaders that are leaving VMware and are being replaced by seasoned executives coming from Microsoft, Borland, Oracle, IBM and CA.
But the reality is that, despite our effort, the number of departures we tracked is just a fraction of the real number. We simply can’t keep up the pace at the current rate.

This silent turnover is now further accelerating and morphing into a massive re-organization.

A number of trusted sources informed virtualization.info that VMware recently laid off up to 40 people in the IT department and no less than 65 senior engineers in the Global Support Services (GSS).

Even before this, VMware fired or lost most of its people in the Analyst Relation (AR) and Press Relation (PR) teams, just two weeks before the VMworld 2009.
And this list includes people who heavily contributed to make the VMware brand so successful since the early days as a startup.

In the US, the company even replaced the Vice President and General Counsel Rashmi Garde. 
In India, the new Managing Director T Srinivasan, appointed in July, already called in a former colleague at Oracle: Shrimathi Ambastha, now working as the new Director of Technology.

There are probably many others we are not yet aware of.

Whatever is happening at VMware, it is taking on major proportions, and it may have a serious impact on the products that make the company a leader in the virtualization space.
For sure it’s having a serious impact on employee morale, which is reflected in the reviews appearing at Glassdoor.com (we already used this website to track the sentiment about the original CEO Diane Greene):

Going down a steep decline
Sr. Staff Engineer in Palo Alto

…

Management bloat. All brought on board in the last couple of years. This used to be a place run by engineers. These days, it's run by middle management. Most of them utterly incompetent. There used to be like 2 Product Managers for each product category. Now it's more like 20 of them. All of them egotistical maniacs, more interested in getting on their soap box and telling you what their vision of the world is than in working with you. Engineering managers are no exception. They seem to care more about their own well being than of the people below them. Things like process and protocol and often held in higher regard than the product itself.

Once was cool, now bloated management just like any other company -
VMware Anonymous (Current Employee) in Palo Alto 

…

One word: MANAGEMENT.
The people in the trenches are great, but like everyone else has mentioned, it's the management that makes you want to pull your hair out. In the Diane Greene days, management lines were clear and direct but since her departure there have been stacks and stacks of middle managers. The company has grown to be diamond-shaped: A few C-level guys on top, lots and lots and lots senior directors, directors, group managers, senior managers, and managers in the middle, and almost nobody at the bottom to execute. The people at the bottom are completely overworked and underpaid, while important decisions can't be made because of CYA middle managers who don't want to take any responsibility.
There has been a "hiring freeze" for the past 3 quarters, yet they have been stacking VPs and senior directors left and right. People who have left are not replaced, so guess what that does? Yup, more work for everyone else. And what happens to those people? They eventually leave too.
Egos and incompetency run wild with most middle and upper management. The fact is engineering and product development are the most important teams because they generate the products that make VMware great. Very few middle managers realize this and continue to push for useless programs with poorly developed infrastructure that ends up costing tons of money in the long run because of poor implementation and complete lack of vision.
Lines of communication are as clear as mud. Despite the glass offices and conference rooms (that Diane wanted as a symbol of transparency), it is very difficult to get information from one team to another because of lack of processes and workflow…

Mantra of Middle Managers... delegate delegate delegate the work.. take take take all the credit...
VMware Anonymous (Current Employee) in Palo Alto 

…you can have all the work delegated to you but your manager, your managers manager and your managers managers manager will take all the credit.. worse yet, they will show up to meetings you set up and grand stand, make you look stupid in front of your internal customers and disrupt the whole meeting.. because they can!
this would be ok if the middle managers were these incredibly smart and talented people frm whom you might learn something, but for the most part, you will find that you have more experience and are more seasoned than the person you work for.. this leads to a feeling that you have no mentor, no growth opportunity and no soul....
HR team- not sure what that group does.. we dont even have a set of core values that are evangelized.. its completely acceptable for the person higher up than you in the chain of command to treat you like you are nobody on a conference call and then turn around and kiss up to a a "senior director" in the same meeting...
what is this, feudal england??? guess I'm a serf...
if not for the engineers and the technology, this company would go down the drain and fast.. just my humble opinion.. I am just a serf after all.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

A couple of months after the launch of the private beta, VMware released Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0 earlier this week.

As we already said in our previous coverage, this is not the 4th edition of the product but the 2nd.
VMware launched SRM 1.0 in June 2008, directly jumping to version 4.0 to explicit the support for vSphere 4.0.

Nonetheless the product is making a notable progress, supporting 12 vendors (a list of 11 is here) that offer fibre channel, iSCSI and NFS storage replication solutions, and supporting 3rd party virtual switches like the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

The most relevant new feature anyway is the support for Many-to-One Failover scenarios, where a single recovery site can receive virtual machines coming from multiple production sites.
Hopefully this is just the prelude to the Many-to-Many Failover that many customers are waiting for.

VMware published a nice walkthrough here.

The company also published three guides to configure SRM 4.0 with the EMC Celerra, with the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and with the NetApp FAS simulator.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, VMware

In February VMware launched an open source version of its View client, released under the LGPL 2.1 version.

virtualization.info already wrote that with this move the company could conquer a large number of thin client providers, which may prefer to adopt and customize View Open Client rather than developing their own connectors.
But it is also possible that VMware may have decided to go open source primarily to accelerate the development of the product and reduce any real or perceived gap with the competition (read Citrix).

In any case, now that View 4.0 is in private beta and finally introduces the much awaited software version of PCoIP, VMware has all the interest to ask the help of the open source community and attract the attention on the new build.

View Open Client 4.0 beta 1 introduces the support for SSL tunneling, two-factor authentication with RSA SecurID and a Command Line Interface (CLI).

Like for the previous release anyway there’s no support for:

• USB redirection
• Multiple desktop sessions
• Multimedia redirection

This client supports View 3.0, 3.1 and the old Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) product, versions 2.0 and 2.1.

Labels: VDI, VMware

Usually virtualization.info doesn’t post stories about industry events (except the major ones related to virtualization like the VMware VMworld) and for sure it doesn’t publish stories about the vendors’ presence at a specific trade show (unless it’s our own Virtualization Congress).

In this particular case we’ll make an exception: VMware just informed its partners that it will exhibit at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009.

This is not the first time that VMware shows up at that event, but it certainly is the first time that VMware and Oracle are in harsh, direct competition.

It doesn’t matter if the Oracle presence in the virtualization space is today near zero.
The experience of the CEO Paul Maritz as a former Microsoft top executive should allow VMware to not underestimate the virtualization stack that Oracle has the potential to build (Oracle VM + Virtual Iron + Sun VM Server + everything else came with the two acquisitions).

Considering this, it will be interesting to see if Oracle will confine VMware in a 10’x10’ booth, just like VMware did with Microsoft and Citrix at the last VMworld.

While VMware called the new event restrictions a standard practice for an industry trade show, pretty much everybody that visited the VMworld exhibit floor could easily recognize that the only two companies impacted were its major and most dangerous competitors.

At VMworld 2009 Red Hat exposed its upcoming KVM-based virtualization offering, which competes with VMware in almost every possible way (from server consolidation to VDI). And yet no restrictions were applied to them.
At the same time, at VMworld 2009 Symantec exposed its upcoming Endpoint Virtualization Suite, which competes with VMware in every possible way (from application virtualization to software streaming to persona management). And yet no restrictions were applied to them.
The list may go on and include at least Novell/PlateSpin, which compete with VMware on the platform, on the enterprise management (including P2V migration tools and capacity planning tools) and on the virtual data center orchestration segments.

It will be interesting to see if Oracle uses the same language VMware uses, and what kind of message will deliver with that language.

Update: By the way, Oracle has a rich agenda around virtualization for this edition of OpenWorld. And it includes many Sun technologies.

Labels: Events, Oracle, VMware

While finalizing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0 and ACE 2.6, VMware is also working on the next generation of Fusion.

The product is becoming increasingly important for VMware, as Apple continues to attract new potential customers (mainly because of the iPhone) and gains market share.
The more Windows and Linux users consider switching to Mac OS X, the more Fusion (and its competitors) becomes the must-have gateway to the new environment.

The new Fusion 3.0, which will be available October 27, includes some new, welcome features:

• new 64bit engine optimized for Snow Leopard
• support for Windows 7 and its Aero interface
• support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3
• a P2V migration tool called Switching Made Easy that works over Ethernet or wireless

VMware may further capitalize its increasing leadership in this segment if the phantom Apple tablet PC that everybody is talking about is going to use a version of Mac OS rather than the iPhone OS, as some have speculated.

In that case VMware may really have a chance to revolutionize the way customers interact with the Windows and Linux applications by developing an brand new support for the tablet multi-touch display that works with any Fusion application.

Labels: VMware

In June the Russian website OpenNET unveiled the new features introduced in the first beta of VMware Workstation 7.0.

VMware kept the entire beta phase private, but last Friday decided to announce the public availability of the Release Candidate (build 197124) which also includes Player 3.0 and ACE 2.6.

The most remarkable new features of Workstation 7.0 RC are the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver that supports Vista and 7 Aero interface, and the support as guest OS for ESX and its VMotion (only on processors that support Intel EM64T with VT-x or on the AMD64 Family 10H and later processors with AMD-V).

The biggest surprise anyway comes from Player 3.0 RC which now has the capability to create and edit virtual machines.

Despite there are many unofficial editors for Player virtual machines, this is the first time that VMware includes one in the product.

The strategy seems to be changing for Workstation too, which continues to increase the size of supported virtual hardware (up to 32GB vRAM, up to 4 vCPUs and 4 cores), well beyond the needs of most consumers.

At this point it seems that Player is becoming the new Workstation and that Workstation is becoming the new Server.
In the near future VMware may decide to push ESXi as the main option for the SMBs that look for Server 2.0 today, phase out Server, and use Workstation as a powerful platform for several different things, including offline VDI.

Labels: VMware

As virtualization.info reported multiple times, VMware recently decided to appoint a second CTO to focus exclusively on desktop virtualization.
His business unit should include:

• the VDI connection broker View (acquired from Propero in 2007)
• the technologies OEM’ed from ThinPrint in 2007 (for remote printing), Wyse Technology in 2008 (for RDP acceleration) and RTO Software in 2009 (for persona management)
• the application virtualization platform ThinApp (acquired from Thinstall in 2008)
• the upcoming high-performance remote desktop protocol PCoIP (co-developed with Teradici since 2008)
• the upcoming hypervisor for embedded devices Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP, acquired from Trango in 2008)
• the upcoming client hypervisor Client Virtualization Platform (CVP, which will probably include the technologies acquired from Tungsten Graphics in 2008)

The mission to glue together such amazing amount of technologies, coming from completely different companies for culture and development style, is now in the hands of Scott Davis, who spent more than two years at VMware as Chief Data Center Architect and was, before that, the President and CTO at Virtual Iron.

In the last few weeks Brian Madden, and others, questioned the VMware capability to understand and be relevant in the desktop virtualization space.

Davis answers (ah! the beauty of this blog-centric era) on his new corporate blog:

…VMware’s vision for client or desktop computing is to use virtualization technologies to encapsulate and isolate all the aspects of the desktop. Make each aspect independently manageable, duplicate-able, recreate-able.  Employee-Owned IT? Separate into different virtual machines. Lost, broken or obsolete device? Throw it away, the VM is preserved in the data center and can be redeployed at will. 

I want the freedom that comes with complete separation between my physical devices and all my software. I want device independence; my applications, my data, my personality dynamically composited and encapsulated executing on the optimal device(s) for my  current time and location.  That may mean collocating layers on the same device or distributing across multiple systems. I want isolation; my personal and professional applications, run-time and data isolated and encapsulated, accessible via the internet, mobile devices, thin and thick clients. With client virtualization I want the display, the computes and the storage intelligently and automatically placed – sometimes its’ better to execute the workload in the data center and virtualize the graphics to a client. Other times, I want to take the whole workload with me and run it on a laptop. Or something in between. And why stop there? We’re also doing best of breed virtualization for isolation and encapsulation between all relevant boundaries – that’s why we have ThinApp for application virtualization and continue to invest in advancing that technology. And why we announced at VMworld our relationship with RTO to make use of their profile caching and replication technology in our solutions. And why we partner with Teradici to jointly bring solutions to market based on the best in class remote graphics protocol designed explicitly for virtualized desktops.  And there’s a lot more coming!…

The VMware marketing now calls this User-Centric Computing.

How to get there? First of all by easing the pain of enterprises that have to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7:

And with the Windows 7 refresh looming, this is the ideal time to make the break to virtualized clients. Rapid provisioning, desktop style. Replacing obsolete or lost devices. Painlessly. Upgrading any individual component part, be it hardware or software, without down time or outage. Reduced Complexity. Desktops have gotten burdened with greater and greater complexity, as anyone trying to figure out why their Windows system runs slower and slower will attest. Hey, I’ve built operating systems software and even I get stuck!

