Year: 2007

Quoting from the AppStream official announcement:

AppStream, Inc., a leader in on-demand application deployment and management, recently named Srinivasa “Venky” Venkataraman as new chief executive officer. Mr. Venkataraman was formerly AppStream’s chief operating officer.

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Mr. Venkataraman has more than twenty years industry experience managing, designing and implementing complex software systems. Prior to joining AppStream, Mr. Venkataraman served as Vice President of R&D at Zone Labs where he helped develop the leading personal and distributed firewall technology that is currently installed on over 20 million PCs worldwide. Before Zone Labs, Mr. Venkataraman served as VP of Development at Senterprise and as a senior manager for Autodesk, where he managed software development for e-commerce and e-business solutions. Mr. Venkataraman has a Master of Science degree with a Mechanical Engineering major from Purdue University, Indiana and a Bachelors degree in Mechanical engineering from Madras University, India…

Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:

PlateSpin Ltd. today announced that the company has won the 2007 “Virtualization Technology of the Year” award as part of The Banker Technology Awards. Backed by The Financial Times UK, The Banker Technology Awards recognize innovation and excellence in the banking technology space worldwide.

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“As large banks and global financial services organizations work to consolidate space, power, and server resources in the data center, innovative solutions like those provided by PlateSpin are becoming increasing important,” said Brian Caplan, Editor, The Banker…

Virtualization startup ToutVirtual is trying to simplify its complex products offering adopting new names. So two editions (525 and Standard) of VirtualIQ, a web-based management console for several virtualization platforms (including Microsoft and VMware ones, with limited capabilities for Xen-based ones), are now merged together in VirtualIQ Pro.

ToutVirtual also adjusted price for this product, now offered at $599 for a one-year subscription or $1499 for a three-year subscription (up to 10 CPUs (sockets) or up to 50 virtual machines).

Company is also working to address other virtualization needs, set to launch somewhere in the future ProvisionIQ, a datacenter automation workflow which may compete with Dunes VS-O on paper.

ToutVirtual has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Every year LinuxWorld expands space dedicated to virtualization technologies. This new 2007 edition, taking place in San Francisco, CA, from 6 to 9 of August, exposes a complete track for the topic, with some interesting sessions presented by XenSource, VMware, Microsoft, rPath and other vendors:

• Can Open Source Virtualization Catch Up (Or Is It Already Ahead?)
  The open source Xen project has hit the headlines a great deal as the various Linux distributions bring their Xen-based products to market. Millions of copies of Xen have been distributed, and Xen is now used to virtualize demanding production workloads in major enterprises such as Amazon. What’s the next step for Xen? Should it focus on better integration in Linux, or add features that strengthen its play as a platform hypervisor? What is Xen’s real edge in the market against Microsoft’s forthcoming hypervisor and the popular proprietary VMware products? How do customers want to consume their virtualization? Xen as a platform hypervisor lacks the fit and finish of VMware’s ESX, but do customers want to consume virtualization from their OS vendor instead, and if so, is VMware relevant, and why is Microsoft so late? This session will answer all of these questions and more.
• How Secure is Your Virtualized Network?
  Although virtualization will drive down hardware costs and increase server utilization, it will also create new management and security challenges. Server sprawl will be replaced with “virtual server sprawl”. New vectors are vulnerable to attack at the management, hypervisor, I/O and hardware levels. Instead of targeting physical machines for profit and access to critical data, malicious internet hackers will target virtual machines instead. Security must uniquely protect virtual servers, networks, and data without constraining the innovation and flexibility virtualization brings with it into the data center. This session will cover unique ways to deliver security to physical networks, servers and endpoints as well as their virtual counterparts in the future.
• Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and On the Wire
  Today, leading virtualization solutions are provided by a mix of Xen-enabled Linux and Windows-based solutions running in mixed environments. As part of a broader interoperability collaboration, Microsoft and Novell technical experts are architecting and testing new virtualization scenarios to jointly develop the most compelling virtualization offering in the market for Linux and Windows. This talk will cover two major components of the future of Linux and Windows interoperability: Virtualization (“On the Metal”) and Web Services protocols (“On the Wire”). We’ll cover the virtualization interoperability work being done between the Longhorn Server hypervisor, Viridian and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xen, and also the details and challenges of implementing standards specifications, such as WS-Federation and WS-Management.
• Case Study: How Virtualization Impacts Systems Management
  Virtualization is generating genuine excitement in the IT community. Over the long term, this new approach to managing resources may cause a fundamental transformation of IT operations. However, virtualizing servers is in fact only the first step toward achieving real Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) improvements. Improved server utilization does help lower acquisition costs, but those savings may be relatively insignificant compared to the ongoing costs of managing the infrastructure needed to host workloads, including operating systems, applications, networks, patches, and software updates. How does the adoption of virtualization affect the way that systems are managed? In an effort to answer this question, Ideas International recently interviewed 50 users who had deployed virtualization about their requirements for managing virtualized infrastructures. This session will summarize the results of these interviews, providing a snapshot of the impact that virtualization has in a variety of real-world environments today.
• Panel Discussion: Xen and KVM – Separating Fact from Fiction
  Join key Xen and KVM developers who will gather to provide their insight into the strengths and weakness of the two most visible open source virtualization technologies. The moderator will guide the discussion into the technical details of the KVM and Xen architecture and implementation and help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of each. This discussion will also cover the gaps that exists today and what is needed for Linux virtualization going forward.
• Panel Discussion: Virtualization and Blades: Complementary or Competitive?
  This session will demystify these two very topical technologies by directing the panelists with hard hitting questions, with a specific focus on what capabilities are ready for prime time today, which capabilities are still immature, what benefits that users are truly realizing today. This discussion will also cover where virtualization and blades complement one another and where they overlap, and what we can expect to see in the next twelve months.
• How Virtualization Enables and Threatens Software as a Service
  Gone are the days of the annual release cycle. Software companies need to operate with rapid releases while maintaining high quality and tight integration. For Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, weekly releases are the new standard. Meanwhile, virtual appliances promise faster software deployment for all software, especially open source. Where do these two trends help each other? And where do they compete? This session will answer these questions and more.
• Making Linux a Virtualization-Friendly OS
  A variety of technologies, such as binary translation, paravirtualization, and hardware assist, are available for virtualizing x86 servers and operating systems. This talk will provide an overview of some of these technologies and how they are used to virtualize operating systems such as Linux. Being an open source OS, Linux stands to benefit tremendously from community awareness of the specific challenges and opportunities that exist for operating systems running in a virtual environment. This talk will provide an update on community efforts to increase the performance and portability of Linux in a virtual machine, highlighting examples of collaboration between hypervisor developers and the Linux community. We will discuss techniques that are supported in VMware products, in Linux distros, and in the mainline Linux kernel. The talk will also highlight future trends in virtualization, including ones that are directly of interest to the Linux community.
• Panel Discussion: The End of the General Purpose OS
  Until recently, the computing world has been dominated by The General Purpose OS. This model uses a one-size-fits-all approach, dictating that software be certified for a specific platform, and forcing developers to spend a great deal of time and expertise ensuring compliance with specific OS requirements. Upon realizing the constraints of such a model, the tech industry has undergone a major shift toward virtualization, a more promising platform for application developers, with 2006 ending as arguably the year of virtualization. As more companies embrace virtualization and its associated business benefits, the next era has already begun and 2007 will be the year of the virtual appliance. Virtual appliances and software appliances wrap applications in an extremely customized (and therefore small) OS, and play on industry-standard hardware or in a virtualized environment. Billy Marshall and Erik Troan will provide insight on virtualization’s impact on the software industry, as well as why the general purpose OS will soon be dead, giving way to virtual appliances.

Beside these sessions LinuxWorld 2007 is going to be interesting also for expected Diane Greene, VMware President, keynote, which will cover upcoming evolutions of virtualization technologies. A new product or technology to be announced?

Register for it here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

Parallels achieves release of its third release of popular Desktop for Mac OS the weekend before Apple WWDC conference, beating once again VMware efforts, still working on Fusion beta 4.

