Year: 2007

The application virtualization company Endeavors Technologies, once doing business as Stream Theory, announces ends of its last lawsuit:

Endeavors Technologies, Inc., Stream Theory Inc. and Exent Technologies Inc. today jointly announced an agreement ending all outstanding lawsuits that Stream Theory has pursued on its patent portfolio. Under the agreement Exent has been granted licenses to Endeavors’ and Stream Theory’s streaming patents and Endeavors and Stream Theory were granted licenses on Exent’s streaming patents.

…

Commercial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Before this one Endeavors closed similar lawsuits with Microsoft and Citrix in March 2007, and with AppStream in June 2007.

The PC component known as BIOS is present in every box since first IBM PC compatible appearance. But in these years its features failed to keep the pace with technology evolution, so that Intel started to work on a modern replacement called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, formerly EFI).

This obliges Phoenix Technologies, which is one of the two worldwide leaders in BIOS manufacturing, to reshape its business model and find new revenue streams. And virtualization is one of the best opportunity at the moment.

virtualization.info has learned that Phoenix is developing its own hypervisor, called HyperCore, designed to host traditional operating systems like Windows Vista, side by side with a special multi-purpose environment called HyperSpace, produced by Phoenix itself.

HyperCore is a true bare-metal Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) which will load directly from Phoenix BIOS, while HyperSpace will be able to provide basic capabilities for daily tasks, like internet browsing and multimedia files view, in isolated virtual machines. The HyperSpace will also provide some security tools, like an anti-virus, to recover other compromised virtual machines.

HyperCore will also be able to run embedded OSes inside its virtual machines, developed by third party ISVs for different purposes.

virtualization.info has also learned that Phoenix Technologies has hired Joanna Rutkwoska, the security researcher behind the Blue Pill rootkit prototype which divided security and virtualization experts, to grant HyperCore’s security level before release.

At the moment no further informations are available. Stay tuned for new details.

The move is of notable importance: while VMware and Citrix fight to embed their hypervisors into popular servers for enterprise customers, Phoenix may be free to do the same thing in the consumer market, but without a single competitor because of its privileged position in the computing stack.

Phoenix may look for acquisition in the virtualization space to achieve the goal as soon as possible.

Worldwide investors are waiting for 2pm PST when VMware will disclose earning report for Q3 2007, the first one as public company.

The announcement will be made with a live webcast, which can be enrolled here.

Meanwhile VMW opens today at $106.15, over three times the IPO price set in August.

Update: VMware published the complete report for Q3 2007, which reveals a 90% growth in net income from $19.2 million (9 cents a share) in 2006 to $64.7 million (18 cents a share), exceeding analysts expectations reported by Bloomberg and other financial media.

Despite the achievement VMware didn’t provide any forecast for Q4 2007, and closed with a -2.48% ($103.52).

Oracle is one of the biggest companies in the IT world creating problems to virtualization adopters because it refuses to adjust support policy and licensing model for virtualization environment.

Several customers are working to move away from Oracle because of that and this may be a reason why the company is now changing its message:

As server virtualization continues to grow in popularity in government data centers, enterprise software provider Oracle will increasingly put its weight behind Xen open-source virtualization software, Charles Phillips, president at Oracle, told GCN in a recent interview.

“We’re big proponents of Linux and standard technologies, so we’re going to put the time toward Xen,” Phillips said. “Our strategy will be around Xen.”

…

“We have not certified our products for VMWare,” Phillips said, adding that “people do that on their own.” Oracle will, instead, put more of its efforts behind Xen.

The company’s efforts at grid-enabling its software would benefit by Xen, he said. Adding a node to a grid cluster might still involve manual work, such as configuring the network addresses. Virtualization could help automate such processes, he said…

This is another strange move from Oracle: XenSource, which is one of the major contributors of Xen, has been acquired by Citrix, and Xen main architect is now a Citrix employee. Citrix has a very tight relationship with Microsoft and it’s hard to believe Oracle may fit this scenario in an easy way.

Less than two months the popular Center for Internet Security (CIS) released first part of a new security benchmarking guide for virtual infrastructures.

This first part covered general security measures to take for enforcing guest operating systems.

Now the CIS released the second part, covering security measures to take with VMware ESX Server 3.0 in 70 pages.

Suggested hardening measures cover various topics, from NTP configuration to use of CHAP to connect iSCSI devices, passing by logging facility fine tuning and boot services minimization.