Are you satisfied Brian?

Labels: VDI, VMware

So far VMware didn’t do a good job in explaining the reasons behind the SpringSource acquisition and how it fits the long term vision.

The ones that attended the VMworld 2009 conference in San Francisco last month, witnessed how many in the audience left the opening keynote as soon as the SpringSource CEO took the stage.
That was something never happened before (except for the sponsored sections at the end of the VMworld Europe 2009 first keynote).

Now that the acquisition is completed, hopefully VMware will say something more and more concrete to engage its audience.

Meanwhile, somebody totally unexpected took the time to explain this acquisition much better than what the VMware marketing did till now: Simon Crosby, the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management Division.

Crosby is the Citrix most popular spokesperson when talking about virtualization. 
Some people in the industry know him because of his role as founder of XenSource but most people know communication style, which is “atypical” to say the least.

If you ever read or heard Crosby you won’t expect him to defend a competitor like VMware.
And this time he didn’t do that on purpose for sure. Quite the opposite he was trying to clarify a major difference between how VMware and Citrix view the role of the hypervisor, the virtual data center, and the OSes inside it.

Yet, one of his last articles validates in a very straightforward way the tremendous importance of frameworks like SpringSource in the virtualization universe:

…Is this the end of the OS? Not at all. Today's IT practice is still OS centric and is only partially down the path toward adoption of a virtual infrastructure hosting virtualized traditional OSes that run the apps. The rate of change will be dominated by the rate of change of human skill sets, and not just the rate of technology development.

In the medium term, however, there looms a challenge to today's OS vendor business models, licensing schemes and even their brands. Our notion of the OS must evolve beyond a narrow historical view - that of a run-time environment that back in the '90s used to execute on a single physical server. Customers will want an operational platform that embraces, pools, shares and isolates hardware resources, virtualizing them and offering multiple tenants the ability to securely gain access to guaranteed resources for their applications, with granular accounting. And, crucially, with no bias toward the specific set of (traditional) app-facing services offered by the (traditional) OS. A well-virtualized infrastructure couldn't care less whether you run your apps on Windows or Linux. It makes resources available subject to an application level service requirement, then quietly gets on with its job - providing guaranteed resources with absolute security.

If IaaS clouds are the new server vendors, then the OS meets the server when the user runs an app in the cloud. That radically changes the business model for the OS vendor. But is the OS then simply a runtime for an application? The OS vendors would rightly quibble with that. The OS is today the locus of innovation in applications, and its rich primitives for the development and support of multi-tiered apps that span multiple servers on virtualized infrastructure is an indication of the future of the OS itself: Just as the abstraction of hardware has extended over multiple servers, so will the abstraction of the application support and runtime layers. Unlike my friends at VMware who view virtualization as the "New OS" I view the New OS as the trend toward an app isolation abstraction that is independent of hardware: the emergence of Platform as a Service.

Anyone can build a hypervisor. In fact, it's been a solved problem for years. But a hypervisor in an OS is not enough. What's needed is two new abstractions: Virtual Infrastructure that spans multiple servers/networks/storage, and an application platform that seamlessly spans multiple servers/storage/networks…

Update: Simon Crosby answered to this article on the Citrix corporate blog. Easily to expect his answer is: No I really didn’t…

Labels: SpringSource, VMware

Since the VMware acquisition at the end of 2003, EMC always said that its new subsidiary had to stay independent to win the market.
A few really trusted those words at the time: nothing like virtualization has driven the storage spending in the history of enterprise IT (and it’s just the beginning, wait for VDI to become mainstream).
It was hard to believe that EMC wouldn’t leverage its relationship with VMware to declass NetApp, HP, IBM, Sun (now Oracle) and others as second choice options when designing virtual data centers.
But over the years the storage giant demonstrated its commitment to keep VMware independent.
For a period of time EMC was even accused of not doing enough, lacking that minimum integration that customers expect between two technologies as complementary and connected as the VMware hypervisor and the EMC storage array.

If EMC ever used its influence on VMware to damage its competitors, virtualization.info is not aware of it and no customer or reader ever complained about that.

Now everything is changing.

It’s not changing in the sense that EMC has started to adopt sneaky or illegal techniques to better position inside the virtual data center.
It’s changing because the EMC commitment is no more to let VMware play nice with every storage vendor in a very balanced way.

The new EMC commitment is to develop, evangelize and deploy solutions that work with VMware better than anything else available from competitors. And they are doing well. Really well.

A major driver in this new strategy is Cisco: the networking giant doesn’t have any real competition in the virtualization space at this point, and this puts the company in the position to demand for an unprecedented level of commitment to its new partners EMC and VMware.

If unpleased, Cisco can go to Citrix. Or Microsoft.
And both VMware and EMC know that networking is the next biggest bottleneck in the virtual data center of tomorrow.
Simply put, Cisco is too important (with or without its unified fabric effort) to let it go.

Nobody here is trying to say that the EMC effort entirely depends on Cisco. 
Their effort depends on a long-term vision that finally makes a lot of sense and that is embraced at all levels inside and outside the company.
The synergy/symbiosis with Cisco is just accelerating the events.

NetApp, HP and IBM (assuming that one day Big Blue will start paying attention again to the x86 market) have a huge problem.
It doesn’t matter how good their solutions in the virtual data center are. It doesn’t matter how tight the integration with VMware vCenter is.
There’s a growing perception that EMC is the way to go. And a growing perception that there’s nothing on the market that can compete with the triad VMware-Cisco-EMC.

These companies have three options: do nothing, start to spend a massive amount of energies in countering the EMC activity and gain back the attention of the VMware audience, or build something similar elsewhere.
Of course this last option is the most interesting. Something may happen around Citrix and Microsoft in the coming months.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, VMware

Last week VMware released a bunch of updates for several products in its portfolio. Each build is primarily for bug fixing but View Manager 3.1.2 also introduces a new feature:

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Lifecycle Management, Releases, VDI, VMware

In mid-July virtualization.info unveiled that VMware was looking for a second CTO, who could take care of a desktop virtualization business unit that includes View, ThinApp, the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), the new Virtual Profiles product OEM’ed from RTO Software, and more.

To cover this role VMware didn’t hire an external resource but promoted its Chief Data Center Architect, Scott Davis, co-founder and former President and CTO at Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May).

Davis is in VMware since April 2007, but VMware formally presented him as CTO only at VMworld 2009.
This move should unload the growing responsibility of Steve Herrod, who leads the VMware technical effort since December 2001.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

In our VMworld 2009 live coverage of the Day 2 keynote, we briefly mentioned that VMware has now an OEM agreement with RTO Software to use their Virtual Profiles products inside View.

The OEM agreement allows RTO Software to sell Virtual Profiles independently and update the product’s code base.
The interesting part anyway is that RTO Software has a similar deal with another major vendor that is become increasingly active in the desktop virtualization space, Symantec, even if their version of Virtual Profiles is not out yet.

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.
This agreement will help VMware to better compete against Citrix, Symantec and the other vendors that are developing end-to-end VDI solutions.

On top of that the persona management is a building block of the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) effort as much as the mobile hypervisor acquired from Trango in November 2008.

Labels: Alliances, RTO Software, VDI, VMware

At the beginning of July virtualization.info reported how VMware, Cisco and EMC (the VCE triumvirate?) are working together to execute virtual machines live migrations across data centers that are 80 km (50 miles) away from each other.

Well, what was considered an impressive yet experimental configuration in July became an officially supported scenario in September.

The three companies discussed three different scenarios for long-distance VMotion at VMworld 2009 and announced the joint validation for one of them, where VMware supports a 200 km live migration (assuming you can satisfy some pretty demanding requirements):

Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, has as usual provided a comprehensive coverage of the session that is really worth a review.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The VMworld 2009 conference ended yesterday, an amazing experience as usual.
virtualization.info already covered the two opening keynotes (day 1 and day 2) plus a special closed-doors keynote about cloud computing.
Like every year will publish a long wrap-up with the impressions about the show in one week or so.

Before leaving San Francisco anyway, in a pure Steve Jobs style, there’s one more thing.

During a small press briefing at VMworld the company CTO Steve Herrod answered questions about several aspects of the company strategy including a brand new one about when the company plans to release its client hypervisor.

Herrod said that the VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) won’t be released before H1 2010.
He didn’t add anything to this but the impression was more about a launch in Q2. And anyway he didn’t clarify if that was the date for the beta or the GA code.

So, unless VMware is trying to surprise its competitors, this means that Citrix will arrive earlier with its free XenClient, which is expected for GA at the end of this year.

The client hypervisor is a critical piece in any next generation virtual desktop infrastructures.
Along with View 4.0 and the software version of the Teradici PCoIP protocol, CVP is a key building block of the VMware VDI 2.0 platform.
Any mistake in the execution will inevitably compromise the confidence in VDI, postponing a broader adoption. VMware is investing a lot in its VDI strategy and may want to be extra careful about CVP.
This may be the reason why the company preferred to not show too much about it during this VMworld.

Labels: VDI, VMware

Second day keynote here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009.
The yesterday keynote, performed by the VMware CEO Paul Maritz and the COO Tod Nielsen, was mostly focused on the company vision.

Today the CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod is expected to deliver, as usual, a more concrete, technology-wise keynote, dedicating more time to the new products that VMware is delivering or developing for a future release.

Stephen Herrod is on stage.
He starts recapping the three initiatives that make the VMware strategy and how there’s a major refocus on the desktop virtualization area and View. View enables Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS).

DaaS requires the right platform (vSphere) and technology for centralized image and policy management.
A key challenge is providing shared images, managing the user personality and simplifying patching.

About the user personality VMware has just started a OEM partnership to integrate RTO Virtual Profiles in View.

Another area that requires a major effort is the user experience, which has to be the best possible no matter what endpoint the workforce is using.
Of course Herrod is talking about the partnership with Teradici and the software version of their PCoIP remote protocol that was briefly demonstrated yesterday.
View 4.0 with the software version of PCoIP will ship this year.

Now Herrod talks about the most important innovation that VMware is working on: the client hypervisor or Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).
A demo of the product is running now: a virtual desktop is launched through View and executed on the local laptop. It runs large Flash videos from YouTube and 3D graphics using the local GPU. Yet the operating system is running inside a virtual machine and has a fully emulated virtual display card.
The second part of the demo shows PCoIP in action on a thin client and on an Apple iPhone, through the new Wyse PocketCloud application.

Herrod is back on the strategy.
VMware wants to provide easy management for the virtual data center also inside the mobile devices. This will happen through the vCenter Mobile Administrator.
But more than that VMware wants to bring the hypervisor on phones: time for the upcoming Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

The Global Head of Product Development at Visa is on stage.
A large R&D mobile device with QWERTY keyboard (three times the size of an iPhone) is used on the demo.
It runs the new mobile hypervisor they acquired from Trango in November 2008.
The host OS is Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and the guest OS is Google Android with a Visa mobile app that connects online and integrates with Google Maps.

That’s enough about the desktop virtualization effort. Herrod moves back to the server virtualization domain and reiterates the new concept that Paul Maritz introduced yesterday: the software mainframe.

VMotion is the foundation of the software mainframe.

So far VMware estimates that virtual administrators perfomerd over 350M live migrations with VMotion, saving over $400M.
VMotion is maturing at a fast pace, with Storage VMotion introduced at the end of 2006 and Network VMotion introduced in May with vSphere. 
Herrod doesn’t say where VMware is with long-distance VMotion but points out that a number of partner have working demos about this.

When you use VMotion for global performance optimization then VMware DRS is the technology to use.
In tests DRS achieved 96% efficiency compared to a manual placement of the virtual machines.
VMware is working to extend DRS to include I/O.

Fast-forward to the new generation of virtual appliances (a name that VMware doesn’t seem to use anymore): the vApps, introduced with vSphere.
Herrod recaps that a vApp has a metadata layer that describes its SLA and security policy, enforced by 3rd party security vendors that use the VMsafe APIs.

Herrod now introduces one of the upcoming modules for vCenter Server: ConfigControl.
ConfigControl is a configuration and change management tool that keeps an historical record of what happens in the vSphere inventory.
It will compete with a number of solutions currently provided by multiple VMware partners.

The product (a technology preview) is shown for the first time ever on stage: the administrator can use a search web interface to find out what changed about a specific object in the inventory.
It can also choose the way the changes are visualized in the console.
For each change that ConfigControl can return the administrator is able to know what are objects were impacted by the change.
The interface seems a little unintuitive but the product is extremely interesting.