As disclosed in last week release candidate announcement, Parallels Desktop 3.0 introduces a second remarkable integration capability after Coherence, SmartSelect, and other important features like snapshots, virtual drives offline access, partial support for 3D applications.

Download a trial here.

Parallels is also preparing to release (or at least announce) its first Server product, as company’s Marketing Manager Ben Rudolph lets understand in its marketing communications.

Second half of this year is critical for market arrangement before Microsoft will introduce its new hypervisor: Windows Server Virtualizatoin (WSV, formerly known as codename Viridian).

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

Altiris, still operating as an independent subsidiary, releases first minor update since Symantec acquisition: Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) 2.1.

This new version introduces support for Microsoft Windows Vista and major capability to stream virtualized applications, through a partnership Symantec made with AppStream.

Despite acquisition SVS is still offered in a Personal edition, free of charge, and a Professional one. The Personal Edition is available here.

The more application virtualization solutions become popular the more it’s evident they need streaming capabilities to fully deliver Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm.

For this reasons vendors are working to offer both capabilities in a single solution: Softriciy (acquired by Microsoft), Ardence (acquired by Citrix) and Thinstall all offer both capabilities.

Time for a new Symantec acquisition?

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

Youngest virtualization player march continues with release of VirtualBox 1.4.

With this new edition innotek officially enters the Apple market, already seeing competition between Parallels, with its Desktop solution, and VMware, with its upcoming Fusion, introducing support for Mac OS X (still in beta).

But VirtualBox 1.4 is also introducing other key improvements like:

• Support for AMD 64bit CPUs (and extended support to all 64bit Linux hosts)
• Support for raw partitions
• Import capability for VMware VMDK virtual hard drives

(complete changelog is available here)

VirtualBox 1.4 is released under GPL license and it’s available free of charge here.

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

Russian startup Veeam continues to release at lightspeed updates for its unique Reporter solution, able to map a VMware virtual infrastructure on a Microsoft Visio diagram.

In this new major release Veeam introduces capability to generate reports also in Word, Excel and PDF format, providing optimal arrangement for each document type.

Download a trial here.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), which allows hosting providers such as Web hosting services, telecommunications companies and outsourcing businesses to bring to market new virtual infrastructure as service offerings.

The VSPP incorporates a new licensing model that makes the industry-leading VMware Infrastructure suite available to hosting providers on a per-virtual machine, per-month basis.

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Hosting providers can choose to license either VMware Infrastructure Enterprise or Starter, enabling them to provide a broad range of utility computing packages for various customer needs, from high-end managed services to individual Web site hosting…

VMware doesn’t disclose prices applied to its partners for this license, letting them charge customers depending on retail offering.

After applying virtualization to thin computing (with VDI effort), VMware now tries to do the same on the hosting market, basically replicating Microsoft Hosting Program and its Services Providers License Agreement (SPLA).

But while thin computing market may be easier to dominate, because traditional server-based computing solutions, never became too popular, on hosting market VMware has to compete with several consolidated players, including relatively new SWsoft, which is conquering the market with its Virtuozzo.

Russian company is aggressively competing with VMware both in Windows/Linux market both in Apple one, with its subsidiary Parallels. At the sime time SWsoft and Microsoft recently enforced their relationship with a support business agreement.

All of this means now VMware has another front of indirect competition with Redmond giant.

VMware approaches final beta stage for its new desktop virtualization product, Fusion, targeting Apple marker.

Trying to compete with Parallels Desktop (reaching today version 3.0), which became highly popular because of its integration capabilities like Coherence and new SmartSelect, VMware delivers in this new build (48339) an impressive new feature dubbed Unity.

Unity provides what Server-Based Computing providers usually call seamless windows, allowing users to see applications inside a virtual machine just like they are installed at the host level.

See a video of Fusion beta 4 in action here or enroll for beta program here.

It’s evident both Parallels and VMware seem to believe Apple audience has different needs than Windows/Linux one. There is no other reason why features like Coherence, SmartSelect and Unity are not included in Parallels Workstation and VMware Workstation as well.

Strong integration capabilities greatly improve general operating system usability and should be extensively provided in any product, not just ones for Apple market.