virtualization.info

Last month virtualization.info reported how Oracle killed the Virtual Iron brand immediately after the acquisition, firing every employee but 10, terminating the reseller program and severely limiting the capability for existing customers to buy new licenses or upgrade licenses.

The move was so quick and brutal that Oracle gave the impression to completely disregard the loss of 1000-3000 SMB customers. And this represented an opportunity for VMware which launched a discount program to attract those customers on vSphere.

It’s possible that the pressure from competitors (also Microsoft jumped in recently) had a positive impact on the Oracle strategy, which finally decided to talk to the Virtual Iron customers through a semi-private webcast held today by Wim Coekaerts, Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering.

During the online event Coekaerts disclosed the integration roadmap that Oracle plans to deliver over the 2010 fiscal year (June 2009 - May 2010).

This integration will begin by including the Virtual Iron resource management capabilities in the Oracle VM 2.2 (already on internal testing and QA).
Everything else will be integrated in the Oracle VM 3.0 platform.
Oracle is specifically interested in the Virtual Iron capacity management, power management, APIs, and partially in its live migration technology. 
The company plans to use the APIs to improve the integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager and the virtualization platform.

That said, Virtual Iron customers don’t have many (painless) options.

For the ones that want to move their virtual machines on Oracle VM, the company will release a Virtual-To-Virtual (V2V) migration tool as part of the Oracle VM 2.2 release, to move away from the Microsoft VHD format that Virtual Iron uses. It’s unlikely anyway that the tool will support live migrations.

Otherwise the customers can stay on the platform they have and wait for Oracle VM 3.0, but there are several “but”.
First of all there’s no chance for get any update, not even the ones already out before the acquisition (like version 4.5 if they are using the 4.4), and this implies that the hypervisor will not support any new hardware the customer purchases. There’s not even the chance to have a replacement media of the purchased product if needed, which implies an immediate backups of the existing DVDs).
Secondarily, even if Oracle VM 3.0 will provide some support for the VHD format, the Virtual Iron virtual machines will still need the Oracle V2V migration tool to be moved.
Last but not least, Oracle is refusing to disclose its pricing strategy for Oracle VM 3.0, so the Virtual Iron customers can only hope that the software will continue to stay free and the support price will be reasonable.

In both these scenarios, Oracle is migrating the Virtual Iron General Support agreement to the its Premier Support agreement for one additional year.
The others will be protected by a lifetime Sustaining Support agreement.

The alternative of course is to run away from Virtual Iron and Oracle but the company message during the webcast was: we are huge, we have thousands of support engineers, we can localize the product in any language you need, we are in the Xen advisory board, and we are fully committed to make Oracle VM a competitive product.
Unfortunately this doesn’t answer the key question: how much does it cost to wait for Oracle?

Labels: Oracle, Virtual Iron

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

Five weeks ago Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron for an undisclosed sum. So far the company didn’t reveal if and how it plans to to merge the Virtual Iron hypervisor with the Sun xVM hypervisor and with its own Oracle VM Server.
Now finally the database giant starts to unveil its strategy.

The Register has just broken the news about an official communication released by Oracle to the Virtual Iron partners:

…In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it "will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers." And in a second letter to a partner speaking with The Reg, the company says it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone - including existing customers - after the end of this month (i.e. in 11 days). Before then, partners can only sell licenses to existing customers under certain conditions.

…

When the integrated product becomes generally available, Virtual Iron customers will be able to move to the new, integrated product and benefit from a more feature rich-solution than is available today…

The Register also unveils that the Virtual Iron company has been almost completely fired:

…In its letter, the company says "Oracle has retained Virtual Iron support personnel, so the same people who provided support prior to the acquisition will continue to do so going forward." But our source says the company has let go all but about ten people from VI's staff, and that two are on temporary contracts…

Now we have to wait and see if Sun xVM business unit will suffer the same destiny.

Labels: Acquisitions, Oracle, Virtual Iron

Just two weeks ago Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron, surprising many industry operators that consider the virtualization vendor offering redundant to the Oracle VM and Sun xVM portfolios (Oracle acquired Sun just one month before Virtual Iron).

