Year: 2007

Starting with VMware Workstation 6.0, VMware is introducing new capabilities in its virtual infrastructures. One of them allows virtual machines to exchange data without using guest OSes network-based approaches like FTP, NFS, NetBIOS, etc.

This capability is granted by a new experimental interface called VMCI:

The Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) supports fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host.

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Without VMCI, virtual machines communicate with the host using the network layer. Using the network layer adds overhead to the communication. With VMCI communication overhead is minimal and different tasks that require that communication can be optimized…

This interface allows transmission of small messages between VMs, as well as sharing of complex data like guest OSes memory.

This opens new possibilities in solving old problems like high availability: think about a virtual cluster where nodes are no more required to communicate by network to share data and activate fail-over.

At the same time, capability to share with host OS, makes VMCI suitable for solving new class of problems, like efficient security check of virtual machines: think about a virtual infrastructure where anti-virus, host intrusion detection systems, endpoint security agents, etc., are controlling guest OSes integrity from host level, without the need to install same agent software inside all virtual machines.

Considering such opportunities, once this technology will be available on VMware server-class products it may allow new generation of security tools.

Read the whole VMCI documentation at source.

This is possibly what Steve Herrod, Vice President of Technology Development at VMware, was referring to in his keynote at Symposia 2007.

Quoting from ITPro:

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At a VMware event in London IDC analyst Chris Ingles said that virtualisation is increasingly being used for core business processes.

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Ingles said he expects the number of physical servers which are virtualised to jump from seven per cent this year to 50 per cent in 2011. “That may be a little bit conservative,” he said…

Read the whole article at source.

This month IDC also predicted that physical server market will hardly grow over 2% annually through 2011 because of virtualization and that virtualization services market will reach $11.7 billion by 2011.

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

Quoting from the IDC official announcement:

As virtualization goes mainstream and becomes an integral part of the IT infrastructure, there are increasing opportunities for IT services to help customers implement and support this expanding technology. According to recent research from IDC, the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011, as data center managers struggle to address power and cooling issues and the need for increased capacity.

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The market for services around volume servers (servers with an average selling price of less than $25,000) will experience tremendous growth between 2006 and 2011.

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Currently the largest services opportunities for the virtualization software vendors will be around software support and education and training. However, the IT consulting and Systems integration services are showing faster growth…

Considering this prediction it’s not surprising Glasshouse just acquired virtualization consulting firm RapidApp.

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

In June 2007 virtualization.info reported a news about Invirtus acquistion by Quest, already owning Vizioncore. Nor Quest neither Invirtus ever commented such news.

But a recent move between these companies is indirectly confirming such relationship: Scott Herold, Director of R&D at Vizioncore, popular among VMware users because of its book VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide, left his role to become Vice President of Product Engineering at Invirtus.

This movement is confirmed by new management profile published on Invitus website.

Invirtus hiring of a key Vizioncore representative seems to timely to be casual.

Despite great success collected with its VMTN forums, VMware is working on a new community portal called VI Ops.

In March 2007 virtualization.info discovered the name and wrongly supposed it could be a new add-on for VMware Infrastructure 3.

VI Ops is instread a new wiki created to:

Learn how to view, create and save your own operational processes using the plan, design, deploy and manage sections.

You can also use existing Operational Processes submitted by customers who use VMware in their enterprises. Share your operational processes with others, or share individual resources such as scripts, papers, tools with the community.

The website, temporarily available here, doesn’t seem near beta status yet, so company’s customers may have to wait still a while before using it.

Virtual infrastructures adoption obliges companies to adopt more rational administration models and operations processes, to contain and control phenomenon like virtual machines sprawl and physical resources wasting / overloading.

In this perspective VMware is welcome in providing blueprints for administration best practices.

Virtualization market is so profitable that after virtualization vendors, also virtualization consulting firms are becoming interesting acquisition targets.

Quoting from the Glasshouse Technologies official announcement:

GlassHouse Technologies, the leading independent IT infrastructure consulting and services firm, today announced it has acquired Chicago-based server virtualization consulting company RapidApp. In addition to server virtualization, the acquisition extends GlassHouse’s offerings into virtual storage, virtual desktop infrastructure, and application delivery and deployment services. As a result GlassHouse customers will benefit from deeper infrastructure management services and consulting throughout their organizations.

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RapidApp will be integrated into GlassHouse’s existing organization, increasing GlassHouse’s total number of employees to over 450 worldwide. Northcutt will assume the role of vice president of Delivery, U.S. and UK; Koury will assume the role of vice president in the GlassHouse sales division…

Quoting from the moka5 official announcement:

moka5, a virtual computing company targeting consumers and small to medium-sized businesses, today announced completion of a $15 million Series B round of financing. The round was led by Highland Capital Partners and included an additional investment by existing investor Khosla Ventures.

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In conjunction, moka5 names former Microsoft and Yahoo executive Bill Demas as Chief Executive Officer.

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Demas comes to moka5 with broad experience in business development, product development, marketing, sales, strategy and general management. He was most recently SVP and GM of the Yahoo Publisher Network Group. At Overture, acquired by Yahoo in 2003, Bill helped lead the company to distribution and publisher revenues of $1 billion. Following the acquisition by Yahoo Publisher Network Group, Demas built hundreds of exclusive distribution relationships with major Internet sites and publishers of all sizes resulting in revenues that more than doubled through 2006.

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moka5 Founder and former CEO Monica Lam will continue to help advance the technology at the company as Chief Scientist and has resumed teaching and research in her role as a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University…

CNET News is reporting Microsoft is finally disclosing a date for Windows Server 2008 (formerly codename Longhorn) release: February 27, 2008.

So if Microsoft is going to respect release plan for Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian), its first hypervisor is set for general availability in late August 2008, 13 months from now.

Because of this date, it’s more likely Microsoft will release Viridian at same time of VMware conference, VMworld, set in early September since this year. VMware customers could expect release of ESX Server 4.0 as company answer.

Quoting from ComputerWeekly:

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Stephen Herrod, vice-president of technology at VMware, presented the company’s plan for its virtualisation technology, in his keynote address.

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VMware is working on expanding this limit to enable users to run larger virtual machines with more than four processors and more than 16 Gbytes of memory.

The company is also working on improving the performance of its virtualisation technology. “We need to support more memory,” Herrod said. Users often use VMware to run multiple copies of Windows Server. This is not efficient as each copy requires its own memory. Instead VMware is developing a memory sharing technology it claims will enable VMware virtual machines running identical software to share memory…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from eWeek:

In the coming years, VMware will continue to dominate the market for x86 server virtualization, but it face new challenges from Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 and XenSource, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

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However, Microsoft’s hypervisor will not likely ship until mid-2008, and with various delays and updates, a newer version will not appear until at least 2009. This, Gillett writes, means that Microsoft will not be able to impact the market until at least 2010.

As for XenSource—the company that grew out of the open-source Xen project—it remains a much smaller company than VMware, which means that it too will not be able to offer a serious challenge until 2010. However, its deal with Microsoft that allows compatibility and interoperability with Windows products does provide a base to challenge VMware in the coming years…

Read the whole article at source.

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