Herrod now moves on the last initiative of the VMware strategy: the vCloud.
Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is an example of connectivity between clouds (one is private, the other can be public or private as well).
Long-distance VMotion is another way to connect the clouds. There are a lot of challenges : moving the VM memory, move and sync the VM disk images, and more.
Herrod says that next year there will be more  long-distance live migration solutions.

Now Herrod is back to the most controversial domain where VMware is moving: the SpringSource acquistion.
It seems that VMware made some on-the-fly adjustments to its message to clarify what the acquisition means in the big picture.

Herrod is doing a better job in explaining where enterprise Java applications are in the VMware universe, but his presentation still doesn’t answer the most important question: why the virtual data center administrators should care.

The SpringSource CTO is on stage, hopefully to explain this. Unfortunately people start to leave as soon as they see code.
VMware has a major challenge here: it has to remove all traces of the SpringSource details from the slides and demo, and refocus the message in a way that it doesn’t alienate its core audience.

With the same demo shown yesterday during the Paul Maritz specific keynote about cloud computing this second day keynote ends.

Labels: Events, VMware

Deeply hidden in the VMworld 2009 opening keynote the VMware CEO Paul Maritz introduced three new key concepts that define the new message of VMware:

• the next generation virtual data center will be a software mainframe, fully automated and self-sufficient
• the software mainframe will be populated through a service catalog (more on this later or tomorrow)
• the cloud-ready services available in the catalog are not here yet. The software mainframe services will be Java enterprise applications that ISVs develop, test and control inside the cloud through the SpringSource framework.

VMware is now hosting a second, closed-doors keynote just about cloud computing, where hopefully the three concepts above will be further defined.

Paul Maritz is on stage.  
He summarizes what was already said during the keynote and then calls on stage the first of what seems to be a long series of partners: AT&T.

AT&T starts with a shameless plug about how the company is in a unique position to deliver the promise of cloud computing and then continues by describing its current Synaptic Hosting offering (if every VMware partner will come on stage to do the same show the room will be empty well before the end of the session).

After AT&T VMware moves on something more concrete, promising a demo of a live migration across two federated cloud infrastructures.
Unfortunately the only thing that is actually demonstrated is the simple VMotion of a virtual machine with SQL Server, simulating running transactions, from a virtual center to another, both controlled by the same vCenter.
There’s no proof that what we saw was a real geographical, long-distance live migration.

Next on stage: SAVVIS, which announces today a new cloud computing infrastructure called Project Spirit.
SAVVIS claims that Spirit is the industry first Virtual Private Data Center with multi-tiered Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities.
But as far as we can see from the online website that is projected Spirit is still in beta and Amazon may have something to say on who has the first virtual private data center.

Now VMware addresses the security concerns about cloud computing. Verizon is on stage to help on the impossible task.
Whatever will be addressed in the next 10 minutes will be just a fraction of the hundreds of security implications of moving inside the cloud.
Verizon talks about its recently released Computer-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering and talks about how it has a validation/certification program that allows 3rd party to add security features to CaaS.
In other words Verizon is doing nothing by itself to improve the security of its cloud computing infrastructure.

It’s amazing how this keynote is turning into a propaganda event to educate the press inside the room. 
So far the VMware partners that came on stage were unable to prove anything but their marketing effort in cloud computing. Not a single one was able to cover the many issues that plague cloud computing today and explain exactly how they are addressing the challenges.

Terremark is the next one on stage.
They perform another demo of the vCloud Express portal that we already saw during the opening keynote.
As virtualization.info already described, the portal is able to easily reconfigure the virtual hardware inside a single virtual machine in the cloud, to provision new virtual machines and to define virtual networking in a very simple way.
Anyway it’s not clear yet if this interface comes out of the box (as a sort of white-label self-service protal) or if the cloud provider has to do most of the job in leveraging the vCloud Express SDK and build such product from scratch.

Now VMware announces the availability of the vCloud API, submitted to the DMTF for the ratification as standard.

Again, on stage we have the SpringSource CEO to explain how the vSphere infrastructure can become the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that VMware has in mind.
Compared to the morning keynote one, this time the demo is focused on how the IT administrator deploys the JAVA application inside a public cloud.

Still, the demo is extremely complex and completely far from what most of the people understanding virtualization and the VMware products recognize as familiar.
It doesn’t matter how detailed is the description of the Spring framework and its application server, VMware has to clarify in much, much simpler terms why and how the JAVA applications are now so critical in the company’s vision.

Right Scale is the last one to come on stage.
It’s just launched service is able to interact with multiple public clouds at the same time, abstracting the providers and giving the customers a single super-management console where to configure and provision new virtual machines.

With this last demo the showcase ends. Time for Q&As.

Labels: Events, VMware

In less than one hour Paul Maritz, the VMware CEO, will be on stage to start the VMworld 2009.
This year there are 12,500 attendees, slightly less than last year, but definitively an amazing result considering the economic conditions.

A number of demos are highly expected from the audience. One for sure is the software implementation of the PCoIP remote protocol that VMware is developing with Teradici.
Another is the client hypervisor that will compete with the Citrix Xen Client expected later this year.

Tod Nielsen is on stage.
Nielsen is one of the first Microsoft veteran that joined VMware this year as the new COO.
Every single move, word, joke or smile he has on stage is 100% Microsoft style, which neatly breaks with the usual style of VMware keynotes.

Nielsen’s introduction is about the Fortune 1000 customers that are not using VMware technologies, only 30, and about the company’s goal: energize and save. 

Paul Maritz is on stage.
This is the second VMworld keynote for the former Microsoft executive who replaced the VMware founder and CEO Diane Greene in July 2008.
His first keynote last September was entirely dedicated to the new focus that the company has on cloud computing. We’ll see if this year the message will be exactly the same.

Maritz starts on the key issues of the IT industry today: complexity, inefficiency and inflexibility.
Only 5% of the IT budgets are spent on infrastructure investments.
The current data center have all these issues but are well understood. The demand to solve these issues will drive the adoption of cloud computing technologies, where hardware virtualization is the mandatory building block.
So the vision then is to move from the “simple” server consolidation to an internal/external cloud architecture to the mythical world of autonomic computing.

Interestingly, this year Maritz uses the term software mainframe multiple times when he talks about automating the data center.
Maritz says that vSphere 4.0 is really able now to deliver mainframe performance and mentions the record performance that VMware announced a few months ago (more than 350,000 IOPS from a single server).

The VMware software mainframe will be built on top of the hypervisor using a number of vCenter new modules that the company already announced in January and that has partially released so far: AppSpeed, CapacityIQ, ChargeBack, ConfigControl, Orchestrator, etc.

But Maritz wants to remark that VMware continues to keep the platform open for the interoperability: IBM is on stage and shows how System Director interacts with vCenter in measuring the power consumption of multiple virtual machines running on a blade, through the IBM power meter and the VMware vCenter APIs.

The discussion is back to the new vCenter modules.
Brief demos of the recently released LabManager 4.0 and ChargeBack 1.0 are shown on stage.

Maritz briefly mentions a key new concept: the service catalog. More on this probably tomorrow in the Stephen Herrod keynote.

Now Maritz moves back to the cloud computing and introduces the expected new initiative called vCloud Express.
Over 1000 service providers already joined the vCloud initiative but starting today new partners can use the vCloud Express to further accelerate the adoption of clouds.

Demo time.
A VMware partner exposes its VMware-powered cloud infrastructure through a vCloud Express portal.
The customer connects to the portal, sign up (by submitting financial details for payment) and then goes into a self-service portal where it can immediately customize and provision virtual machines and virtual networks in the partner cloud.

Maritz now shifts the focus on desktop virtualization and View.
HP is on stage and introduces its virtual desktop reference architecture featuring LeftHand Networks storage. 
HP also shows a new product called Insight Control for VMware View, which offers integration with the HP Onboard Administrator interface, power management control and other features.

Finally Maritz talks about the PCoIP protocol.
Telus Communications, a VMware customer, is called on stage to show a demo of VMware View 4.0 and the software implementation of PCoIP.
A PowerPoint presentation about Telus with some transition effects is launched from a virtual desktop. Nothing more than some fading effects, but smooth enough to not compromise the user experience.
The presentation also includes a small video that runs smoothly as well, but it’s not clear if its an animated GIF, a Flash clip or a fully-featured video.

Despite the strategic value of PCoIP and the effort that VMware has put so far in developing it, Maritz doesn’t spend any more time on it and moves on to discuss the SpringSource acquisition.
Hopefully the tomorrow’s keynote will show something more concrete.

Maritz explains that most of the enterprise Java applications are developed with the Spring framework.
VMware will continue to support the Oracle and IBM application servers side by side with the SpringSource application server. 
Maritz states that the acquisition of SpringSource will accelerate the development of new applications that are more cloud-oriented and calls the SpringSource CEO on stage.

A notable number of people in the audience leaves the room. This is because VMware has failed so far to explain in a clear way what will exactly do with the Sprint framework and the Hyperic management layer.
The demo is showing something more adapt to an audience of developers than for the typical virtual infrastructure administrator that attends VMworld.

This last intervention closes the Day 1 Keynote. Within one hour there’s another, closed-doors keynote from Paul Maritz entirely dedicated to cloud computing.
virtualization.info will cover that one as well. Stay tuned!

Labels: Events, VMware

This Friday Forbes unveiled the upcoming launch of vCloud Express, a VMware initiative to accelerate the adoption of vSphere a cloud computing platform.

Now it’s the eWEEK’s turn to ruin another VMworld surprise: VMware Go, a free web management service for ESXi.

…
The Web-based service automates the installation and configuration of VMware's freely downloadable ESXi hypervisor, VMware ESXi.

VMware Go will enable SMB customers to "fly through the ESXi setup process with just a few mouse clicks," Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's vice president of product marketing for servers, told eWEEK.

…

VMware Go will be made available as a beta offering on Aug. 31, 2009 to customers at a special Web.  It is scheduled to become generally available in Q4 2009, Balkansky said.

The special web site eWEEK is talking about is http://www.vmware.com/go/vmware-go/ but it’s not live yet.
It will be tomorrow as soon as VMware announces the product.

Labels: Platform Management, VMware

Earlier this week Amazon announced its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, a segmented version of its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) that is accessible only through a VPN connection.

There were at least a couple of reasons to launch VPC right now: sure, it is the 3rd anniversary of EC2, but most of all it’s the week before VMworld, the VMware conference that this year is going to have a major focus on cloud computing.

Both Xen.org and VMware will in fact launch two new initiatives called Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and VMware vCloud Express.

XCP will be a set of tools, of course distributed as open source, to extend the capability of the hypervisor as a cloud computing platform. And it will be supported by all the members of the Xen.org advisory board members, including Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle.

So the Xen Cloud Platform will merge together new and existing pieces of software in a single package even if it’s not clear at the moment what will be part of the platform exactly.

For sure XCP will include support for the DMFT existing and upcoming standards: the OVF  to load virtual machines from any 3rd party hypervisor (Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, etc.) and to migrate them across federated clouds, and the upcoming VMAN interface.
The VMAN support alone won’t be enough to grant a seamless migration from a private virtual data center to a public or private XCP cloud, so it’s very likely that the platform will support some virtual machines live migration capabilities.

XCP will also integrate the just surfaced Open vSwitch, an open source virtual switch which offers features similar to the ones provided by the Cisco Nexus 1000V in VMware vSphere 4.0.

XCP will also feature some advanced storage capabilities that support multi-tenant cloud services, and this mean mean that Citrix will contribute the project by releasing a part of its StorageLink technology as open source.

The presence of standardized interfaces and open components means that any commercial offering could be able to interoperate, extend or manage the Xen Cloud Platform in a not-too-distant future.
And this includes existing clouds like Amazon EC2 or RackSpace Cloud Servers (formerly Mosso) as well as the products offered by any vendor, including VMware.

Of course it’s entirely expected that Citrix will launch a version of its Essential for XCP but we already know for sure that the Xen Cloud Platform will support open source management solutions like Eucalyptus (adopted at NASA) and OpenNebula.

The existence of VMware vCloud Express, was revealed by Forbes just two days ago.
Forbes describes it as a “an easy way to get up and running with vCloud service”, but the moment there are no other news about it.
VMware is expected to formally announce the product early next week.

Labels: Citrix, Cloud Computing, VMware, Xen

Warning: the following post is not related to any product release, vendors alliances, or any other industry news that we normally cover on virtualization.info.
It’s just a commentary on the (bad) public relation and marketing practices that are so common before the big trade show that VMworld is.

Last year VMworld 2008 broke any attendance record in the history of VMware, surpassing 14,000 attendees and over 200 vendors sponsoring and exhibiting at the event.