In its complex it’s a valuable document which will help ESX administrators until the new 3i architecture (which get rid of Red Hat based service console) will be deployed, but as always hardening procedures have an impact on any given environment. Customers which want to follow this guide should first ask VMware if they support the hardened ESX host.

Download both guides at the source.

Thanks to Christofer Hoff for the news.

After announcing new product XenDesktop and its virtualization strategy after XenSource acquisition, Citrix now unveils major distribution agreements with popular OEMs.

First one is with Dell:

Citrix Systems, Inc., the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, and Dell Inc. today announced a partnership to make server virtualization technology a reality for customers of all sizes. By offering Citrix XenServer OEM Edition across Dell’s PowerEdge server line in the coming year, the companies will bring built-in, easy-to-use virtual machine installation and management to millions of Dell customers worldwide.

…

As part of the agreement, Citrix XenServer will support Dell OpenManage and Dell will offer the more comprehensive multi-server Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition as a standalone product or as an easy software license key upgrade from the embedded XenServer OEM Edition. Additionally, XenServer OEM Edition and XenServer Enterprise will be tested, qualified and supported by Dell.

…

Dell expects to begin shipping servers embedded with Citrix XenServer OEM Edition in Q1 2008.

…

Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition can also be purchased directly from Dell or an authorized reseller…

Second one is with HP:

Today at Citrix iForum, the world’s largest application delivery conference, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced an agreement with HP to qualify and sell Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition (formerly XenSource XenEnterprise) on industry-standard HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

…

HP ProLiant servers provide optimum operational efficiency and virtualization performance for consolidation and energy efficiency. HP and Citrix’s expanded relationship provides customers the ability to purchase an entire virtualization solution, from server to software, from HP with the added benefit of interoperability and HP support…

Price is identical in both agreements and doesn’t change from the one announced for XenEnterprise 4.0.

After less than two months since first announcement Sun is already able to release first version of Solaris 8 branded zone (formerly project Etude).

This new branded zone is a special Solaris Container able to host a Solaris 8 instead of Solaris 10 partition, just like Solaris Container for Linux Applications exposes a container to host CentOS and Red Hat Linux partitions instead of Solaris 10 ones.

But differently from its Linux counter-part, this branded zone is offered along with a P2V migration tool, so that Solaris 8 customers (only ones adopting SPARC architectures) just have to migrate their physical boxes to complete the whole process.

While Sun Solaris 10, Solaris Containers and new Solaris Containers for Linux Applications are free, this product doesn’t come free as well. After a 90-days trial you have to buy and subscribe support services, which price is still unknown at the moment.

Download the trial here.

Microsoft just updated its Virtual Machine Additions for Linux guest operating systems introducing support for Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10.

The partnership between Microsoft and Novell is critical here, allowing Novell to have its OS supported much earlier than competitor Red Hat (Microsoft support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is still frozen at RHEL 4.0).

Download the new package here.

Microsoft finally releases RTM version of its System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2007, which introduces live backup for virtual machines hosted by Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1, through the Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Service (VSS).

SCDPM is not free of charge but has been included in the System Center Management Suite Enterprise, along with Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007, Operation Manager (SCOP) 2007 and Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007, priced at $860 per virtualization host (with unlimited virtual machines on top).

Read a whitepaper about the integration with SCVMM here and download the trial product here.

This release finally gives the opportunity to partially address the critical challenge of reliability in virtual infrastructures. Now customers should expect (and demand for) official support statements by third party ISVs, recognizing the virtual machine live backup through VSS as a valid one for their applications.

Quoting from the Vyatta official announcement:

Vyatta, the leader in Linux-based networking, today announced that its open-source networking software has received VMware Virtual Appliance Certification, thereby providing customers with a solution that has been optimized for a production-ready VMware environment. The company also announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program. As a member of TAP, Vyatta will offer its solutions via the TAP program website. With the Vyatta virtual appliance for VMware environments, organizations can now include Vyatta’s router, firewall and VPN functions as part of their virtualized infrastructure…

Vyatta offers an open-source software platform which can be installed on any x86 computer and which provides most routing capabilities currently available only through well-known vendors like Cisco, Nortel, etc.

Cisco is expected to release a virtual version of its networking devices inside VMware ESX Server, as virtualization.info revealed in July. Despite the companies didn’t make an official announcement during VMworld 2007, the informations has been confirmed by several parts.

So emerging competitor Vyatta has all interests in partnering with VMware and have same opportunity Cisco has.