Oracle didn’t disclose the price paid for Virtual Iron, and Virtual Iron didn’t disclose its earnings in these years, so it’s impossible to say if the database giant decided to buy just to avoid a similar move from a potential competitor and because the deal was cheap, or if the Virtual Iron acquisition was a premium one because Oracle really needed its management stack.

Anyway the Virtual Iron financial situation was unveiled last week by the New York Times, so that any reader may draw his own conclusions:

Labels: Oracle, Virtual Iron

Just two weeks ago, after one year and a half of silence, EMC (or better a couple of its top executives) decided to publicly criticize the Oracle support policy against its subsidiary VMware.

The trigger for such change of directions probably was the acquisition of Sun, which may transform Oracle in a dangerous competitor in the long term.
Rather than replicate on the corporate blog, Oracle answered with the acquisition of Virtual Iron, which is pretty much equal to a declaration of war.

While Oracle VM Server is being sold as a general purpose hypervisor that customers can use for any workload, a few are really using it to run any application but Oracle ones.
The acquisition of Virtual Iron, even more than the acquisition of Sun and its xVM virtualization portfolio, may change this perception and attract a different kind of customers that not necessarily use Oracle products.

So EMC is back on the topic, this time attacking the entire Oracle virtualization strategy.
Once again is Chuck Hollis, Vice President, Global Marketing CTO, to push the button on his personal blog:

…Put in the context of other recent activities, the picture is crystal clear: it appears that Oracle intends to use their market power with databases to force customers to consider their soon-to-be-announced virtualization stack.

…

Almost all of my IT customers want to standardize on a single virtualization layer.  They'd like to use one consistent set of technology to virtualize server applications, virtualize desktop applications and virtualize all the supporting cast of management, security, backup, etc. as well.
And, not surprisingly, they've all chosen VMware as the direction they'd like to go.
It appears that Oracle is going to try and bust up this happy customer-centric vision.  It looks like they're going to use customers' dependence on the Oracle database to force a separately architected, separately managed and separately supported virtualization layer on their customer base.

…

There are a host of useful features in VMware that we'll probably never see in the Oracle hypervisor.

…

Sorry, Mr. Customer.  You'll have to live with a separate, clunky, inefficient and expensive Oracle Officially Supported Alternative.  Oracle wins, customers lose.

…

Sorry, Mr. Customer.  I guess you can't consider Oracle for vSphere fault tolerant environments.  Maybe SQLserver, maybe UDB, maybe something else -- but not the Oracle database since that feature isn't in the Oracle Officially Supported Alternative.  Oracle wins, customers lose.

…

Now, you know I talk to large customers frequently, and -- frankly -- they're pissed at all of this.  With Oracle's latest moves regarding Sun and now Virtual Iron, they can clearly see what's going on here.  And they're starting to figure out how they want to play this.

One smart fellow told Oracle that they were starting a large-scale proof-of-concept around Microsoft's SQLserver as the strategic alternative to the Oracle database.  The Microsoft team was more than happy to help, as were we at EMC.  I don't know how it's going to end, but I bet that Oracle does a special deal with this guy regarding VMware support as a result.

Another guy told me he was starting to contract with one of the focused Oracle boutique consulting organizations for most support issues -- they had no problem with VMware -- and denying Oracle services revenue in the process…

Labels: EMC, Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron

Less than one month ago Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, closing one of the most strategic deal of the last ten years.
With Java, Solaris, MySQL, Oracle also inherited the entire Sun xVM virtualization portfolio.

Oracle has its own Xen-based hypervisor, Oracle VM Server, and its own management console, Oracle VM Manager, but it’s reasonable to believe that these two products will merge with Sun xVM Server and Ops Center in the coming months.

Any customer at this point would assume that Oracle has enough resources, engineers and developed code to release a strong virtualization product against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.
It seems that this is not the case.

Today the company announced a second, major acquisition in the virtualization space: Virtual Iron, for an undisclosed sum.  
This confirms the rumors that virtualization.info reported in March.

So far Virtual Iron raised $65 million in five rounds of investment, one of the highest sum ever granted to a virtualization vendor.
In the last couple of quarters the company reported a healthy growth: 130% revenue growth in Q4 2008 and 65% growth in Q1 2009.
During the last year anyway, many of the original executives left the company, including the founder and CTO Alex Vasilevsky who is now heading the startup called Virtual Computer.