It was a huge exposure opportunity even for the smallest startup in the market and so all the PR firms that were involved literally overflooded with news the influencers (analysts, journalists, bloggers, independent technical evangelists, etc.) that were supposed to attend the conference or at least cover the event on their websites.

Of course this activity also implied firing the PR announcements online, bombarding every poor customer that subscribes Google News or other news alert systems for specific keywords about virtualization.

This is a common practice before a big trade show, but it doesn’t mean that it is a good one.

What happened last year is that both most influencers and some customers had the “honor” to receive at least 200 news announcements.
In some cases the vendors had the smart idea to send out one announcement for every single product that was updated in their portfolio, and because the rule that more is better still applies in the IT industry, some vendors released two, three, even four news at the same time.

All of this mess happened during the show, while the news recipients were actually busy attending sessions, visiting booths, doing networking, etc. Everything but reading 200+ emails.

Now the question is: who the hell in the world would has time to pay attention to so many announcements at the same time during the live trade show?
Each one should require a careful analysis considering we are talking about enterprise products that have a major impact on the company productivity. Definitively not something that can be read and digested in two minutes, in-between breakout sessions.

Of course these press announcements are also read by the many that didn’t attend the show, but one of the main purposes to release them during the show is to attract the people on-site to the vendors’ booths.
Quite the opposite, such massive amount of information would scare away even the bravest reader because it requires hours just to separate the concrete announcements from the meaningless hype.

In fact, after a long analysis, an astonishing fact emerged: at least 30% of the VMworld announcements released by exhibitors, were about product upgrades that would become available in one month, one quarter or even the next year.
In other words the vendors put a huge effort to announce something during the event that they couldn’t sell at all during the event.

This is SPAM, and, whatever the PR and marketing department believe about the topic, it hurts the vendor’s image.

So what’s happening this year, one week before the VMworld 2009?

Somebody must have recognized the fault of this approach and has announced its upcoming new products one or two weeks before the event takes place.

Customers and influencers had time to review with calm the new things that will be available on the exhibit floor, and will certainly visit the booths with a more clear idea of what they want to see.

Unfortunately the large majority of the market vendors still believe that flooding the inboxes during the event is a good idea, so this week still is the calm before the tempest.

As every year, virtualization.info will report on the VMworld news after a careful analysis so, dear readers, don’t worry too much about the virtualization SPAM coming your way.
We’ll provide a meaningful digest as we did earlier this year, last year, and the year before that one.

Before that, anyway, we’ll provide the live coverage of the event keynotes and any major announcement that VMware will make during the conference.

Thanks for staying with us.

Labels: Events, VMware

The conference VMworld is just one week away and this year VMware’s competitors seem to have additional reasons to start a controversy and disturb the event.

The topic of the day is the size of the hypervisor footprint, which equals to a certain attack surface and has a relevance when you try to estimate the overall security level of a platform.

This is an area where VMware always claimed a neat superiority over Microsoft because the primary version of Hyper-V comes with a full copy of Windows Server 2008 as its parent partition.
VMware believes this is a major selling point at the point that it is highlighted on the corporate website.

Microsoft never addressed the critique before a couple of weeks ago, when it published an interesting analysis (part 1, part 2 and part 3) of what happens to the hypervisors footprint after a round of patches.

On its website, VMware compares its lightweight ESXi, the hypervisor version without the Console Operating System (COS), against the full version of Hyper-V. For Microsoft a more fair comparison should be between ESXi and its lightweight Hyper-V Server.
Nonetheless the company prepared three different analysis (only including critical and security patches):

• Hyper-V Server 2008 vs ESXi 3.5 | June 2008 - June 2009
  Hyper-V: 82MB footprint increase with 26 patches
  ESXi: 2.7GB footprint increases with 13 patches
• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V vs ESX 3.5 | January 2008 - June 2009
  Hyper-V: 408MB footprint increase with 32 patches
  ESX: 3GB footprint increases with 85 patches
• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V vs ESXi 3.5 | January 2008 - June 2009
  Hyper-V: 408MB footprint increase with 32 patches
  ESX: 2.7GB footprint increases with 13 patches

Without patches, Microsoft highlights that the only part of the two platforms that can be really attacked (the hypervisor plus the virtualization stack) is 32MB in ESX and 20MB in Hyper-V.

At the end of the last week VMware officially answered. 
First on the hypervisors footprint without patches:

…

We don't know how many lines of code are in a Hyper-V system, so we use the installed disk footprint-- the size of the installed files needed to support virtual machines -- as a reasonable proxy for lines of code.

…

A df -h command will then show you that the total size of those compressed ESXi boot images in the directory corresponding to /bootbank is 59.3MB -- somewhat less than the 70MB figure we've publicly stated.

…

For comparison, here's a look at the disk footprint of ESX 4.0 "Classic", which measures about 1.7GB.  Most of the additional footprint is due to the Linux-based service console.

The disk footprints we measured for Hyper-V R2 RTM are far larger.  Windows 2008 R2 Server Core with the Hyper-V role enabled, was 3.6GB.  For those Hyper-V users that want to preserve the "Windows they know," a full Windows Server 2008 R2 installation is pushing 10GB.

Yes, ESX "Classic" does use a Linux-based service console and therefore has a larger disk footprint, but VMware has publicly stated that the OS-free ESXi architecture is our future direction and ESXi has all the capabilities of ESX "Classic".  Microsoft has made no such commitments to eliminate Hyper-V's dependency on Windows…

And then on the footprint with patches:

…

Because ESXi is installed and patched like an appliance -- the entire image is replaced as a whole -- our patches are naturally the size of the full ESXi installer package.  Our customers prefer that appliance approach because it ensures consistency in the their installations and avoids "patch drift" away from a validated configuration.  With the Windows Update-based patching used for Hyper-V, patches can be smaller, but customers can skip or miss patches, resulting in insecure, partially patched configurations.

…

With both ESX and ESXi, a host reboot following patching has always been non-issue because VMotion and Maintenance Mode make it trivial to shift VMs to alternate hosts during the reboots.  Microsoft's customers must certainly be looking forward to using those same features in the long-awaited release of Hyper-V R2

…

We've kept track of the "Patch Tuesday" patches required on a Server Core Hyper-V system since Hyper-V first shipped in June 2008 and there have been multiple "Important" or "Critical" patches to apply almost every month.  Most of those patches don't apply to Hyper-V, but users must still install them and then reboot their hosts.  And, as users are painfully aware, Hyper-V R1's missing live migration support has meant downtime for their VMs with each reboot.  The downtime may lessen with Hyper-V R2, but the patches won't…

Both positions are extremely long and articulated. The excerpts above can’t really give the readers a full summary of every detail that both companies covered in their analysis.

A complete reading of all articles is recommended to evaluate who’s right.

Anyway it’s worth to remind everybody that security of the hypervisor impacts the security of the virtual infrastructure just partially.
The attacks can come from everywhere: the virtualization.info security columnist, Claudio Criscione, is covering this very topic on his first series: Real-World Security in a Virtual Infrastructure (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Wait for Part 4 in the coming days).

Labels: Microsoft, Security, VMware

For a long time a number of contributors sponsored by Red Hat worked on a virtualization interface that could standardize the way hypervisors are managed, getting rid of the differences between vendors’ implementations.

The API is called libvirt and it’s around since early 2006.

Red Hat has a strong commitment on it, at the point that its imminent KVM-based virtualization offering is based on its, as announced in June 2008.
This is why the API is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) which allows the inclusion in any commercial product.

Through libvirt, a management platform running on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS or even Windows can already control both Xen, KVM, Sun VirtualBox, Parallels OpenVZ, QEMU, LXC and User Mode Linux (UML). But the best has yet to come.

The just released version 0.7.0 includes a number of remarkable new features, including support for the IBM POWER hypervisor and what seems a first attempt to support VMware ESX.

Of course this doesn’t mean that VMware will allow a product using libvirt to manage its flagship hypervisor without buying vCenter Server.
But for sure it means that in a near future Red Hat may be able to offer what Microsoft already offer with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM): the capability to control multiple hypervisors through a single management console. And this may be extremely appealing for some of those customers that already purchased vCenter.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, VMware, Xen

During this August VMware released a round of minor updates for many products:

• vCenter Server 4.0 Patch 1
  This critical patch has been released for those customers that implemented VMware HA and their Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) utilize Class A addresses (see the related KnowledgeBase article).
• Workstation 6.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.
• ACE 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing and security patching: the version of Apache for Windows used by the ACE Management Server has been upgraded to 2.0.63.
• Player 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.
  

Labels: Releases, VMware

At the beginning of this week VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million ($362M in cash and $58M in unvested stock and options).

The company tried to clarify the deal with a public presentation  hosted for its investors and an article published by Steve Herrod, the company CTO, on his corporate blog:

VMware has traditionally treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be running.

This is the largest acquisition in VMware’s history and the most complex to evaluate as it radically changes the company mission and market position.

Easy to predict, that part of the worldwide press that doesn’t just republish press announcements is still trying to figure out the sense of this investment.
Surprisingly, the announcement led to an unexpected number of negative comments, some of them completely unrelated to the acquisition (like this one and this one).
The financial analysts highlighted the high price, and the investors didn’t seem too impressed so far:

Who is SpringSource
SpringSource is a small company (157 employees as reported by LinkedIn) founded in 2004 and funded with $25M in two investment rounds (led by Benchmarks Capital and Accel Partners).

The firm offers a Java framework called Spring to develop enterprise-grade applications that can run on Java application servers like Tomcat. The company claims that Spring has been adopted by almost 50% of Global Fortune 2000 and Gartner estimates that 2 million developers use it.
SpringSource also offers its own version of the Tomcat application server, called tc Server, and its own version of the Apache web server, called Enterprise Ready Server (ERS).
The company even offers its own Java application server: dm Server.

Both the Spring framework and the dm Server are available as open source (and VMware already said that it plans to keep this model).

In May 2009 SpringSource acquired Hyperic, an infrastructure management firm that offers products (HQ and IQ) for every major operating system (from Microsoft Windows to IBM AIX), every major application platform (from LAMP to Microsoft .NET) and every major enterprise service (from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle Database) on the market.
The Hyperic solution also monitors VMware and Citrix virtual infrastructures and the Amazon implementation of Xen.
For each supported product Hyperic can do a wide array of activities, from auto-discovery to real-time health monitoring, from capacity planning to event tracking and alerting, up to granular reporting.

Even here SpringSource has a big tap into the open source world as the Hyperic management platform is also available in a open source edition.

In total the company may score around $20M in sales as CNET suggests.

Where VMware position itself now
It seems clear that for VMware virtualization is no more about virtual machines, and not even about enterprise virtualization management.

A few months ago virtualization.info speculated on the fact that VMware is turning into an infrastructure management company, getting ready to compete against the big four: BMC, CA, HP and IBM.
VMware already has a lot of technologies that could easily extend to the physical world. And the Hyperic management suite is a new, big piece of the puzzle.

So while the possibility to control the physical layer gets more concrete every day, VMware also has to move forward with its cloud computing plan.
In 2006 virtualization.info suggested that VMware may want to shift its focus on the cloud computing space to avoid a direct competition against Microsoft and its free hypervisor. The idea at that time was that the Microsoft slowness in entering new markets would give VMware more time to further consolidate its position. But something unexpected happened: Microsoft was quicker than usual in embracing cloud computing and announced Azure.

With Hyper-V Microsoft is able to empower any Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provider. 
With Azure, it can also empower Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud providers, or become one by itself.
Last but not least, with the upcoming version of Office online and a number of hosted services (from Exchange to SharePoint), Microsoft also becomes a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud provider.

If Microsoft can efficiently and quickly combine Hyper-V with Azure and port most of its products online, then it will become a global cloud computing provider much earlier than expected.
And this may be a good reason for VMware to accelerate its plan, by investing $20M in the hosting provider Terremark (equal to a 5% stake) and now trying to integrate IaaS and PaaS clouds.

Of course the executives in Redmond are downplaying the upcoming competition, or at least this is what the Corporate Vice President for Microsoft's Management and Services Division, Brad Anderson, did during the last investors meeting:

…I look at that [VMware-SpringSource deal] as a response to what Microsoft has been communicating in the market about the application architecture," Anderson said in a Webinar. "But I think they're moving into a space that really is away from what their core competency is, and moving into a space where, if you look at what Microsoft has with Visual Studio, I think Microsoft has a lot of strength there…

Ultimately, even if the company doesn’t admit it (and there are evident reasons to do so), it seems that VMware is trying to take full control of the physical, virtual and cloud space, leaving to its customers just the bother to plug in their applications (and if they plug-in a Java application rather than a .NET one it’s even better).

