Year: 2007

This year edition of most popular virtualization event in the world, VMware VMworld 2007, is set to be a unique experience.

More than 10,000 are expected in San Francisco for September 11, when VMware is supposed to disclose a lot of new products and initiatives, like:

• ESX Server lite edition on Dell hardware (and possibly other OEMs)
• Server 2.0

The whole content catalog has been finally published and several sessions seem really interesting, like:

• Chargeback in a VMware Virtual Infrastructure
• Fault Analysis and Methodology
• Performance Benchmarking in Virtual Environments
• Debugging Hard Bugs using Record/Replay Technology
• VMware Server 2.0: The Onramp to VMware Infrastructure
• New Technology Directions in the Virtual Hardware Platform
• High Performance Virtualized I/O in 10Gigabit Ethernet Era
• Evaluating Virtualization Platforms Using VMmark

Register for it here.

virtualization.info will be there to understand new trends and provide a complete round-up (read the VMworld 2006 one).

So if you are a reader and plan to attend I’d be happy to meet you (send an email to [email protected] to arrange a meeting).

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

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Quoting from Computer World:

…

“Midrange servers are experiencing a period of short-term investment this year, partly as a result of firms adopting some larger systems with a view to the rollout of virtualization,” according to the report. “This adoption of virtualization, however, will be an inhibitor over the longer term as the overall server market struggles to maintain growth rates of more than 2% annually through 2011.”…

Read the whole article at source.

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

Quoting from Business Journal:

Former Amazon.com Inc. executive Mark Peek has joined VMware Inc. as chief financial officer, the company said Thursday.

In his new role, Peek will lead VMware’s finance, IT and facilities teams.

The Palo Alto-based company said Peek has more than 25 years of industry experience, including as Seattle-based Amazon.com’s chief accounting officer and senior vice president…

Read the whole article at source.

Considering this one as last step before its Initial Public Offering, there’s a chance VMware decided to launch IPO at VMworld 2007, in early September, instead of this summer as initially announced.

Quoting from InformationWeek:

…

Virtualization has thrown us for a loop, quite honestly,” said Shannon Poulin, Intel enterprise marketing manager, last month at an IDC conference on virtualization. Two years ago, less than 5% of the data center had been virtualized. By 2010, Intel projects that 25% of enterprise data center servers will be running in virtualization mode. Server design is trying to catch up with the trend, Poulin said.

…

“The virtualized environment is the Wild West when it comes to performance benchmarking,” he noted.

“I think we’re only in the infancy” of designing servers for virtualized operation, he added.

…

Intel’s Poulin said future Intel motherboards for four-way servers will contain a “Flex” feature to assist in the migration of virtual machines across different servers.

…

Poulin said Intel’s second generation virtualization hooks will let a virtual machine migrate across all Intel chips and breach the Intel/AMD barrier…

Read the whole article at source.

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

Allen Stewart, Principal Program Manager of Windows Server Division at Microsoft, wrote a short but interesting piece on one serious problem companies embracing virtualization have to face: change of IT administration model.

…there does not seem to be a consistent model some companies have taken the approach of keeping things the same way as the physical environment, others have created a virtualization group and assigned them the task of managing the virtual world.

…

So in the centralized approach Tier 1 and Tier 2 have complete rights to the environment and handle activities like VM creation from templates, deleting VM’S, starting/stopping, workload migration. The Engineering team handles, virtualization product evaluation, environment build out, creating standard VM builds/templates.

…

Certain environments like branch offices and test/dev labs may dedicate a different model where Virtualization tasks and activities are delegated to business units or IT in branch offices…

Read the whole article at source.

VMware is finally approaching final release of its first virtualization product for Apple desktops: Fusion.

In this last build (50460) VMware introduces some interface improvements (including Unity experimental support for more Windows editions) and a memory optimization control system.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Quoting from the IGEL official announcement:

IGEL Technology today announced the inclusion of a Leostream client in the latest version of its Linux firmware.

…

IGEL offers VDI compliance in addition to all the other digital services available in its Linux firmware. This includes terminal emulation, Citrix ICA, NoMachine NX, VoIP, Java and native SAP.

…

VDI compliance will be available across all IGEL Linux thin clients from July 27th 2007…

After announcing a revamped Virtualization Industry Radar, virtualization.info launches today a new tool: Virtualization Industry Predictions.

Virtualization Industry Predictions collects all forecasts major analysis firms publicly disclosed since 2003, providing customers, system integrators and investors another effective tool to research and track virtualization market evolution.

Virtualization Industry Predictions is available at this address: http://virtualization.info/predictions

Just two weeks ago SearchServerVirtualization published first vague informations about an upcoming lite version of VMware ESX Server, featuring hardware integration at some levels.

Now website News Director, Alex Barrett, is back on topic revealing Dell will be VMware partner offering this solution in a new server line called VESO:

…

VESO, according to a large Dell customer who was briefed on the product, will be available in the second half of this year, and will have extended memory and I/O capabilities, simplified iSCSI boot functionality, physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration services, and an embedded hypervisor, most likely ESX Lite.

…

The addition of an iSCSI boot option suggests that ESX Lite may come in multiple versions. An embedded version residing in memory would be more of an OEM offering, the source said, whereas booting off iSCSI storage rather than a flash drive or firmware could lay the foundation for larger, richer hypervisor environment…

Read the whole article at source.