After the release of Xen by XenSource (now acquired by Citrix), Virtual Iron was one the first competitors to adopt it, so the company can probably count on seasoned virtualization engineers and the favor of a certain number of the Xen adopters. 
Despite that, most of the features of the Virtual Iron hypervisor overlap the Oracle VM Server and Sun xVM Server ones.
So it’s not completely clear why the database giant needed to close this additional deal.

Is Oracle trying to become the fourth major player in the virtualization space by consolidating the market?
Or is this an indirect admission that both its product and the Sun one are not competitive enough against ESX, XenServer and Hyper-V?

For sure Oracle has a big challenge now: merging the code and the portfolio of the three products will require a flawless and timely execution.
Without it the company will not be credible to the eyes of its investors, customers and partners, and it will risk a mass exodus of the Sun and Virtual Iron virtualization experts to other companies.

The first virtualization vendor to be disturbed by the new Oracle/Sun/Virtual Iron giant is Red Hat, that plans to lead the open source market with a new virtualization solution based on KVM.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly

Labels: Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron

In the last two years Virtual Iron has been frequently mentioned as an acquisition target in rumors about Novell, Symantec and other big IT vendors.
The last one comes from Jeffried & Co. analyst Catherine Egbert who suggested that Virtual Iron is being acquired by Oracle.

The rumor was picked up by several news sites, including LocalTechWire, ITBusinessEdge and The Register.
virtualization.info reached out both companies but, as expected, Oracle answered that the company doesn’t comment on press stories while Virtual Iron didn’t answer at all.

Does Oracle need Virtual Iron? If we listen to Larry Ellison the answer is no.
But it’s not because Oracle is not interested in becoming a global virtualization player. Quite the opposite.

The Oracle CEO once said that his cat could write the VMware hypervisor and to prove it in November 2007 his company released its own virtualization platform: Oracle VM.

Maybe Ellison overlooked the challenges that come when you want to develop and sell a mission-critical virtual machine monitor (VMM) because so far Oracle VM failed to gain any relevant market share.
The Oracle hypervisor comes free since day one and it’s based on Xen, but it didn’t turn all the heads that Citrix is turning with its upcoming free XenServer.
One of the reasons behind this lack of interest is that Oracle, exactly like Citrix, is not recognized as a virtualization vendor and has to develop a huge marketing action to change this perception.

Another reason why Oracle may be changing its plans to go solo and look for the acquisition of Virtual Iron is to not lose control on the development of Xen.
After Citrix acquired XenSource, some key contributors of the open source hypervisor went away: one of them is IBM, another is Red Hat which will extensively adopt KVM in H2 2009.
The major contributors that are still developing Xen may either jump on the KVM bandwagon or ally with Citrix, influencing the features and roadmap of the hypervisor to slow down Oracle.

So it’s possible that Oracle needs a virtualization vendor more than what originally expected.
For sure Virtual Iron has the knowledge, the technology and the brand to make Oracle VM more relevant in the virtualization space and influence the Xen roadmap in a useful way.

Labels: Acquisitions, Oracle, Virtual Iron

After a development period of ten months, Virtual Iron updates today its virtualization platform to version 4.5.

The upgrade introduces a key feature for customers with high-security requirements, the role-based access control, a long overdue capability, the internal network switches (aka switches not binded to physical NICs), and the support for Windows Server 2008.

Along with the new features, Virtual Iron 4.5 comes with a new packaging, as the company seems to have renamed the Enterprise Edition in Extended Enterprise Edition.
No chances to the Free Edition which is still capped as follow:

• Up to 4 virtual servers
• Up to 1 virtual CPU
• Local disk storage only
• No VLAN
• Novell SLES 10 kernel & drivers
• Online community support only

Labels: Releases, Virtual Iron

It really seems that the wave of executive departures that Virtual Iron suffered in 2008 didn’t impact the business.
The company in fact reports a healthy growth for the second quarter in a row with a 65% increase in revenues from the fourth quarter of 2007 as compared to revenues in the same period in 2008.

In Q4 2008 Virtual Iron reported a 130% growth.

In the last few years Virtual Iron never reported such high numbers: so or the company is really improving its communication capabilities (maybe the just hired Susan Roberts is the key here), or the leadership change is bringing some positive effects, or it’s just a coincidence.