If true it’s a dreaming plan: these are the building blocks of a fully autonomic computing environment, which still seems so incredibly far away.
Such ambitious plan would also explain very well why Cisco is so interested in VMware and invested $150 Million in it. 
At the right moment (read: when it’s ready to compromise its relationship with Microsoft) Cisco may even decide to acquire VMware and connect the dots.

Of course the risk of such plan is that VMware tries to do too much altogether and too quickly, which may translate into a poor execution.

Who are the new competitors
Excluding Microsoft (already discussed above), Google and Salesforce (which are not interested in the IaaS layer as far as we know) there are not many companies that may compete with VMware on this new game.

Citrix has a well-defined vision of how to optimize end-to-end the application delivery process but at the moment it’s not something that involves the full control of the physical layer or a PaaS architecture.

Cisco may be everything but a competitor considering its interest in serving and interconnecting the software platforms that VMware offers.

The only major vendor that has the pieces and the money to become an infrastructure management company with full control of the cloud is Oracle.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle has even more than what VMware has today: a full computing stack, including physical servers, storage and thin clients, no less than three hypervisors, an enterprise-grade operating system, several application servers, widely adopted back-end services, a management platform to control everything mentioned so far, and even a dormant IaaS and PaaS infrastructure.
And yes, Oracle has a significant control on the Java language too.

It must be seen if Oracle also has the ambition to become what VMware is trying to become.

Labels: Acquisitions, SpringSource, VMware

Disclosure: virtualization.info runs its own independent conference about virtualization technologies called Virtualization Congress.
The first edition was arranged in US in May 2009 and was co-hosted with the Citrix Synergy 2009 conference. Even if the Citrix event sponsorship didn’t influence by any mean the agenda of the Virtualization Congress, the sessions’ contents or the speakers line-up, it is still true that Citrix is a competitor of VMware and that the Virtualization Congress may be mistakenly perceived as a very humble attempt to compete with VMworld.

At the end of May Brian Madden highlighted how the imminent edition of VMware’s main conference, VMworld 2009, has some unprecedented, severe restrictions for exhibitors (as many of them are direct competitors).

Specifically, the VMworld exhibitors are not allowed to market or demonstrate products that overlap with or replace VMware offering.
Additionally, all non-VMware partners (read “competitors”) can’t have a booth larger than 10x10ft (virtualization.info received a confirmation about this from one of the event sponsors). 
Last but not least, the exhibitor employees must remain in the boundaries of their booths.

Now Citrix is unveiling an additional limitation:

Exhibitor agrees that it may not use any Organizer event to leverage or promote any other event in which Exhibitor is a sponsor or participant, and therefore agrees that it may not, during the period from two days before until two days after the Event, conduct, promote, endorse, or sponsor any functions, classes, seminars, exhibits, or similar marketing activities within 50 miles of any event similar to the Event that is the subject of this agreement, other than Exhibitor's participation in the Event under this Agreement.

The agreement is so restrictive that it may easily include also all the parallel night parties that vendors arrange at the hotels surrounding the conference center before, during and after the official VMware marketing activities.

Microsoft found a creative solution to circumvent the new cage: advertise the presence of its best resources in sessions and restaurants around the conference center way before the VMworld takes place :)

It’s so ironic that the VMworld tagline this year is Hello Freedom.

Labels: Events, VMware

The rumors that circulated for months are now officially confirmed: VMware postpones the VMworld Europe from Q1 to Q4, just one month after the North America main conference.

This means at least three things:

• The Europeans that planned to go to the VMworld 2010 instead of the imminent VMworld 2009 in San Francisco to limit the travel expenses will have to wait an entire year instead of just few months.
• All the exhibiting vendors will have to build two conference teams to manage the two VMworld logistics with just one month of delay from each other.
  The biggest companies are perfectly ready to do so but the smallest VMware partners may have issues.
• Some customers that plan to attend both events won’t be able to do so because the quarter budget probably doesn’t allow to do so.

The early feedbacks expressed by well-known members of the virtualization community are not exactly positive: here, here and here.
Anyway VMware may have a few reasons to do so:

• Reduce the total amount of attendees for the North America conference
  Last year VMworld 08 scored over 14,000 attendees. Worldwide crisis aside, if this trend continues to grow the profit will certainly increase but also the logistic issues.
  The company may want to rebalance the attendees across the regions and simplify the event management.
• Give more relevance to the European conference
  It’s not a secret that VMware marks the North American event as its flagship conference. 
  European attendees prefer to go there because everybody does the same, so they get more networking opportunities, prime-time speakers and fresh announcements.
• Disturb the Microsoft conference business
  In Q4 Microsoft arranges its TechEd Europe conference, and while the audience is only partially overlapping with VMworld, those attendees are extremely interesting to VMware.
  So far Microsoft didn’t dedicate much TechEd space to virtualization and it certainly doesn’t have a dedicated virtualization conference.
  Virtualization still is one of the main priorities in many European companies and a system administrator with budget for a single event in Q4 may end up choosing VMworld over TechEd.

VMware has a VMworld fan page on Facebook. It may be worth to express some feedbacks there.

Labels: Events, VMware

VMware achieved the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ for VI3 last year. Even before that the company submitted VI3.5 to the EWA Canada test lab to obtain the same level.

Now that vSphere 4.0 is out, VMware is of course trying to get a third EAL4+ rating for its new platform.

As virtualization.info already wrote in the past the certification is valuable as long as the submitted Protection Profile is a meaningful reference model.
This is the PP that VMware submitted to earn the VI3 EAL4+ certification.

The company expects that vSphere 4.0 earns the EAL4+ rating by H2 2010.

Labels: Security, VMware

A couple of weeks ago the VMware Performance Team released a new interesting paper about a virtual deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on vSphere 4.0 Release Candidate (build 140815).

The 16,000 mailboxes environment was distributed across 8 virtual machines (Windows Server 2003 R2, 14GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 20GB vHD and 2000 users each) served by a HP ProLiant DL 580 G5 server with 4 Quad-Core Intel Xeon X7350 @ 2.93GHz and 128GB RAM.

The backend storage was served by a NetApp FAS6030 array with 114 disks split into four aggregates (the data on was made of 40 disks).

VMware tested the same environment with Microsoft Exchange Load Generator (8-hours workday simulation) using a 4GB Fibre Channel connection, a 1GbE iSCSI connection and a 1GbE NFS connection.
Despite this major difference in the available bandwidth the three protocols performance are very similar:

Labels: Benchmarks, VMware

Exactly two years ago Citrix announced the acquisition of XenSource, officially entering the server virtualization (with XenServer) and desktop virtualization (with XenDesktop) markets, in direct competition with the former partner VMware.

Citrix invested $500 million in this operation but spent the minimum possible effort to spread the word about its existence in the hardware virtualization universe.
Of course the relevance of XenSource in the open source world, the implications on the Xen project and the price paid for the startup, engaged the community for a while, but beyond that the company did almost nothing to change its image of terminal services / application delivery company into something different, that could attract a large number of competitors’ customers.

It is safe to say that for the first 18 months after the acquisition, the Citrix marketing didn’t take any major step in reposition the company as a real player in a market that was completely new before the arrival of XenSource folks.
So it doesn’t surprise much that most customers didn’t perceive (and still do not) XenServer as a serious alternative to VMware ESX.

Still now, the only major tool that the company uses to evangelize XenServer and its efforts in the server and desktop virtualization space is the voice of the well-known Simon Crosby, founder and former CTO of XenSource and now CTO of the Virtualization & Management division at Citrix.
But his voice is just a whisper compared to the massive marketing effort that VMware puts in place every quarter and the tireless activity of its ubiquitous community.
Without the Virtual Reality Check benchmarks (Feb 09) and Burton Group's report on XenServer maturity (July 09), life would be even too easy for competitors.

Something is changing anyway.
Citrix probably decided that competing on the server virtualization market with VMware is a useless waste of energy as the hypervisor may become a commodity that customers prefer to find inside their operating systems, and so gave away XenServer for free. And it’s getting aggressive on the desktop virtualization space.

For the first time since the acquisition Citrix openly and directly address competition against VMware, and does that very aggressively.
On the corporate website a comparison matrix titled Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View: Which Is the Best VDI Solution? is a public declaration of war:

On the blogs and webinar, Citrix even calls allies like NetApp (which is the biggest competitor of the VMware parent company EMC) when talking about Storage Best Practices for High Definition VDI and says:

FAQ:  What differentiates the Citrix + Netapp VDI solution from the one from VMware?
Answer: As outlined in the detailed competitive comparison on our website,  the Citrix + Netapp VDI solution differs from the one from VMware in four key areas: 
1.       User Experience:  Citrix's HDX Technologies optimizes the user experience by leveraging integrated client/endpoint-, server-, or network side technologies to allow users an optimal high definition user experience to a broad range of applications - streaming media, Flash, audio, 3D graphics, etc - over both the Local Area Network and the Wide Area Network.  This is in stark contrast to VMware View, which will work for LAN use cases, but not for the WAN.
2.       Application Management:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution includes integrated XenApp, Citrix's proven application virtualization solution, which works with 1000's of Windows applications, in either a Hosted or Streamed mode.  VMware View integrates with VMware's ThinApp application virtualization technology.  However,  the VMware View solution requires bundling all delivered applications into the VM, which makes application delivery much more cumbersome and difficult to manage.
3.       Flexibility:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution offers IT organizations the flexibility to use a variety of VM Infrastructure - Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, or VMware ESX.  By contrast, VMware View ties an IT organization to only VMware ESX.  This gives the customers the flexibility to choose the most powerful cost-effective best-of-breed VDI solution.
4.       Policy-based access control:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution leverages a familiar Microsoft and/or Citrix management user interface for managing granular -  by user groups or individuals - access to data and applications.

The point is not if the statements above are true or not (plenty of virtualization.info readers will rush to clarify this, for sure). The point is that Citrix may have finally decided what to do with XenSource technologies and it’s moving to execute the plan.
If true customers now at least have a more concrete understanding of the strategy to make their decision.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

After Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0, VMware launched yesterday another private beta, this time for its VDI solution View.

The new View 4.0 finally introduces the software-only implementation of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol.

VMware is working on a way to replace Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) since late 2007, when it joined the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) to work on a new standard called Net2Display that never came out.

Once clear that Net2Display couldn’t replace RDP anytime soon, VMware developed a two-phases plan to deliver a more efficient protocol for its VDI platform.
In phase one, the company signed an OEM agreement with the thin client vendor WYSE Technology, to use its TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) technologies.
In phase two, VMware started a co-development program with Teradici, to create a software-only version of its high-performance PCoIP protocol.

At the moment the Teradici technology only works with the help of dedicated graphic adapters that must be installed on the machine serving the virtual desktops.
VMware demonstrated this technology in action during the VMworld Europe 2009 and had positive feedbacks.

After months of work it seems that the two companies have something ready to show because this first private beta of View 4.0 is completely dedicated to PCoIP.
Subsequent beta builds will focus more on the connection broker itself and may be open to a wider audience.

It’s safe to assume that VMware will demonstrate this software-only implementation at the upcoming VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.
We’ll see if what the two companies are building is fast enough to replace RDP (which is becoming more VDI-focused thanks to the Calista technologies that Microsoft acquired in January 2008).

Labels: Teradici, VDI, VMware

VMware is preparing to release a new version of its Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

When the company announced the product for the first time in September 2007, it was immediately clear how virtualization technologies have the potential to revolutionize the disaster recovery industry.
Then, after the SRM 1.0 release more than one year ago, the product raised a lot of interest among the customers and a strong support from the storage vendors.

At the beginning of July VMware started the private beta of the second release, dubbed Site Recovery Manager 4.0, as Mike Laverick revealed on the VMTN forums.
The new version was originally numbered 1.5 but VMware recently decided to rename it as 4.0, probably to sync with the vSphere version (and to gain some extra maturity points).

A public beta may be announced in time for VMworld 2009, or VMware may decide to keep it private until General Availability.
We’ll try to provide additional information about the new features that are included in SRM 4.0.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, VMware

During his last earnings call the VMware CEO Paul Maritz didn’t just announce a 38% drop in profits and the hiring of several new executives, but also the company forecast for the VDI adoption.

It’s not a secret that VMware is pushing hard on VDI since April 2007, when it acquired the startup Propero and decided to compete against its former best partner Citrix and all the rest of the ecosystem that itself created in 2006.

So it’s surprising to hear Maritz saying that a serious adoption of VDI won’t happen before another one or two years.

