Year: 2007

Quoting from the Embotics official announcement:

Embotics, the Virtual Machine (VM) Lifecycle Management Company, today announced the appointment of Eric Courville as vice president of Sales and Business Development. In his new role, Courville is responsible for worldwide sales and will oversee the company’s go-to-market efforts and the development of Embotics’ partner programs. Courville brings over 17 years of experience in sales, sales management and business development within enterprise software and hardware markets.

Previously as PlateSpin’s vice president of Global Alliances, Courville was responsible for establishing and maintaining relationships with all worldwide channel, OEM and alliance partners. Courville also served as PlateSpin’s vice president of Sales and Business Development before his Global Alliances role, where he helped lead PlateSpin to well over 200 percent revenue growth annually over the last three years; increasing the number of customers from less than 60 to more than 3500 globally. Prior to PlateSpin, Courville held management positions with MediSolution, Platform Computing and Silicon Graphics…

Today Citrix announces that XenSource acquisition is completed, and confirms that Xen development will still be led by Ian Pratt, co-founder of XenSource.

Citrix also reveals that Ian Pratt is now an employee, which implies a remarkable impact on how the open source hypervisor will evolve.

So the question is not just about how much committment Citrix will have in open source, but how much support thet will continue to receive by other Xen contributors, like IBM and Red Hat, which probably don’t feel too comfortable about company’s deep relationship with Microsoft.

One week ago virtualization.info broke the news that Citrix was about to transform its VDI connection broker, Desktop Server, into something different. Now the company officially confirms it, exposing its new virtualization strategy now that XenSource acquisition is completed:

…

With the completion of the XenSource acquisition, Citrix now adds two new product lines to its portfolio, Citrix XenServer for server virtualization and Citrix XenDesktop for desktop virtualization. Combined with the company’s existing application virtualization products, these two new additions give Citrix the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end virtualization portfolio:

• Server Virtualization with Citrix XenServer
  The new Citrix XenServer product line is an enterprise-class platform for managing server virtualization in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing and storage resources. Based on the high-performance Xen virtualization engine, Citrix XenServer combines comprehensive server virtualization capabilities with unparalleled scalability, performance and ease-of-use. The new product line ranges from Citrix XenServer Express Edition, an easy-to-use single-server solution available for free download, to the more comprehensive Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition (formerly XenEnterprise).
• Application Virtualization with Citrix Presentation Server
  With more than 70 million users and 99 percent of the global Fortune 500 as customers, Citrix Presentation Server is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. Presentation Server stores all Windows applications in a single central store in the datacenter, then delivers them to end users on-demand via innovative application virtualization technology. Server-side app virtualization stores applications on the server and virtualizes the presentation layer to end users, while client-side app virtualization streams applications to the desktop and runs them in a protected virtualization environment at the end point.
• Desktop Virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop
  Citrix XenDesktop, scheduled to ship in the first half of next year, will be a groundbreaking new product line designed to overcome the challenges of cost, complexity and user experience that have prevented virtual desktops from becoming a mainstream enterprise reality in the past. Citrix XenDesktop will be the industry’s first comprehensive, fully integrated desktop delivery system, moving beyond the limitations of existing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) point solutions to ensure the simple, secure, fast delivery of Windows desktops to any office worker over any network. Citrix XenDesktop will combine a powerful desktop delivery controller (based on Citrix Desktop Server with native ICA protocol support), Xen virtualization infrastructure for hosting any number of virtual desktops in the datacenter, and virtual desktop provisioning to stream a single desktop image on-demand to multiple virtual machines in the datacenter (based on Citrix Provisioning Server).

XenDesktop will be released in H1 2008, but a Technical Preview Kit is available today here.

What happened to Citrix Desktop Server support for VMware ESX Server? At the moment no informations are available.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Update: The Citrix FAQ page about XenDesktop reveals VMware support strategy:

Does Citrix XenDesktop support VMware environments?

Yes. Citrix XenDesktop supports VMware environments. VMware ESX customers can use Citrix XenDesktop for delivering their virtual desktops hosted on VMware ESX.

Do I have to replace VMware to implement Citrix XenDesktop?

No. Citrix XenDesktop was built to integrate with a variety of VM infrastructures including VMware, XenSource and Microsoft.

Vizioncore is well-known for its prodigality in giving away free versions of its product. They started with esxBasics, a free bundle including former esxRanger and esxCharter (which Vizioncore is about to release with a new format), and now continues with products acquired from Invirtus.

First one is vOptimizer, recently released in version 4.0, which has following limitations in its freeware shape:

• 2 users
• No reporting or email notification
• No support

Download the freeware edition of vOptimizer here.

This product should be included in the arsenal of free virtualization tools that virtualization.info exposed last week.

The virtualization startup Veeam finally released first version of its Monitor for VMware Infrastructure 3.