Labels: Virtual Iron

CohesiveFT is a company offering an online solution to assemble virtual machines and deploy them on cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon EC2. Additionally, it offers a web management console to administer them.

CohesiveFT competes with another well-known company in this space, rPath, and now both can offer support for Virtual Iron virtual machines.

The virtualization vendor partners with rPath since January 2007, and now do the same with CohesiveFT.

Labels: Alliances, CohesiveFT, Virtual Iron

Virtual Iron finally found a replacement for Mike Grandinetti, former Chief Marketing Officer, who left the company in May.

Susan Roberts replaces him as Senior Director of Marketing.
She comes from Dassault Systems where she was Director of Global Branding and Marketing Communications and Paxonix where she was Director of Marketing.

She holds a U. S. Patent (pending) for interactive consumer instruction and her work has been recognized by numerous regional and national award committees including the prestigious Clio Award for Best Interactive Television Service, as well as the Business Marketing Association Silver Award for achievements in database marketing and  the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in Exporting.

Labels: Leadership, Virtual Iron

In the last period Virtual Iron lost a number of key executives: the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Strategy Officer (still working as consultant), and the Director of Corporate Marketing.
Even before this, the company decided to not show up at industry events like the VMware VMworld for a couple of times.

Considering these facts the impression is that Virtual Iron is trying to contain the costs and avoid to burn the $65 million that raised in five rounds (the highest financing ever in the virtualization industry, excluding VMware).

Virtual Iron may not have another chance to collect capital, so it must to gain a more significant market share (Gartner reports no more than 1%) or to be acquired.

While there’s obviously no news about an acquisition, the company revealed some information about its growth: 130% revenue increase from Q3 2007 to Q3 2008, and 2,000 customers worldwide.

While these are great numbers the real problem is understanding if they are great enough to survive against the competition with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Sun and Parallels (and probably more coming).

Labels: Virtual Iron

There’s no doubt that hardware virtualization has a chance to significantly reduce the power and cooling usage in most companies thanks to remarkable server consolidation ratios. But some vendors are trying to use automation to make the IT greener (as marketing people love to say).

Virtual Iron and VMware now offer the capability to consolidate into a single server the virtual machines served across a bunch of virtualization hosts.
The VMs are live migrated and the empty virtualization hosts are powered off until there is an actual need for them.

While this sounds a great thing it may have some side effects that few companies are considering.

Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, is wondering if this dynamic power management has a concrete impact on the hardware mean time between failure (MTBF).

Interesting enough the major IHVs that he contacted didn’t perform any test to find out.

Labels: Virtual Iron, VMware

The list of executives leaving Virtual Iron gets longer and longer.

In May the company lost its public face, the Chief Marketing Officer Mike Grandinetti.
In November it also lost the one that was supposed to reshape the go-to-market strategy: the Chief Security Officer Tony Asaro. Asaro left the company after just

And now Virtual Iron loses its Director of Corporate Marketing Tim Walsh.

In realty Walsh left before Asaro, in October, to found, like its former colleague, his own consulting company.
Walsh left Virtual Iron after more than 3 years (and $65 million funding).  

Now, or the CEO Ed Walsh is working to completely renew its leadership team or the high-level profiles are leaving a sinking boat.

Labels: Leadership, Virtual Iron

After its co-founder and its Chief Marketing Officer, the virtualization vendor Virtual Iron lost another key executive: Tony Asaro.

Asaro joined the company in January 2008 as Chief Strategy Officer and replaced Mike Grandinetti, the former CMO, in the relationship with press and analysts when he left.

Asaro left in September but it seems that the relationship with Virtual Iron will continue in the role of Senior Advisor.

The company direction is now in the hands of Sandeep Bhangi, Vice President of Corporate Development & Strategic Alliances, who comes from Sun and Apple, and the rest of the leadership team.

Labels: Leadership, Virtual Iron

This week Virtual Iron announced an extension of its partnership with LeftHand Networks as the virtualization vendor joined the SAN vendor’s Technology Alliance Program.

The relationship started over one year ago when LeftHand obtained the certification to work with the Virtual Iron hypervisor.

