Cisco on Nexus 1000V features
One of the biggest enhancements expected with the next version of VMware Infrastructure (possibly called vSphere 4.0) is the new pluggable virtual infrastructure, which will allow customers to replace the standard VMNet virtual switch with 3rd party software switches.
The first company to offer such product will be Cisco, which announced the Nexus 1000V at VMworld 2008 last September.
After seeing the virtual switch command line for in action and its architectural diagram, we now have extensive details about its features, thanks to an exclusive virtualization.info interview with Paul Fazzone, Product Manager of Nexus 1000V at Cisco.
Fazzone also provided a key information about the release date of the virtual switch: H1 2009.
This date makes very likely that both ESX 4 and Nexus 1000V will be released at the imminent VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes.
The Virtual Iron virtualization strategy
So far the Xen hypervisor offered a unique opportunity to enter the virtualization market as a major player.
Top industry vendors invested (Citrix, through the XenSource acquisition, Novell, Red Hat) or are investing (Sun) million of dollars to bring it inside the enterprise business.
One the first companies embracing Xen is Virtual Iron which achieved some notable goals in the last few years:
- it accumulated the impressive capital of $65 million in five investment rounds
- it closed major OEM agreements (with HP and IBM, with Dell, with Provision Networks, with Arrow Electronics) and partnerships (with Microsoft, with PlateSpin, with FalconStor, with Reflex Security, with Fabric7)
- it provided a broad range of certified storage (NetApp, IBM, EqualLogic, Data Core) to its customers
- it launched its own channel partner program since more than one year already
and yet the company has to face major compeitition for all the other big players mentioned above.
virtualization.info met Ed Walsh, the new CEO of Virtual Iron and asked questions about the competition, the go to market and acquisition strategies, the technology roadmap, the relationship with Microsoft, and more.
The Quest virtualization strategy
Quest involvement in virtualization has increased substantially over the last two years. The company initially made a controlling investment in Vizioncore in 2005, acquired Invirtus in June 2007, then Provision Networks in November 2007. Last month Quest finally completed the acquisition of Vizioncore.
While the acquired companies are focused on different virtualization segments (disaster recovery, VDI, P2V migration and virtual machines performance optimization), Quest itself has long been well-known for its focus on software management of applications, databases and operating systems like Windows.
So while Quest is becoming a major virtualization player, its parallel business focus, its acquisition strategy and its current relationship with its subsidiaries in virtualization can be confusing to customers. virtualization.info met Scott Herold, the new Lead Architect of Quest’s Virtualization Business Unit, to ask for clarification about the big picture.
The Sun virtualization strategy
Sun is the latest major player entering the virtualization space and challenging VMware after Microsoft, Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Citrix and Parallels. Anyway the company is in a unique position compared to all these competitors.
Sun in fact is able to provide the certified hardware (both servers and storage), two different virtualization platforms (both xVM Server and Solaris Containers), a management solution (Ops Center), and even a VDI connection broker (Sun VDI).
On top of that Sun has a partnership in place with Microsoft to grant interoperability and high performance for Windows virtual machines.
For all these reasons Sun entrance in the market is expected with much interested.
virtualization.info met Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, asked ten questions about the overall Sun virtualization strategy and discovered some major news:
The XenSource acquisition
Biggest news after VMware IPO surely is XenSource acquisition by Citrix.
Leading one of the most popular open source projects ever, Xen, XenSource is a critical company to influence (in positive or negative ways) the free world community and the virtualization industry.
virtualization.info wanted to investigate how this acquisition may impact the market, and asked Simon Crosby, CTO at XenSource, and Wes Wasson, Corporate Vice President of WorldWide Marketing at Citrix, to answer ten questions about different topics, including Xen forking, commercial offering changes, partnerships agreements and support policy with VMware.
The IBM involvement in virtualization
IBM pioneered virtualization 40 years ago with mainframes. Since that time the technology has been ported to x86 market, mainly thanks to the effort of VMware.
Now that virtual machines are revolutioning the whole IT industry, IBM is demonstrating its experience putting huge efforts in hypervisors (Virtualization Engine and Xen), management tools (Virtualization Manager and Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager), desktop solutions (Virtualized Hosted Client Infrastructure), and benchmarking (vConsolidate) development.
virtualization.info met Rob Sauerwalt, Global Brand Manager for IBM System x, to discuss about current company involvement in virtualization and his point of view about raising market trends like virtual appliances and application virtualization in an exclusive interview.
Virtual Iron on the Microsoft-XenSource partnership
Despite the wide and good success the Xen hypervisor project has obtained in the open source community, commercial solutions based on it or incorporating it didn’t have similar luck:
- the launch of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 has been severely judged by Red Hat, accusing the competitor to offer the product while still unsuitable for enterprise deployment
- the interoperability agreement between XenSource and Microsoft has been hit as well by VMware, accusing competitors to take advantage from open source community work without providing anything back
- and finally the launch of XenEnteprise, by XenSource itself, has been compromised by its own CEO’s declarations, stating Xen actually isn’t enterprise-ready
In this very confused scenario the most direct XenSource competitor, Virtual Iron, which is going to deliver a virtualization product based on Xen as well, decided to talk with virtualization.info: Mike Grandinetti, Chief Marketing Officer, offers company’s point of view on Xen maturity, Red Hat involvement in the project, value of XenSource agreement with Microsoft and VMware future.
The Vizioncore roadmap
One week after the launch of the new esxMigrator tool, Scott Herold, Director of Research and Development at vizioncore, sit down with virtualization.info speaking about company products, future projects and state of the virtualization market.
The Microsoft and XenSource partnership
Two weeks ago Microsoft and XenSource announced an agreement to grant interoperability of virtual machines on upcoming Windows Server Virtualization and XenEnterprise virtualization platforms.
The move raised the attention of the whole IT world, involving licensing, supporting, security and performance issues.
virtualization.info interviewed both companies to further understand details of the agreement and spread some lights on what customers have to expect for the Microsoft hypervisor release.
To answer questions I met Mike Neil, Senior Director of Virtualization Strategy, Windows Server Division, at Microsoft, and Simon Crosby, CTO at XenSource.
To simplify questions and answers since now we’ll call a virtual machine natively running on Microsoft hypervisor, Windows Server Virtualization, as WSV-VM and a Xen virtual machine natively running on XenSource hypervisor, XenEnteprise, as XE-VM.
The Akimbi acquisition and the VMware roadmap
Immediately after the release of new Virtual Infrastructure 3, virtualization.info had the pleasure to reach Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware, to ask him details about just launched products, recent Akimbi acquisition announcement, secret VMware Integrity product, planned presence in the Apple operating system and further steps in virtualization market leader strategy.
From his answers a revelation comes out: VMware is going to partially support Microsoft virtualization technologies.
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