Year: 2007

Quoting from ComputerWeekly:

Gartner fellow, Brian Gammage, said, “Microsoft’s licensing terms for Windows Vista running in VMs are unjustified; in addition, these terms are widely perceived as being designed to delay market adoption of competitive virtualisation software.”

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Gartner expects Microsoft to release a hypervisor for Windows Vista by mid-2009, which would lead to a rapid increase in the number of virtualised installations. Gammage said, “To accommodate this change, Microsoft will need to make a number of adjustments to Windows licensing and product use rights.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Putting aside predictions, it’s true Microsoft has to do something for its desktop virtualization strategy. So far in fact company only talked about Windows Server Virtualization (WSV, formerly codename Viridian), which will be a bare-metal hypervisor solution.

No words have been spent to address desktop virtualization need for customers which saw few and non-competitive improvements over years on Virtual PC.

Possibly Microsoft wants to approach virtualization in two different ways: hardware virtualization with WSV on server-side, and application virtualization with SoftGrid (acquired in 2006 from Softricity) on client-side.

If Microsoft decides to offer hardware virtualization also for desktop instead, it has three choices: continue improving Virtual PC, which seems unlikely considering investments made so far in WSV, adapt WSV to work with Windows Vista, which could require long time before seeing a working product, or buy a vendor already offering a competitve solution in this segment (e.g.: Parallels, innotek).

Parallels acquistion woudld imply SWsoft acquisition as well, which makes sense, considering Microsoft willing to offer OS virtualization beside hardware and application virtualization.

In all cases Microsoft has to clarify strategy as soon as possible and deliver it without further delays to avoid VMware taking unrecoverable market shares.

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

With an email to its beta testers VMware announces availability of release candidate (build 397) for its upcoming Lab Manager 2.5.

Company doesn’t detail which improvement are in place for this new build and beta program is declared closed.

VMware also discloses RTM version will be available in early July.

Since Lab Manager 2.5 introduces support for ESX Server 3.0.2, this minor verions for ESX is expected as well in the near timeframe.

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

Starting from today virtualization.info releases an improved version of its Virtualization Industry Radar introducing two new features:

• Vendor’s history
  Each vendor’s name in the Virtualization Industry Radar doesn’t like anymore to company website but exposes all virtualization.info related articles, arranged in chronological order.
• Vendor’s rating
  Virtualization Industry Radar now also exposes a performance tracking, rating each vendor as Underperform, Neutral or Outperform.

  Rating levels assigned by virtualization.info Industry Radar are based on actions performed on the market at strategical and technical levels (market dominance and influence, capability to compete, acquisitions strategy, openness to interoperability and standardization, customers support policy, releases frequency and quality, etc.). There is no relation with financial performances achieved by listed companies.

virtualization.info hopes these improvements will further help readers in their analysis of virtualization market and invites to visit Virtualization Industry Radar at following address: http://virtualization.info/radar

(updates are available through a dedicated RSS feed readers can subscribe here)

Slashdot and other major news source reports WINE developers are claiming a violation of adopted license (LGPL) from Parallels.

It seems in fact SWsoft subsisdiary is using some parts of WINE source code, enhancing and using them inside commercial product Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X, but not distributing them back to the community, as GPL license requires.

To track down these violations and discussions WINE is having with Parallels about this topic, WINE staff is now exposing everything online with a wiki called Parallels Desktop Watch.

Despite dispute started June 1st so far WINE didn’t want to start a legal action against Parallels.

One Slashdot reader claims to be a former employee and provides his view on the topic:

As a former employee, I should say that part of the problem is developers, that choose libraries for the project without looking into the license. I didn’t work on Parallels project, so I don’t know how exactly it is there, but in our project I several time had to tell people that they can’t use some library, because it is GPL and they were like “Hmm, never thought of looking at it from this perspective”. Most of them just used to take and use whatever is available.

This is not the only licensing issue Parallels is involved in: in April 2007 virtualization.info exposed a silently ongoing lawsuit from Netsys GmbH, which claims rights over a large portion of Parallels Workstation code.

Update: WINE developer Stefan Dösinger just confirmed they received modified sources from Parallels, which are now available for the whole community here.

Now WINE staff is busy in the reviewing process.

Second update: While WINE developers are still in the review process, Paralells takes an official position letting its marketing manager Ben Rudolph clarifies company position:

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Parallels does use a very small amount of Wine code in our 3D graphics implementation.

We compiled the modified sources, checked and double checked them for accuracy, cleared them with legal, and provided them to Wine as required. The problem that arose for some people is that we didn’t do this as fast as we should have (which, admittedly, we didn’t). I should note here that the Wine LGPL doesn’t state any timeframe for getting sources to the Wine project…only that you need to at some point.

There’s no violation of the license, no secrecy and nothing to hide…just a delay of a few days due to the fact that we’re a small company with a small engineering team that’s trying to focus on a million things…

Quoting from the Internet News:

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“I believe VMware could represent a very serious challenge to Microsoft’s hegemony. VMware creates the ability to manage below the operating system, which turns the operating system into a commodity. Citrix wasn’t a threat. Netscape wasn’t a threat. These were replaceable technologies. VMware has an opportunity to become irreplaceable.”

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“It is unbelievable how much time Microsoft has allowed VMware to grow,” Bittman remarked. “I also believe if Microsoft does things right, they can eliminate the challenge,” Bittman said.

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Bittman said he believes VMware not only needs to quadruple the amount of virtualization licenses it sells this year, but that the virtualization vendor needs to “move very, very rapidly” in creating new features none of the competition — Microsoft, Xen, Virtual Iron and SWSoft — yet possess.

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“As a part of EMC, they cannot make any acquisition that they choose to make,” Bittman said. “They are running independently but [VMware President] Diane Green can’t decide today to merge with Opsware; while VMware might have aspirations to acquire or merge with Opsware or BladeLogic, so does EMC and they have different goals. I believe EMC should make the money on VMware now and invest it somewhere else — before VMware gets too big…

Read the whole article at source.

While Thomas Bittman, Vice President at Gartner, mention of Opsware and BladeLogic could be seen as just examples for VMware acquisition strategy, decision to call for these names doesn’t seem so casual: one month ago SYS-CON reported a rumor claiming VMware is looking to buy Opsware after its IPO, still expected this summer.

From corporate blog Virtual Iron founder and CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, pre-announces opening of Virtual Iron 4.0 beta program.

Register for it here.

In its Techworld Awards 2007 both PlateSpin and VMware achieved recognition.

PlateSpin won Green Product of the Year award for its PowerRecon 3.0, while VMware won Virtualisation Product of the Year award for its Infrastructure 3.

It’s true virtualization can drastically reduce power consumption in worldwide datacenters, but it’s clear green computing is the new marketing hype of the year. Most virtualization products could be considered green.

Quoting from the Catbird official announcement:

Catbird Security today announced the first comprehensive security solution for virtual networks.

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The VMware-certified Catbird V-Agent virtual appliance delivers the operational flexibility that is a hallmark of virtual infrastructure. Unlike traditional host-based solutions, stateful appliances and proprietary hardware solutions, Catbird’s unique stateless “in-the-cloud” architecture is 100% plug-and-play for virtualized environments…

Quoting from Computing Business Review:

Serguei Beloussov told Computer Business Review in February that the company would aim to eventually integrate the operating system-level and hardware-level virtualization technologies, but suggested the results were a long way from general availability.

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“We will have them together by the end of the year,” he said this week, noting that the Parallels hardware virtualization approach will become a feature of Virtuozzo, and vice versa. “In the management tools you will create a virtual environment, or a virtual machine, but it will be transparent,” he said. “We actually envision that operating system virtualization will work on top of hardware virtualization, and definitely alongside…

Read the whole article at source.

Jeff Gould at Interop News wrote a very long and interesting article on Xen market status

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Suffice it to say there has been a lot of excitement and optimism in the pundit community about Xen.

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But now that Novell and Red Hat have both been shipping Xen in their commercial Linux distributions for some months, things have grown eerily quiet. Sure, there is still product news coming out of the Xen vendors, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But what I’d really like to know is – who’s actually using this stuff in production? And I mean actual end-user organizations, not ISPs or hosters. Based on the absence of Xen-related chatter, my guess is that production users of Xen are still few and far between.

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Taking Novell, Red Hat, XenSource and Virtual Iron together, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a dozen named reference customers for Xen.

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If we take off our open source blinders for a moment and look at Xen objectively, we can begin to spot a few of the flaws that appear to be holding it back.

The first problem with Xen is that as a piece of software it is far less mature than VMware ESX.

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Then there is the question of performance.

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A year ago I thought that Xen offered Red Hat a huge opportunity to take some market share from Microsoft before the release of Longhorn (Windows Server 2008). Apparently Red Hat thought so too, because they planned and promoted the release of the all-important RHEL5 around Xen, even delaying the launch date by several months to smooth out the snags encountered in the integration effort.

But today it’s apparent that however Xen evolves in the future, it isn’t going to be the Longhorn killer Red Hat thought it would be…

Read the whole article at source.