The question was submitted by a Citi analyst during the earnings call, who asked to separate the hype from the reality. Maritz answered:

…That’s going to take a while for them to get comfortable to really understand all the issues involved and actually get into production so we view this as incredibly important with tremendous amount of potential but it’s really going to be into 2010 and 2011 I think before we start to show a significant impact in terms of large amounts of revenue…

The comment is even more surprising when we compare the results that VMware and Citrix announced in the desktop virtualization space.
Maritz said that his company secured two new Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) in Q2 2009, while the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton reported 200 new customers for the same timeframe, and 10 of them booked over 1000 virtual desktops.

It more than clear that VDI is not ready for a mainstream adoption, but this lack of confidence from VMware is something pretty new.
Maybe this is why the company is actively looking for a new CTO that can lead the desktop virtualization strategy.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

For a few months now virtualization.info has reported how VMware is accelerating the replacement of its executives in almost every department and in every region where it is present.

The last news about this topic is about the research of a second CTO, dedicated to the application and desktop virtualization business unit, but apparently there’s much more than that.

During the last earnings call, the VMware CEO Paul Maritz announced a few new remarkable hires:

• Mark Egan, who was the Symantec CIO for 6 years.
  Egan is the new VMware CIO, replacing Tayloe Stansbury who left VMware for Intuit after one year and a half.
• Baliz Kadanish, who was the Vice President of R&D at Mercury (acquired by HP in 2006).
  Kadanish is now the VMware Senior R&D Manager in charge of the application level provisioning and management.
• Zahid Hussain, who was the Vice President of Engineering at Brocade for 5 years (left in 2008).
  Hussain is now the VMware Vice President of Engineering in charge of the vSphere development team.
• Derek Collison, who was a Technical Director at Google and before that the Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at TIBCO Software.
  Collison is now in the VMware CTO office, in charge of a project related to cloud computing, as TechCrunch reports.
  At Google Collison was working with Mark Lucovsky, the Director of Engineering that VMware hired last month, on the search APIs.
• Vadim Spivak, who was a Senior Software Engineer at Google, working with Lucovsky and Collison.
  Spivak is now a VMware Staff Engineer, as TechCrunch reports.

Additionally, CRN reported last week about a migration from the VMware parent company EMC and its subsidiary:

• Douglas Smith, who was the Senior Director of Business Development at EMC for almost 12 years.
  Smith is now the VMware Senior Director of Worldwide Partner Sales.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

At the end of July VMware announced the financial results for Q2 2009.
The company is handling well the financial crisis, keeping a flat growth rate, but the profit dropped significantly and it’s evident that the new licenses revenue trend is not positive. In details:

The VMware revenue remain substantially flat compared to the Q2 2008, with a 3% loss in US and a 3% growth abroad.
In particular VMware experienced a double-digit year-over-year booking increase in China, Japan, Canada, Brazil and UK.

The positive balance depends more and more on the software maintenance and professional services (+32% revenue) as the new licenses revenue significantly drops by 20%.

VMware is also suffering a 38% loss in profit, moving from $52.3M in Q2 2008 to $32.5M.

The company hired almost 200 new employees in the last quarter (virtualization.info could track only a few executives), reaching 6900 people total, which produced a 3% increase in operating expenses.

VMware almost maintains the same level of investment for R&D (+0.3% compared to Q1) while it’s more consistently raising the investment in Sales and Marketing (+4%).

The company reports a high interest around vSphere 4.0 with almost 250,000 trials downloads in just 8 weeks.
Anyway this information is no more significant because the warez scene recently released for the first time ever an illegal key generator for the product, and this can inflate and compromise the numbers.

VMware now has $2.3 billion in cash and cash equivalent and $934 million in deferred revenue, which means it has more than enough to pursue additional, small acquisitions as it did in the past.

The total amount of Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) booked in Q2 are 15% down from Q1 and from Q2 2008.
Despite that VMware sees an improvement in the global economy conditions and forecasts the Q3 2009 revenues between $456M and $480M, while it expects a full 2009 revenue growth of 3%.

The earnings call full transcript is available here, courtesy of Seeking Alpha.

Labels: VMware

Richard Garsthagen, the popular VMware Senior Evangelist behind the organization of VMworld Europe, released a new free tool called vAudit.

This tool allows to track a VMware View 3.x environment is being used by the users, auditing their activity on the virtual desktops (logon and logon failures, working hours, logoff and disconnection) and showing it on a timeline.

vAudit is not an official VMware product but if extremely popular the company may decide to include its capabilities in the next version of View.

Meanwhile you can enjoy this free version and download it here.

Labels: Releases, VDI, VMware

vSphere 4.0 is out and the virtualization.info Bookstore is getting filled with fresh new books about it, but the large majority of VMware customers are still on VI 3.x, so they should be happy to know that one of the bestseller about this platform is now available for free.

The book is VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide, written by Scott Herold (Lead Architect, Virtualization, Quest), Ron Oglesby (Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, Dell) and Mike Laverick (the man behind RTMF Education).

On his popular blog Mike announces the availability of the book for free and offers a couple of additional chapters for free as well.

Download everything here:

• VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide
• Quick Start Guide to ESX3i
• Upgrade Guide to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5

Labels: Books, VMware

VMware just released a very useful, 54-pages free ebook that collects many the principal guidelines to optimize the performance of the new vSphere: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0.

It includes four chapters:

• Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere
• ESX and Virtual Machines
• Guest Operating Systems
• Virtual Infrastructure Management

If you are planning a migration to the new platform this is a highly recommended reading.

Labels: Books, VMware

virtualization.info keeps tracking the massive executive replacement that VMware is operating on a global scale, in almost every area, including the PR, the marketing and the sales department.

Last month we reported how a growing number of former Business Objects executives are joining VMware in the EMEA region after Maurizio Carli was hired as General Manager in this area in December 2008.
Before that we tracked the arrival of other high level executives from Microsoft, from Borland and from Oracle.

Another ex-Oracle joins the list today: Fred King, the former General Manager of Technology Alliances & Channels in the Australian & New Zealand region.

King joins VMware, after five years in Oracle, as its new Director of Partner Organization in the ANZ region, as CRN reports.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Last month virtualization.info announced a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
The webcast shows a live configuration and/or management of a popular virtualization product among the ones that we daily track in the news.

There are no slides at all. Everything is performed live and directly on product consoles.

Our first show featured the configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays, something that is not exactly easy to test without the proper lab equipment.

We got several inquiries from the vendors to show their products in the next OneHourOn shows, but before moving on we’d like to repeat the first one one more time for the readers that wanted attend and couldn’t because of the limited seats available.

This time we increased the availability to 50 seats, and we’ll progressively increase more as long as we are satisfied by the performance.

So the second virtualization.info OneHourOn show is scheduled for July 23 @ 6pm CET (9am PST).
Once again our presenter will be Marcel Brunner, VMware Specialist at EMC Switzerland.
The webcast will be delivered in English language.

Like for the previous show, attending the event is free.
You are welcome to register at this address: http://onehouron.eventbrite.com

Attention: The attendees will receive the coordinates to join the meeting by email, so be sure to register using a real email address and be sure to check the SPAM folder if you didn’t receive the meeting coordinates by June 22.

If you want to send suggestions about what product should appear in the next OneHourOn show, or if you are a vendor and are interested in demoing your product during the next OneHourOn show, please send an email to onehouron@virtualization.info

Labels: Announcements, EMC, OneHourOn, VMware

Just yesterday virtualization.info reported how Citrix is reorganizing its application virtualization division by appointing a new CTO.

VMware is doing exactly the same: virtualization.info has learned from trusted sources that the company is looking for a new CTO just for the desktop division, to take care of View, ThinApp, the new remote desktop in co-development with Teradici, and probably the client hypervisor as well.
This new CTO won’t replace the well-known Steve Herrod but rather work side by side with him to lead the VDI and application virtualization effort.

By a coincidence, this morning TechCrunch reports that Mark Lucovsky, Director of Engineering at Google, left the search engine to take a job at VMware.

Lucovsky spent five years at Google. Before that he was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, where he wrote most of the kernel executive, kernel32, and the Windows API for Windows NT.

Lucovsky spent 16 years in Microsoft and the new VMware CEO, Paul Maritz should know him pretty well (Maritz was one of the top executives at Microsoft from 1986 to 2000).
It’s not confirmed if Lucovsky is going to become the new VMware CTO for the desktop division but if there’s one that knows how to improve an application virtualization platform for Windows he’s the one.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

Last week Wyse Technology announced the release of Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA).

This new protocol enhancement, probably a superset of the existing TCX Multimedia technology that VMware is OEM’ing, is promised to accelerate up to 3 times the performance of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp (using the ICA protocol), VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (both using the RDP protocol) in WAN scenarios with more than 200ms in network latency.

Like the Citrix Branch Repeater and other products in this space, VDA works as a proxy that customers need to install on the branch office.

VDA is embedded in Wyse thin clients that use the ThinOS 6.4 but its works also on regular fat clients like workstation and laptops powered by Windows XP.

Here’s a 2 minutes demo of the technology:

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technology

After more than one year VMware finally seems to make some progress on one of the most useful tools in its revamped product portfolio: Lifecycle Manager.

The technology behind this product was acquired in September 2007 from the Swiss startup Dunes Technologies.
The Dunes orchestration framework was used to build a simple yet very useful web portal for self-service virtual machines provisioning.
The framework itself turned into vCenter Orchestrator, bundled as part of vSphere 4.0, while the automation package turned into vCenter Lifecycle Manager. In fact the new 1.1 beta (build 4376) requires an updated version of the former to run properly.
While fairly complex, in theory a customer should be able to develop his own version of Lifecycle Manager just using Orchestrator.

It’s not clear what new features are available with this update except the obvious support for vSphere 4.0. The release notes only mention the resolution of bug fixes and the performance enhancement.
Sadly the new beta doesn’t support any recent version of the most popular browsers and this includes Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5 (that is fine as it was released just one week ago), Safari 4 and Chrome 1.0/2.0.

Yet the product should be considered as critical in many virtual environments.
The key component of Lifecycle Manager is the capability to authorize the deployment of new VMs through four different access levels: the user (who requires a new VM), the approver (who accepts or refuse new provisioning inquiries), the IT staff member (who decides where to deploy the approved VM) and the IT administrator (who can allow access to VM templates and define deployment guidelines).

It may sound like this product is most useful in the big enterprises where multiple departments continuously require new virtual machines to the IT staff, but the VM sprawl phenomenon is more pronounced in the SMB segment where there are not robust operational frameworks and not enough administrators.
VMware may want to consider a full blend with vCenter Server like Microsoft does in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Enroll for the beta program here.

Labels: Lifecycle Management, VMware

Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and vCenter AppSpeed 1.0.

AppSpeed 1.0 (build 36919) is powered by the technology that VMware acquired in May 2008 from B-hive.
It is able to discover the elements of the virtual infrastructures (physical hosts, virtual machines, clusters, etc.), the applications running inside them, and even some structures inside the applications (like tables inside a database).
Once tracked the applications, AppSpeed sniffs their traffic to understand their “normal” behavior (like the response time, the performance) and build some baselines.
At this point the product compares the baselines with the actual application performance to recognize potential slows down (or lack of availability) that affect the user experience.

The new AppSpeed pricing starts at $1,250 per CPU.

In some ways this approach seems similar to the one that Liquidware Labs/vmSight is taking to understand the user experience in a VDI environment and plan the environment capacity accordingly.

In both cases the self-learning technology is precious for the virtualization administrator, who often has to prove that the hypervisor is not responsible for a performance degradation. When an application doesn’t work as expected the first component to blame is the newest one, the virtualization layer, but AppSpeed tracks the software behavior day by day so there’s some concrete information to investigate.

Like Chargeback 1.0, AppSpeed has huge potentials: combining its capabilities with a change management solution (VMware will release one called vCenter ConfigControl later this year) it may track down which modifications in the virtual infrastructure negatively impact the behavior of one or more virtualized applications.

Anyway the most interesting thing is that AppSpeed is another component that may easily work on physical infrastructures but doesn’t.

virtualization.info already suggested how VMware is slowly turning into an infrastructure management company, getting ready to compete with the big four BMC, CA, IBM and HP.
The company keeps saying that it’s not interested in managing the physical infrastructures, even if it recognizes that a lot customers out there don’t migrate 100% of their systems inside virtual machines and those customers are interested in a solution that manages everything.

At today, the VMware’s answer to those customers is to offer integrated end-to-end solutions mixing together their products with the ones of the big four above.
But the point it that while VMware doesn’t have yet all the pieces needed to become an infrastructure management company, the ones that are in place (like AppSpeed) are purposely limited to the virtual data center. And this is the biggest potential that VMware has today.

Labels: Performance Monitoring, Releases, VMware

Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and AppSpeed 1.0.

