Year: 2007

In the last two years the most popular virtualization book has been for sure VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide, written by two exceptional authors: Ron Oglesby, CTO at RapidApp (now acquired by Glasshouse), and Scott Herold, former Director of R&D at Vizioncore and now Vice President of Engineering at Invirtus.

Despite the book, focused on ESX Server 2.x version, is yet to be considered old, Oglesby and Herold are already offering it for free, while working on next book: Virtual Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide.

This new edition sees Mike Laverick, well-known VMware trainer based in UK, joining as third author and taking care of a special section of the book: Advanced Operation Guide.

A 110-pages free preview of VI3ATDG is available online and covers:

• Part 1 – Chapter 4 – VirtualCenter and Cluster Design
• Part 1 – Chapter 10 – Recovery and Business Continuity
• Part 2 – Chapter 1 – Installing ESX 3.x

Download it at the official website.

While waiting for this release, you may want to check several other new books about VMware Server, ESX Server, XenEnterprise and Virtual Server that virtualization.info Bookstore is now listing.

Quoting from Bloomberg:

…

VMware, which went public last week and has a market value a seventh of Google’s, is wooing code writers with salaries that recall the dot-com heyday of the late 1990s, headhunters and analysts say. The salaries are more than other software companies in the area are offering, said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research.

Chowdhry estimated that Palo Alto, California-based VMware is paying $130,000 to $160,000, plus stock options –compensation that only Google can match, he said.

…

VMware’s hiring push “is a preemptive move against XenSource and Microsoft,” Chowdhry said. “Virtualization is very hot right now, and a lot of companies are thinking about buying it. That’s why VMware is engaged in aggressive hiring, with aggressive compensation, to stave off emerging threats…

Read the whole article at the source.

A demonstration that VMware is not the only company looking for talented virtualization developers is provided by virtualization.info Job Board: every day there are tents of new announcements from popular companies all across US.

Network World published a short interview with Mike Neil, General Manager for Virtualization Strategies at Microsoft.

The interview is interesting mainly because of two statements.

First:

Server virtualization is still a developing market and technology. Since, to a great degree, the utilization of virtualization has been in relatively confined areas, typically in large enterprises or infrastructure products like [VMware’s] ESX Server, Microsoft will be able to have a much broader approach and make virtualization available to a wider swath of the industry.

And second (talking about VMware VMotion feature):

From a competitive standpoint, it is a sexy feature and sounds really exciting. But, of the Microsoft customers using VMware or other virtualization technology, few are actually utilizing that type of functionality. It is a relatively sophisticated piece of technology to set up. The capabilities we do have and are shipping — our ability to cluster virtual machines and the ability to migrate quickly — will meet most customers’ needs.

So Microsoft basically believes virtualization is still at its beginning. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Challenges report is demonstrating this is very true.

But Microsoft is also downplaying value of virtual machines live migration, which instead is where virtualization is expressing its highest value at the moment.

When using virtualization in production environment there’s no customer, enterprise or SMB-grade, that would ever refuse such capability if it comes affordable and reliable. The fact that VMware VMotion in particular is currently demanding expensive and complex pre-requisites is another story.

Quoting from Enterprise Network And Servers:

…

Virtualization provides too many benefits to just stand by and watch. According to the Yankee Group, 9 out of every 10 enterprises will have implemented virtualization into their IT infrastructure by the end of 2007…

Read the whole article at the source.

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

Two weeks ago at LinuxWorld conference Kevin Kettler, CTO at Dell, showed an OptiPlex 745 running Windows and Linux virtual machines on top of XenSource hypervisor.

Reports from sevearl news sources are vague and very different: InformationWeekk and others are reporting Dell will preload XenSource (now acquired by Citrix) hypervisor on its server line, while Linux Insider and others are reporting such offering will be available on consumers PCs as well, as soon as early 2008.

First scenario is very likely, considering Dell is working with VMware on upcoming ESX Server hardware appliance: the hardware vendor may want to offer more than one hypervisor to its customers.

VMware shares performances continues to improve: today, one week after IPO, VMW is still raising, surpassing $66 during the day and closing at $65.99, achieving another 15% of growth.

Despite shares value at IPO was $29, financial analysts at Barron’s say that current price is still cheap:

…

By the way, the pre-IPO excitement contrasts with that leading up to the initial offering of Google, which had to cut the price of its shares. Whereas Google shares gained 18% on the first day of trading, VMware moved up 76%. I suspect that more than a few people who skipped buying GOOG in the early going were determined not to miss VMware…

Barron’s analysts have same opinion about EMC:

…

For one thing, EMC will consolidate VMware’s results on its income statement, meaning it stands to benefit directly from VMware’s strong future. VMware’s profit will rise 59% a year for the next three years, according to Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert. And VMware’s 50% annual sales growth could add as much as five percentage points to EMC’s yearly revenue growth, says Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi…

This article was moved to the new section virtualization.info TechTalk.

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Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class software for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management, today announced it has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance, a community of software and hardware vendors working to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems based on user feedback.

Joining the Interop Vendor Alliance enables Virtual Iron to continue to improve the performance of its technologies and solutions in customers’ multi-vendor environments. Other alliance members include Citrix, EMC, Novell and Sun Microsystems…

This news, announced same day VMware launched its IPO, is particularly important now that Citrix acquired XenSource: Virtual Iron is the first company which could be damaged by this acquisition, despite Citrix’s good intention about open source.

virtualization.info broke the news in April 2007, after a close analysis of IPO documentation VMware presented to SEC for its IPO. But virtualization leader never issued an official announcement in following four months.

Finally, a week after the launch of its successful IPO, VMware confirms the acquisition by redirecting Propero website to its own, and providing following note to readers:

Propero Limited Acquired by VMware, Inc. in April 2007

VMware expects to use the Propero technology and expertise to extend its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offerings and to provide a more complete solution for the discovery and management of virtual desktop machines.

There are still no mentions about the deal.

So far VMware acquired three companies: Akimbi in June 2006, a vendor focused on virtual lab automation, Propero in April 2007, providing a hosted desktop solution, and Determina in August 2007, a security firm busy on pro-active patch management and 0-day attacks defense.

After XenSource acquisition by Citrix, another breaking news is going to shake virtualization industry: young virtualization platform KVM, already included in Linux kernel, is being ported on Windows.

At the moment there are no more public details than a mention on official FAQs page:

3.4. Do you have a port of kvm for Windows?

Not in this release.

Company maintaining KVM, Qumranet is still in stealth mode but it’s expected to announce its first product before the end of September. During such occasion the virtualization startup may also unveil the upcoming port.

KVM for Windows would have a huge relevance in the virtualization industry, offering an open source alternative to commercial solutions made by VMware, Parallels and Microsoft itself.

Another young company offering an open source virtualization platform is german startup innotek, with its VirtualBox, but at the moment the product is oriented to desktop usage only.

KVM is also being ported on FreeBSD since May 2007.

FreeBSD is currently missing an enterprise virtualization platform and KVM may fill an important empty space.

More news about Windows porting as soon as possible.