This new product brings all features already seen in Monitor for VMware Server and Workstation, with some important differences in architecture: it’s a multi-tier solution, supports multiple ESX Servers monitoring, doesn’t require an agent, and doesn’t even require VirtualCenter, which makes it suitable even for SMBs.

Download a trial version here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Accountability is one of the top 10 challenges virtualization.info recognizes for virtualization adopters. Only few companies are working on this segment at today but the need for chargeback capabilities is high, mostly in big enterprises.

Today a new company called V-Kernel officially launches with a product in this space: VKernel 1.0

VKernel, which is (unfortunately) delivered as virtual appliance only, integrates with VMware VirtualCenter and automatically pull stats from the virtual infrastructure. From them the product can generate several reports about software license fees, power cost, etc.

Download a trial here.

V-Kernel has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap and the Virtualization Industry Challenges report have been updated accordingly.

Despite only few days passed since major faults Amazon suffered on his Xen-based general purpose grid computing facility, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the company is ready to announce a major improvement in the service, introducing 2way and 4way 64bit virtual machines.

In details Amazon now allows creation of three kind of virtual machines inside EC2:

Small Instance (default)

• 1.7 GB memory
• 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
• 160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
• 32-bit platform
• I/O Performance: Moderate
• Price: $0.10 per instance hour

Large Instance

• 7.5 GB memory
• 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
• 850 GB instance storage (2 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
• 64-bit platform
• I/O Performance: High
• Price: $0.40 per instance hour

Extra Large Instance

• 15 GB memory
• 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
• 1,690 GB instance storage (4 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
• 64-bit platform
• I/O Performance: High
• Price: $0.80 per instance hour

But the biggest news is that EC2 beta program is no more restricted to a small amount of testers.

Enroll for it here.

Quoting from the XenSource official announcement:

XenSource, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise-class virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced that it signed its 1000th customer in Q3. The introduction of the feature-rich, high-performance XenEnterprise v4 in August accelerated this growth, helping the company nearly double its customer base. New XenSource customers include ASIERUS, Carsdirect.com, Cornell University, McKesson, Miami Herald, Microsoft, Polycom, Postini, Raytheon and Sleek Networks. Additionally, XenServer and the freely available XenExpress also experienced record customer traction, with more than 25,000 downloads of XenExpress occurring in Q3…

XenSource announced the 500 customers goal in July 2007, so it only took 4 months to double the customers base.

It’s worth to note that among its customers XenSource has Postini, which has been acquired by Google. So in some ways Google is now using virtualization technologies. A strange thing since the search engine stated

From the Xen-devel mailing list Keir Fraser, Project Leader at XenSource, announces release of new Xen 3.1.1 version.

The very short announcement reveals this is a bugfix release only. All vendors using the open source hypervisor (CItrix/XenSource, Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat and now Sun) are expected to update their products accordingly in the coming months.

Binaries for Xen 3.1.1 should be available shortly here.

Along with cost and power saving, more efficiency and flexibility, virtualization technologies introduces severity in datacenter: any virtual infrastructure without a rational and strict operational framework is doomed to fail in returning the expected investment, and in most cases introduces more management problems rather than reducing them.

So the need for guidance during planning, design, implementation and maintenance phases of IT projects is bigger than ever.

VMware already recognized this need and it’s building an online wiki called Virtual Infrastructure Operations (VIOPS) to create a user generated framework.

Now also Microsoft is moving in the same direction, starting a new beta program called Infrastructure Planning and Design, part of Solutions Accelerators beta group.

The program allows beta testers to access a series of guides describing the architectural considerations and streamline the design processes for planning and implementing Microsoft infrastructure technologies.

Microsoft started with two most wanted guide:

• SoftGrid Application Virtualization Guide (37 pages)
  The Infrastructure Planning & Design Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization guide discusses when to use standalone mode and connected mode for application distribution. It assists designers in the infrastructure planning process for SoftGrid by providing a clear and concise workflow of the decisions and tasks required for each method. This guide enables you to plan the infrastructure required for meeting your application virtualization service goals.
• Windows Server Virtualization Guide (50 pages)
  The Infrastructure Planning and Design: Windows Server Virtualization guide discusses Microsoft virtualization options using Windows Server virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. The guide explains design considerations at critical decision points and helps plan for an optimized server virtualization infrastructure architecture to meet organizational goals for performance and consolidation.

but a third one about Terminal Services is expected in Q1 2008.

These guides enhance and replace the Windows Server System Reference Architecture and will be available on Microsoft TechNet for free once finalized.

If you are about to start a new virtualization project with Microsoft technologies they really worth a look.

Enroll for the beta program here with following invitation code: IPDM-QX6H-7TTV.

Thanks to Justin Zarb for the news.