The need for chargeback capabilities is growing at a fast pace as the virtualization technologies mature and multiple departments of the same organization start to use the same virtual infrastructure with confidence.
This is why startups like VKernel are growing in popularity and seasoned players like Vizioncore start to include the chargeback feature in their performance monitoring products.

With a perfect timing VMware enters the segment and releases this new module for vCenter Server 3.5 and 4.0.

Chargeback 1.0 (build 175384), which comes as a virtual appliance, sports the following capabilities:

• Support for multiple cost centers
  The product allows to segment the virtual infrastructure in multiple chargeback hierarchies which group the various hosts and virtual machines assigned to different departments, cost centers, or business units in an organization.
• Support for multiple cost models
  The product tracks CPU, Memory, Storage, Network Received and Transmitted, and Disk Read and Write. These resources can be analyzed against three cost models: fixed costing, allocation-based costing and utilization based costing.
• Support for cost comparison reports
  The reporting functionality allows to generate cost reports for a hierarchy and for any entity or set of entities within a hierarchy. A cost comparison report can be generated by using two different cost models.
• Support for local users and LDAP users (Active Directory only)
  Different users with specific permission sets can be created and predefined roles can be assigned. A user can have different permissions at different levels within a hierarchy and across hierarchies.
• Support for high-availability
  More than one instance can be installed and added to a cluster. All the instances in a cluster are automatically synchronized, use the same database and can be accessed through a load balancer.

The Chargeback pricing starts at $750 per CPU.

As the list above highlights, the product is fairly granular and rich enough for a 1.0 release. Some of the competitors in this space don’t even have three different cost models.
The tight integration with vCenter and the huge potential (cost prediction, what-if cost analysis, etc.) makes this product a highly desirable addition for the enterprises that demanded for chargeback capabilities for a long time.

Of course this is not exactly a good news for VMware partners, which have less room to add value.

So far the company defended its current strategy by saying that it’s natural for a vendor that grows like VMware does to expand its product portfolio in many directions, that the customers specifically asked to have all the features that are being launched, and that the product portfolio competes with the partners’ offering just in part, because VMware only offers basic capabilities.
While the first two are perfectly reasonable points, the last one doesn’t seem applicable anymore looking at how complete Chargeback is at its first release.

virtualization.info stressed out much so far about this expansionistic behavior not to blame VMware, but to highlight how the company strategy is basically opening new opportunities for its primary competitors (namely Microsoft and Citrix) which still lack of a rich partner ecosystem and miss a number of highly desirable 3rd party tools (chargeback is one of them).

VMware still is the cash cow of virtualization and everybody wants to partner with them, but compared to three years ago, a startup with limited funding may have to choose between playing the catch up game with the market leader or bringing value to its competitors which offer big opportunities to grow (mostly when one of the competitors is Microsoft) in the mid term.

Rather than trying to slow down this natural opening to multiple hypervisor as they enjoy a wider adoption and turn into more interesting revenue opportunities, VMware is accelerating the shift.
So, ultimately, this is a message to all those non-VMware customers: the VMware partners are coming, sooner rather than later the tool that today only supports ESX and vCenter will eventually become available to everybody.

Labels: Chargeback, Releases, VMware

Today VMware releases the fourth generation of its virtual lab automation tool Lab Manager.

The new 4.0 version (build 1140) introduces the following features:

• Support for multiple workspaces (isolation of resources in multiple workspaces in the same organization, sharing of configurations across different workspaces)
• Host spanning across network fencing (network-fenced virtual labs can see the same host) 
• Resource usage monitor
• Configuration history and archiving
• Support for vSphere 4.0 (excluded VMware FT and Linked Clones technologies)

The new Lab Manager pricing starts at $1,495 per CPU.

The biggest news anyway is that VMware killed the other product derived from Lab Manager: Stage Manager.
Stage Manager was launched 13 months ago and since then received just a single minor update.
At the launch time virtualization.info reported how this product was sharing much of the Lab Manager engine (and even its agents), wondering why VMware didn’t simply extend the former to provide the staging functionalities of the latter.
Over one year later the company seems to finally agree and merges back Stage Manager with Lab Manager 4.0.

The now defunct Stage Manager 1.0.1 is here.

Labels: Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMware

Today VMware releases the first minor update for its disk and file backup/restore product Data Recovery, included in bundle with vSphere 4.0 Plus, Advanced and Essential Plus licenses.

The new build (176771) doesn’t introduce any new feature but fixes a number of bugs and improves the performance.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, VMware

Despite vSphere 4.0 is finally out VMware didn’t stop to release major updates for the previous platform.

The new Update 5 (build 174841), available today for vCenter Server 2.5 only, introduces support for up to 80 virtual machines per host in a HA cluster.

Reaching the new limit requires some modification on the virtual infrastructure that are described in the knowledgebase article 1012002.

Labels: Releases, VMware

The VMware executive replacement continues at fast pace since the replacement of Diane Greene with Paul Maritz as the company CEO.

A growing number of seasoned executives is joining the company from Microsoft, Borland, IBM and CA, and the replacement interests all departments, from the marketing to the public relations.

The last two new entries are taking their places in EMEA and in India.

The first one is Jean-Pierre Brulard, the new General Manager for the Southern Europe.
Brulard comes from SAP, where he has been the Senior Vice President of the Business Objects for EMEA for seven years.
Brulard joins another former Business Objects executive: Maurizio Carli, the new EMEA General Manager that was appointed in December 2008.
Carli and Brulard worked together at Business Objects from 2002 to 2007, when Carli was the Business Objects General Manager for EMEA.

The second one is T. Srinivasan, the new Managing Director of India and the SAARC region.
Srinivasan comes from Oracle where he has been Vice President for the India region for less than one year.
Before that has been Executive Director at HP for one year.

Update: As an anonymous suggested in the comments, VMware also hired Elie Kanaan, who comes from Business Objects as well. 
Kanaan was the Vice President of Marketing for EMEA and at VMware replaces Reza Malekzadeh (who left in May) in the same role.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

A couple of weeks ago, PRWeekus reported that VMware is changing its PR and communication structure.

First of all the company hired Aaron Feigin in May as the new Senior Director of Global Communications.
Feigin comes from Borland, where he has been Vice President of Corporate Communications for five years.
Feigin is not the first ex-Borland executive that joins VMware: in January the company hired Tod Nielsen, the former Borland CEO, as its new COO.

It seems that Feigin plans to make the VMware announcements less technical and more marketing oriented:

…he plans to revamp VMware's PR strategy by having the communications team work more closely with other departments and focus less on product features in its messages.

…

“We want VMware's story to be more in align with our customers' long-term goals”…

The second thing is that VMware is replacing its current PR agency, Fleishman Hillard, that lasted just six months after replacing the long-time partner OutCast Communications.

We’ll see if this will imply yet another change in the message at the big VMworld 2009 conference that will start at the end of August.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

In May Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron. Just five weeks later the database giant fired most of the employees, terminated the partner program and stopped selling new licenses (with a few exceptions).
The only option offered to Virtual Iron customers is to drop their suddenly-in-end-of-live hypervisor and jump on Oracle VM, which is free but certainly has different capabilities and not a single tool to simplify the migration.

Virtual Iron never detailed how many customers they have, but it’s safe to assume that most of them, if not all, are in the SMB segment. And considering that Virtual Iron had a $3.4 million revenue in 2008, it’s likely that its customers are no more than 3000 as The Register is suggesting (more probably much less than that).

For some reasons these customers must be special if VMware decided to announce a notable 40% discount to those ones that will move to vSphere.
The initiative sounds good but uncommon for VMware, which never took too much care of the SMB market in its history.

Oracle anyway is not too happy about this intromission and immediately answers:

Oracle is dedicated to the on-going support of Virtual Iron customers and has enhanced the support offering beyond what was previously available from Virtual Iron. Oracle is pleased to be able to offer its Lifetime Support program for Virtual Iron products, which will extend sustaining support for these products and the Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition products indefinitely.

At least the VMware disturb activity helped to understand why Oracle fired all the Virtual Iron employees but 10:

Oracle has retained Virtual Iron support personnel, so that people who provided support prior to the acquisition will continue to do so going forward.

So the Virtual Iron customers have to choice between a free virtualization platform (Oracle VM) that is about to drastically change (nobody knows how and when) and an expensive (but discounted) virtualization platform (VMware vSphere) that probably the already evaluated and rejected before adopting what they have today.
It’s safe to assume that they are looking instead at Citrix and its free XenServer.

Update: After a number of days in silence also Microsoft enters the discussion, and easy to guess its primary purpose is to smash the VMware offering:

…But a closer look at the VMware offer shows some serious limitations.  These include:

• Only Virtual Iron 4.0 or newer customers are eligible
• Only those with active support subscriptions with Virtual Iron are eligible
• Customers must buy a VMware license for every socket on their Virtual Iron contract.  This effectively locks in the customer to VMware for size of their Virtual Iron contract.
• The discount is 40% off the list price of the product but only 10% on one-year of support and subscription, 0% for more than one year of support subscription.
• The offer isn’t valid on all SKUs.  This means for Virtual Iron customers who want to keep their Live Migration and CPU balancing capability, they need to buy vSphere Enterprise Plus, the most expensive SKU.

…

As usual VMware is welcome to rectify if the analysis above is not accurate. This post will be further updated to include they perspective as well.

Labels: Oracle, Virtual Iron, VMware

It’s not a secret that virtual machines live migration is perceived by most virtualization professionals as a must-have feature.
After trying to dismiss its value for months, even Microsoft is putting a major effort in promoting it now that its upcoming Hyper-V R2 finally offers it.

The problem with VM live migration is that it doesn’t work beyond a single network segment where two or more virtualization hosts share the same SAN space.
The first vendor that will be able to offer such feature over a WAN link will change forever the way we think disaster recovery.

VMware is working on long-distance VMotion since a while now, but the last time we checked (at the VMworld 2008 analyst briefing) the company was skeptical about delivering the technology in a short timeframe (like 12-18 months) because of complex technical issues.
Nonetheless a long-distance VMotion was demonstrated just last week with the help of Cisco.

The two companies showed how a VM live migration is possible between two data centers away 80km (50 miles) from each other, “fighting” against a 400us latency for each fibre cable.

A long time may pass before this technology reaches the production stage, but VMware and Cisco are really innovating here and deserve maximum attention.

Labels: Cisco, Disaster Recovery, VMware

This is not exactly the best possible week for VMware which is receiving “negative attention” from technical and financial analysts.

David Cappuccio, Managing Vice President at Gartner, wrote on his corporate blog how the current VMware market position reminds the Novell leadership of the early ‘90., and if VMware, like Novell, is doomed to be smashed by the Microsoft techno-commodities. 
It’s not a new speculation: plenty of others pictured this scenario years ago, as soon as Microsoft announced its plan to deliver a free hypervisor as part of the operating system.
Nonetheless, the fact that a Gartner VP is wondering about the topic out aloud is remarkable.

Elsewhere, Reuters is reporting how only 2 of 31 Wall Street analysts who follow VMware stock advise investors to buy it at current prices, as the shares are expected to drop much as soon as Microsoft will start distributing the RTM of Hyper-V R2 next week.
Analysts project revenue growth of 2 percent to $1.9 billion this year, with per-share profit excluding items falling to 91 cents from $1.05, according to Reuters Estimates.

Update: The Gartner and Wall Street financial analysts may be completely wrong about the destiny of VMware (as some virtualization.info readers already commented below) but the company looks really desperate right now: VMware has just released a press announcement to win those Virtual Iron customers that Oracle left in the cold less than a month ago.

If the “global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud” has to do this to win, let’s say, 300 SMB customers, then the financial analysts forecasts may be even too optimistic.

Labels: VMware

A couple of weeks ago VMware published a benchmark analysis titled Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 4.

It assesses the performance of a SQL Server 2008 OLTP database hosted by a vSphere 4.0 virtual machine with 8 vCPUs and 58GB vRAM, and compares it against the performance of a physical system:

Of course it would be much nicer to see how a OLAP database performs, to understand the reliability of virtualization in extreme (and real-world) conditions, but the chances to have it seems pretty low. 
Nonetheless the paper above is extremely interesting and really worth a read.

Labels: Benchmarks, VMware

VMware, Cisco and EMC are really putting a massive effort in promoting the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform that Cisco unveiled in March.

One of the most interesting things produced in this effort is the whitepaper that Cisco just published on his website: Scalability Study for Deploying VMware View on Cisco UCS and EMC V-Max Systems.

The triad managed to setup and document a VDI environment based on VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 4 with 640 virtual desktops (Windows XP with 512MB vRAM and 8GB vHD), served by four UCS blades (160 seats per blade), each with 96GB RAM and the new Intel Xeon 5500 Quad Core CPUs.
Which is four times what was achieved on Dell M600 blades.