It’s interesting to note that this new deal arrives immediately after HP completed the acquisition of the storage vendor, after months of heavy promotion operated by VMware.
Maybe the relationship between Virtual Iron and HP may further improve now.

Labels: Alliances, Virtual Iron

Last week a Gartner chart comparing virtualization vendors market shares and their hypervisors’ features generated a lot of buzz as, for example, Oracle VM was reported as more used than Microsoft Hyper-V.

The chart was included in a recent article from Datamation, but Gartner said that it was part of November 2007 report.
The analysis firm has requested the news magazine to update its article with the newest version of that chart, based on projections made on March 2008. Let’s compare the two diagrams:

	November 2007
	March 2008

As you can see the data is remarkably different and even more interesting for several reasons:

• While VMware continues to be unreachable in terms of market share, Microsoft now jumps to the second position, ahead of Citrix, despite Hyper-V is really new on the market while Citrix counted 400 new XenServer customers in Q4 2007, to add on top of the XenSource ones won before the acquisition.
• Oracle, which was as good as Virtual Iron and better than Citrix in the first chart, goes back to the lowest rating for the Management / Automation category and for the Maturity / Stability category.
  It’s an interesting degradation considering that Oracle VM updated its hypervisor to 2.x version in July (after the second projection went out): something terrible must be happened somewhere between 1.x and 1.x.x. to negatively influence Gartner.
• Virtual Iron, XenServer and Hyper-V became more expensive

But the chart is interesting also for another reason: now that we have a guarantee about the freshness of Gartner data, we can compare its market share projections with the IDC ones, published two weeks ago generating another strong flow of comments. The difference is more than remarkable:

• Microsoft market share: IDC (23%) – Gartner (7%)
• VMware market share: IDC (44%) – Gartner (89%)

Please consider that the IDC percent refers to an aggregate data that includes both ESX and Server for VMware and both Hyper-V and Virtual Server for Microsoft. We don’t know if Gartner did the same.

In any case it’s clear that there is a major discrepancy between the projections, putting in serious doubts the reliability of every report on the virtualization market shares.

It would be interesting to have additional numbers from other analysis firms. If Forrester, Burton Group or any other wants to play this game we’ll update this post accordingly.

We wonder, no irony intended, if virtualization.info could be used to provide some reliable metrics about the virtualization adoption to compare with the ones above.
To verify this we published a very simple (9 questions) survey covering just the hardware virtualization (hypervisors) adoption.

This should be considered as a first attempt to measure the market through our audience and it’s expected that the survey design may be unsatisfying for somebody.
If the experiment will be successful we’ll work on more sophisticated questionnaires, evaluating multiple aspects of the market.

Every reader but virtualization vendors employees is welcome to answer the 9 questions. It shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes.
The results of course will be published free of charge online as soon as we reach a fair amount of responses.

http://www.virtualization.info/surveys

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron

Datamation just published a new article about Virtual Iron and its potential to win virtualization competitors.

The piece includes a very interesting Gartner chart that reveals surprising information:

First of all the Microsoft virtualization offering is perceived as the less mature and stable compared with the other in the matrix. Even less than Oracle, the last vendor entering the virtualization space.This shouldn’t surprise much considering that Hyper-V is at its first edition while Oracle uses Xen as the hypervisor for its Oracle VM.
Nonetheless it’s a further confirmation that Microsoft still has a huge amount of work ahead if it wants to change the market perspective.

The second interesting detail is that the estimated number of deployed virtual machines for Microsoft already reaches 50,000, while some competitors like Virtual Iron can just double the number despite they are in the space since a remarkable amount of time.
Once again the fact that Oracle VM has more deployed virtual machines than Microsoft is surprising.

The third interesting fact is that Oracle VM is the only hypervisor perceived as secure as VMware ESX.
As mentioned above Oracle adopts Xen as virtualization engine, pretty much like Citrix and Virtual Iron, but compared with the other is the youngest in the space.

It’s unclear how recent this chart is, but for sure it’s related to 2008: considering that Oracle VM has been around for less than one year, if these numbers are reliable maybe it’s time to reevaluate the relevance of Oracle in the virtualization space.

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends, Microsoft, Oracle, Virtual Iron, VMware

Labels: Virtual Iron

Labels: Virtual Iron