History

Leostream company, one of the first launching virtual machines centralized management solution (much before VMware VirtualCenter appeared), released now a P2V migration tool, as VMware and Platespin already did.

Leostream approach to Physical to Virtual migration is different from VMware: the tool is integrated in main product, Leostream VMC (from versione 2.3), and isn’t licensed for a certain number of migrations. It’s simply an additional feature (actually working with Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 migrations only) and in this way Leostream solution become really cost effective.

It’s done. Finally someone very big acquired VMware.

There are a lot of voices about a previous meeting between Microsoft and VMware folks where MS tried to buy VMware. Someone says there wasn’t a satisfying agreement so MS decided to buy Connectix. Someone else says MS decided to buy Connectix after both virtualization technologies review since Connectix approach was simplier to handle and embed into Windows operating system (MS plans to integrate Virtual Server into next releases of Windows as far as I know).
Nothing of all this is confirmed in any way.

After this EMC Corporation, virtual storage products and solutions provider, decided to come into the game.
Many many VMware customers are now very worried about this: someone thinks prices will become higher and higher, someone else thinks VMware products will fade away between huge EMC offer. And someone thinks VMware will stop to be innovative, impartial, open to customer community requests and needs.

To avoid panic (I think) both VMware president and EMC CEO wrote an open letter to respective customers trying to paint near future for both markets:

Diane Greene, VMware President, open letter to community
Joe Tucci, EMC Corporation CEO, open letter to community

VMware decided to improve popularity lowering (or zeroing) Workstation product price for some professionals categories.

Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP) and Microsoft Certified System Engineers (MCSE) can benefit of this promotion:

For a limited time, when you purchase a copy of VMware Workstation, the first 1000 MCP/MCSEs to register for the program will receive a $100 rebate.

so that we may verify your status as a faculty member.

As reported by BetaPlace, Virtual Server beta testers received the following email:

“The Virtual Server team has added some major pieces of functionality to the Virtual Server product since the Customer Preview build (219) was released earlier this year. These include a full security sweep and audit of the code base, new security settings per Virtual Machine and Virtual Network, virtualized SCSI hardware in the Virtual Machines and cluster failover support between Virtual Machines on the same physical server.

As can happen when large pieces of functionality are added to a product, there have been a larger than expected volume of issues reported during the first round of internal testing of the now feature complete build. We plan to hold the release of the Beta until we are satisfied that it reaches a level of stability and functionality that our customers expect from our products. As a result of this, and the holiday period, the start date for the Virtual Server Beta program has been moved out to early Q1 next year. A firmer date will be provided as we get closer to the release. We apologize for this slip in schedule, but we believe it is the right thing to do. We fully expect the beta release to be a feature complete and stable release.”

The first Microsoft made Virtual PC edition is finally available on MSDN on Platforms section.
It’s a 40 MB iso available only in English language.

VMware just expanded product line introducing a hi-end tool for multiple ESX server (and multiple GSX Server in future) environments: VirtualCenter 1.0

VirtualCenter offers an advanced VMs control that GSX and ESX web management interfaces cannot offer. It also introduces VMotion technology to move without any downtime a virtual machine from one physical ESX to another one.

With VirtualCenter VMware eventually cuts off many third parties companies providing VMs managing products, like Leostream, Platespin, Dunes, etc.

Microsoft annnounced will distribute Virtual PC 2004 on MSDN (any subscription) for mid-November 2003.

I found this paper while Googlin around: hope it’s useful for some of you:

http://suif.stanford.edu/papers/lisa03-deploying-vap.pdf

Some days ago the just launched VMware web community saw 1000th user registered.
A quite impressive result that can provide an idea of how many customers are around (this was impossible with newsgroups analysis).

VMware choosed to add this support tool to already existing newsgroups to let enterprise users (managing company firewalls blocking NNTP protocol, for example) be obtain more profit from community.

First real Microsoft release of Virtual PC, since Connectix acquisitions, is becoming reality (before this, MS released a Virtual PC 6.1 for MAC in August) in about a week and will be worldwide available in around 90 days.
Virtual PC will be also included in MSDN subcriptions.