The description of the environment is extremely detailed and goes deep into the configuration setup and the performance analysis. It’s really worth a read.

Thanks to Virtual Geek for the news.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, Papers, VDI, VMware

Update: The article below has been temporary removed after that some VMware distributors and the company itself have indicated how some statements are far from reality.
We removed the article to have time to further investigate and correct our mistakes, if any, without spreading false information.

We can confirm now that it’s not true that a VI 3 Standard license plus a-la-carte vMotion and Storage vMotion can’t be moved to a vSphere 4 Standard license while retaining those features.
VMware clarifies this with a footnote at this URL:

Customers with current Support & Subscription contracts who purchased VMware VMotion as an add-on to VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation or VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard also received VMware Storage VMotion. These customers retain both VMware VMotion and VMware Storage VMotion when they receive VMware vSphere Standard.

But it’s also true that a number of customers were told by VMware sales representatives that their only upgrade choice was to move on the vSphere Enteprise Plus, as reported in the original article below.
We have full details about these customers, that asked to stay anonymous, and yes, they are outraged.

We sincerely apologize for not better checking with VMware before publishing this story.

Never like now VMware has hit a low level of popularity because of its pricing strategy.
The virtualization leader grew steadily in the enterprise market to the point that its products are now adopted in 100% of Fortune 100 and 95% of Fortune 500, but it has been considered out of range by most SMBs so far.
The new licensing upgrade scheme introduced with vSphere 4.0 is further compromising the already delicate relationship.

There are main two problems with that.

The first, pointed out in April, is that VMware has introduced a completely new top license called Enterprise Plus, which is not available as a free upgrade for the owners of the VI3 Enterprise license, and which is mandatory for those servers featuring more than 6 cores per socket.
This means that as soon as 8-cores CPUs become the standard, any enterprise buying new machines will be obliged to purchase an Enterprise Plus license and spend $600 more per socket.

The second problem is that VMware didn’t provide an upgrade paths for some key feature like vMotion and Storage vMotion when they are licensed a-la-carte.
Those customers that currently have a VI 3 Standard license and those additional capabilities, can’t keep them when migrating to the new vSphere 4 Standard license.
The “nearest” licensing level that includes vMotion and Storage vMotion is the new Enterprise, but VMware is not allowing its VI 3 Standard customers to move on that one.
The only allowed upgrade path in this scenario is from VI 3 Standard to vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus, which implies paying a huge, unplanned premium.

This last issue is critical because it touches those medium businesses that trust VMware and just want their vMotion.
It’s not that they don’t have alternatives now that Citrix and (very soon) Microsoft offer vMotion-like capabilities for free as part of their free hypervisors.
No matter how many features VMware is packing in vSphere or how mature is perceived its platform: the current company behavior is pushing the customers right in the arms of the competitors. And looking at some outraged feedbacks received by virtualization.info lately, those customers may be happy to go.

Labels: VMware

Yesterday in a public webinar VMware announced the upcoming release of Studio 2.0, the environment to author OVF packages that the company launched in September 2008.

The new VMware Studio 2.0 is remarkable in terms of new features.

The first most important is that it will support the new generation of virtual appliances (VAs) that VMware calls vApps.
The vApp is a concept that VMware introduced for the first time at VMworld 2008, and it implies a new metadata layer wrapping the virtual appliance what describes the virtual hardware, performance and security requirements to run the virtual machine.

Once created the virtual appliance or the vApp, Studio 2.0 will be able to deliver it on VMware Workstation, Server (both 1.x and 2.x) and of course VI/vSphere.
The most interesting thing about this last interaction is that Studio can push (and update at a later time) the new VA/vApp through VMware Update Manager (VUM).

Another two key features are the capability to author/build Windows virtual machines and the capability to use an existing virtual machine as input.

Studio 2.0 itself will be delivered as a virtual appliance, featuring Ubuntu Linux as the OS of choice.
Developers will be able to interact with it through a web browser, CLI or a plug-in for Eclipse.

Thanks to vinternals for the news.

Labels: Standards, VMware

With the first post in a new corporate blog, VMware unveiled the existence of Code Central, an online facility where its community can upload and exchange scripts for the various VMware SDKs.

VMware has a special interest in seeing what kind of automation the virtualization professionals want to have now that its vCenter Orchestrator has been released as a free module of vSphere 4.0.

Orchestrator is powered by the technology that VMware acquired by Dunes Technologies in September 2007.
The Dunes framework is powerful and flexible enough to become the foundation for new products, from a VDI connection broker to a virtual lab automation manager.
In most cases the customers will use it to automate specific aspects of their environments, but once in a while a Code Central public script become popular enough to give the input to VMware for a new, non-free product.

This is the same strategy that is being pursued by Vizioncore, which recently launched a free scripting IDE for PowerShell called Virtualization EcoShell, an extension of the PowerGUI console that its parent company Quest releases for free a long time ago.
Also in this case, Quest/Vizioncore is giving away the tools for free to grow a loyal developers community and see if any member can produce something amazing to extend their new automation product called vControl.

Labels: Platform Orchestration, VMware

While opening the beta program of the next Fusion major release, VMware also keeps updating the current product which now reaches version 2.0.5 (build 173382).

Fusion 2.0.5 is mainly for bug fixes but it also extends the support to the following host and guest operating systems:

• Host OSes
  Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit only, experimental)
• Guest OSes
  Mac OS X 10.5 (on new Intel Xeon 5500 and 3500 Series)
  Ubuntu 9.04
  Mac OS X 10.6 Server codename Snow Leopard (32bit only experimental)

Labels: Releases, VMware

Last week virtualization.info wrote about the private beta program of VMware Workstation 7.0.
It seems that the company is also working on the next version of Fusion (2.5? 3.0?) as MacNN reports:

…The private beta, released to a select group of beta testers, offers simpler access to common tasks in the Virtual Machine Library, added support for DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3 functions, experimental OpenGL 2.1 support, and a new “migration assistant” for moving from Windows XP or Vista to the Mac.

Other modifications in the preview provide an "always-on" application menu where users can start Windows applications directly, and changes to the automatic updates to help with checking, downloading and installing updates. Additional support is also included for the Mac OS X 10.6 (32-bit only), along with experimental guest support for Windows 7…

Labels: VMware

At the end of the last week VMware published a new minor update for its application virtualization technology ThinApp, acquired from Thinstall at the beginning of 2008.

The new build (3313 if you follow the Thinstall numbering, 169725 if you follow the VMware one) is introducing a very minor change in a configuration file and a number of bug fixes.
Most of all it seems that this version was released to grant compatibility with the VMware vSphere 4.0 client.

As virtualization.info highlighted in March for the ThinApp 4.0.2 release, VMware didn’t deliver a major upgrade for this product for over a year now, and it doesn’t seem ready to clarify the strategy behind the acquisition as also others have recognized.

Labels: Releases, VMware

Last week the Russian website OpenNET leaked the news about the existence of VMware Workstation 7 and revealed all the new features of this first private beta build (translated with Google):

• Improvements in the support of 3D
  OpenGL 2.1 and Shader Model 3.0 are supported in virtual machines, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
• Support for new model drivers Windows Display Driver Model for Windows 7
  is still only 2D acceleration and support only one monitor, the driver is using 32MB RAM. If you want to run a 3d application in Windows 7, you must configure it to use the old SVGAII driver from VMware.
• Support vSphere 4.0 and ESX support
  Professionals can now run these technologies as a guest system to verify the manner in which they are suited to your organization. ESX at this point is supported only on processors that support hardware-accelerated virtualization (all Intel Core 2 and above, AMD Athlon 64 X2 AM2/Phenom and above).

• Support for Multiple expanded to a four-SMP systems
  VMware allows you to allocate to the guest system with four virtual single processor with two dual-and single-Quad.
• Virtual allows you to print without a printer to print on all printers host OS
  Printers are added to the guest operating systems automatically and not require a network.
• Download VMware tools on the Internet on demand.
  VMware added ability to upload via the internet the latest versions of VMware Tools including for the new OS, which will improve support for new systems of having to wait out a new version of VMware WorkStation.
• AutoProtect
  Snapshot'ov possibility of creating a new virtual machine on a schedule for the rapid restoration of the guest OS.
• Encrypting the virtual machine
  VMware now supports encryption (AES 128-bit) and password protection of virtual machines. Running such machines working in the VMware Player.
• Support for IPv6 was added to connect the type of bridge (direct connection of virtual machines to the physical network).
• Support for ALSA
  Finally we became VMware support audio output to ALSA, which will simultaneously output sound from the host and guest OS without locking the sound device.
• Put on a break
  Now you can temporarily stop the implementation of a guest operating system and free up resources for the system.
• Improvements in technology Drag and Drop.
  Support drag and drop images, formatted e-mail attachments and zip folders is now supported in Windows, and Linux.
• Improved support for debugging of guest OSes in a replay ( "Play")
• Expanding virtual disks.
  It is now possible to expand virtual disks and operating system Windows Vista and Windows 7 can take advantage of this opportunity without running additional software
• Fuse
  Linux operating systems can now mount the virtual disk images via Fuse.
• …

Labels: VMware

A security researcher near virtualization.info, Claudio Criscione, informs us that VMware Converter 4.0.1 Stand Alone includes a web interface that is currently hidden or unfinished.

It’s a well-known thing that the product uses a web service to interact with the ESX hosts, but it seems that VMware is developing a complete web user interface around it.

At the moment the product only exposes a login form if you connect to the address: https://ipaddress/converter/
but several other functions are partially implemented, like for example the file upload facility that is handled by the FileInput.js component.

It’s unclear way VMware is shipping this partially finished interface inside the product or if there’s a concrete plan to finish it.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, VMware

Today virtualization.info is happy to announce the launch of a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
We’ll use our on-demand datacenter to show the configuration and management of products provided by the many virtualization vendors that we daily track in the news.

So no slides at all.

This is a great opportunity to see in action a product that you may be interested in purchasing and by the way this also is a great opportunity to see how powerful, flexible and fast Rent-A-Lab can be.

Of course we’ll take full advantage of the enterprise equipment we have (currently 28 servers, each with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5420 2.5GHz, plus 35TB of storage served by SANs from several vendors).
This is why the first OneHourOn webcast will show a fairly complex installation to reproduce in a lab without expensive test equipment: the installation and configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays.

The first virtualization.info OneHourOn is scheduled for June 25 @ 6pm CET.
Our presenter will be Marcel Brunner, VMware Specialist at EMC Switzerland.
The webcast will be delivered in English language.

Attending the event is free.
Because this is the first attempt to run such virtual event we decided to limit the number of seats to 15.
You are welcome to register at this address: http://onehouron.eventbrite.com

Attention: The attendees will receive the coordinates to join the meeting by email, so be sure to register using a real email address and be sure to check the SPAM folder if you didn’t receive the meeting coordinates by June 24.

If you want to send suggestions about what product should appear in the next OneHourOn show, or if you are a vendor and are interested in demoing your product during the next OneHourOn show, please send an email to onehouron@virtualization.info

Labels: Announcements, EMC, OneHourOn, VMware

Earlier this month Veeam announced the decision to remove support for the free version of VMware ESXi from its Backup & Replicator (formerly Backup). The company CEO revealed that VMware specifically asked to do so:

…Recently, VMware requested that Veeam discontinue support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy.

…

In light of VMware's request, and our close technical partnership, Veeam Backup and Replication will no longer support ESXi Free. We will still continue to offer support for ESXi Free to existing Veeam customers who purchased Backup & Replication prior to version 3.1…

After the controversial decision to limit the competitors at the upcoming VMworld, with this move VMware took a further step to compromise its image of beloved innovator as the community reactions demonstrate here, here and here.

The official VMware answer on this topic was given to SearchServerVirtualization:

…We provide certain APIs [application programming interfaces] and methods particular to the virtualization environment,” said Patrick Lin, the vice president of product management for VMware’s server business unit. By offering access to the hypervisor via a preferred set of APIs, “our intent is to provide a level playing field in the basis of backup,” he said.

But Veeam did not use VMware-approved methods to develop its product, said Parag Patel, VMware’s vice president of alliances. “We’re not exactly sure what they did, but it didn’t seem sound,” Patel said. “For us it’s a question of what’s built and how it’s built. … To be perfectly honest, we didn’t want to be associated with it because it wasn’t satisfactory…

Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what is the real reason behind this move. The effect is that any company that is working with VMware or aspires to do so will perceive the partnership with the virtualization vendor as a mined field. And not just because VMware is about to place a product in every possible market segment.
If VMware continues with this trend the ecosystem that is slowly growing around Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer will receive an unexpected boost.

Labels: