Year: 2003

Gartner reports:

“Server virtualization technologies will bring mainframelike workload consolidation and flexibility to reduced instruction set computer and Intel servers through 2008. In addition, re-provisioning technologies will expand the boundaries of RISC- and Intel-based workloads, enabling them to be dynamically “right-sized” to larger or smaller servers when needed. The changes and offerings will be incremental, but they will build to result in significant cost and labor savings throughout the period should become an ongoing effort and a part of the server strategy for every enterprise.”

Here full prevision: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/vmware/118469.html

I need to say no better news to end this 2003 blog archive 🙂

Since I’m not in the beta program I can permit myself some speculations 🙂

Satyam Vaghan from VMware asked in ESX Server public newsgroup to informally answer some questions I’ll report below enterely:

Dear pple,

Thanks,
-Satyam

This means a new upgrade is coming…?

P.s.: Answer him! You know this could bring to a better product in the near future

Since VMware Workstation upgrade is coming, VMware staff is asking experienced customers and enthisiastic people to submit some small but very useful “tip of the day” to make them appear at product startup (as I can imagine):

The VMware Workstation product team collecting short but useful tips for new users of VMware. We want to collect them from you, the experienced users, to share with new users who are going to work with Workstation for the first time. Your ideas may find its way into the product documentation itself!!

“Suspend a virtual machine if you want to stop temporarily and resume at the same point. Take a snapshot if you want to return the virtual machine to the same point repeatedly.”

So if you think you have some good ideas reply to this post on VMware web community.

VMware is cooking upgrades for two of the most popular products: Workstation and GSX Server. I cannot reveal versioning for both upgrades, since I’m covered by NDA, but I strongly suggest you to adhere both beta programs to have great surprises…

Here announcements appeared in official web forum:

Workstation:

VMware is making a beta version of the next update release of VMware Workstation available to interested users. If you would like early access to our new release for testing and evaluation purposes, please visit this URL to subscribe to the Workstation Test mailing list:

Please make sure your email address is the same one registered with VMware.

GSX Server:

VMware is making a beta version of the next major release of VMware GSX Server available to interested users. If you would like early access to our new release for testing and evaluation purposes, please send email to:

It is helpful if your email is sent from your address registered with VMware.

VMware launched two new programs to strenght partnership with key customers and other figures gravitating around virtualizazion world.

First one is the Referral Program, aimed to create new low profile VMware evangelists. Here how it works:

Do you believe in VMware software? Are you someone who has influenced
colleagues, raved about us to friends, posted on newsgroups, and generally
evangalized VMware? If so, we want to reward you for contributing to our
progress!

To sign up for the VMware Referral program, go to www.vmware.com/ref

I personally will not adhere to this program since I don’t wanna give the impression I mantain this blog to have something in exchange.

The second one is the Core Customer Program, aimed to create or better define high profile VMware / virtualization evangelists.

Here some raw details about how it works:

VMware Core Customers are an exclusive group of VMware users who understand the benefits of VMware products and want to spread the word to the IT community. The VMware Core Customer Program gives our top customers the opportunity to share their experiences with other VMware customers and showcase their companies as technology leaders in activities such as:
Speaking with other companies that are evaluating VMware software
Developing a case study on their VMware deployment
Talking with press and analysts
Maybe most importantly, the Core Customer program gives VMware the chance to highlight the ways our customers use our products to lower costs, improve performance, and fulfill corporate business requirements with highly responsive IT services.

To sign up, simply email [email protected] and we will contact you with information needed to join the program. Be sure to include your name, company, and title in the email.

This last one is still quite obscure. I should receive more informations in early January so stay tuned for updates.

Errebian, an important Italian e-procurement company, appeared in VMware customers satisfaction list. Their adoption of GSX Server to virtualize a whole demilitarized zone (DMZ) providing .NET web hosting and more, was interesting enough for VMware folks to produce a case study.

I personally managed all phases of the project: intial Return on Investiment (ROI) calculation, implementation, performance tuning and VMware case study submission and I need to say that working with Antares I.T. and VMware people it’s really enjoyable.

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.”