Year: 2007

In April 2007 Zeus Technologies, a company focused on load balancing appliances, tried to enter the virtualization market launching its own connection broker: ZXTM VDB.

Since that time the company released no more news about the product, and today virtualization.info discovers that Zeus simply removed it completely from its website.

Any reference to ZXTM VDB disappeared, despite the website still contains the manual and Google Cache still contains some original pages.

It’s unknown what happened about the product, but it’s sure that the competition in desktop broker market must be tough. virtualization.info expected similar exits since VMware acquired one of the players, Propero, severely hitting its own VDI ecosystem.

Zeus Technologies has been removed from the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Last vendor entering the virtualization arena is the german company innotek.

They launched an open source desktop virtualization product called VirtualBox in January 2007, but besides that the company mostly runs in stealth mode. In fact VirtualBox didn’t get much traction over the year, given the hard competition with VMware Player and Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC and Parallels Workstation.

Anyway innotek is much more interesting for another product, a true bare-metal hypervisor with microkernel architecture, that is in development since a while: hyperkernel.

At today there are no public informations (tech specifications, features, release dates, etc.) about this possible competitor for VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and all the others, but the launch date may be near: the official website now exposes a very short statement saying the product is currently in use by selected customers, despite not yet generally available.

This leads to think innotek reached private beta for its new hypervisor and we may see an official launch in 2008.

Quoting from Computer World:

…

“The idea [that] people will gravitate to Oracle VM for virtualization for non-Oracle applications [is interesting, but] I don’t think they will,” said Galen Shreck, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Shreck predicted that non-Oracle sites will continue to turn to established virtualization technology from companies such as VMware, Microsoft Corp. or Citrix Systems Inc.

Oracle, he said, lacks the systems management capabilities and independent software vendor partner relationships needed to create a virtualization platform for the masses. “I don’t think Oracle can keep up” with the virtualization capabilities of market leader VMware, or even Microsoft and Citrix, Shreck added.

Read the whole article at the source.

Competition isn’t the point: so far Oracle VM effort never seemed an attempt to compete with existing virtualization market players.

It rather seems a way to offer a new product’s feature, database consolidation, without losing control of advantages/shortcomings: if Oracle officially support its products on 3rd party hypervisors the pressure to change its licensing terms will be much bigger (the company still enforce a per physical processor model).

Locking customers in with a restrictive support policy allows Oracle to get the most out of its traditional business model before being obliged to change it.

It’s yet to be seen how many customers will decide to surrender this game and stick with Oracle instead of looking for more virtualization-friendly competitors.

Virtual Iron follows trend started by VMware and Citrix to tie the hypervisor to popular OEM servers. After starting with IBM and HP, the company is now opening to Dell:

Quoting from the official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software solutions, today announced a new worldwide authorized reseller agreement with Dell Corporation. Dell will work through Virtual Iron’s distribution channel and resell the software to end-users as part of an extensive portfolio of server virtualization and storage offerings…

At this point only Microsoft is missing the party (Sun will do this for sure once its upcoming xVM hypervisor will be out). But two points lead to think that Redmond software giant will soon join its competitors:

• Microsoft already has an OEM agreement with most hardware vendors to pre-install Windows into 95% of shipping servers worldwide. Since Windows is going to embed Microsoft hypervisor the company will automatically have an OEM agreement for virtualization platform since day 1.
• Microsoft is about to distribute a parallel, stand-alone version of Hyper-V (formerly Viridian / Windows Server Virtualization). This is made to address VMware ESX 3i product, but probably also to attract those hardware vendors which don’t want to offer a full copy of Windows Server 2008 on their servers.

After getting a lot of attention at VMworld, the russian startup Veeam is back with an updated version of its Configurator.

This new version includes capability to create user accounts on multiple VMware ESX Server at the same time, and a show a detailed diagnostic report on service console.

Download a trial here.

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

Microsoft continues to fire out literature about its new virtualization management platform System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007. After a much appreciated Infrastructure Planning and Design for Application and Server Virtualization and a less remarkable Planning a Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Deployment, it’s now the turn of a 143-pages scripting guide:

The Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM) command shell is built on Microsoft Windows PowerShell, an administrator-focused, interactive command-line shell and scripting language that is integrated into the Windows operating system. VMM commands, called cmdlets, can be used separately to perform simple administrative tasks, as an alternative to using the VMM Administrator Console. VMM cmdlets and other command-line elements can also be aggregated into scripts to perform more complex tasks and to automate tasks involving a large number of managed virtual machines that would be burdensome to perform from the Administrator Console…

As you may remember PowerShell is so interesting that even VMware is considering its adoption to enhance VirtualCenter. This document is a mandatory piece to start building serious automation in your virtual infrastructure, without waiting for 3rd party expensive solutions.

Download it here.

Quoting from the Embotics official announcement:

Embotics, the Virtual Machine (VM) Lifecycle Management Company, today announced it has joined the Global Citrix Alliance Partner Program as a Technology Partner. Embotics and Citrix are working together to make Embotics’ V-Commander, which controls and manages virtual machines, compatible with Citrix’s end-to-end virtualization solutions…

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

In Shanghai today, IBM unveiled plans for “Blue Cloud,” a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.

Blue Cloud, built on IBM’s expertise in leading massive-scale computing initiatives, will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services. IBM announced today that its Blue Cloud development is supported by more than 200 IBM Internet-scale researchers worldwide and targets clients who want to explore the extreme scale of cloud computing infrastructures quickly and easily.

…

IBM’s first Blue Cloud offerings are expected to be available to customers in the spring of 2008, supporting systems with Power and x86 processors. At an event in Shanghai today, IBM demonstrated how cloud computing technologies, running on IBM BladeCenters with Power and x86 processors and Tivoli service management software, dynamically provision and allocate resources as workloads fluctuate for an application.

Blue Cloud – based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure — will include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling. Blue Cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. This includes software that is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that speeds performance and ensures reliability even under the most demanding situations. Tivoli monitoring checks the health of the provisioned servers and makes sure they meet service level agreements…

Quoting from the Trigence official announcement:

Trigence, a leader in virtualization at the application level, today announced the addition of Frank Foti as Director of Consulting Services. Foti brings more than two decades of hands-on, customer service and consulting experience and will lead Trigence’s newly launched Consulting Services Group. In this role, Foti will work with his team to deliver product customization and integration expertise through each phase of the customer lifecycle.

Prior to joining Trigence, Foti was Director of Consulting Services for EXENET, a professional services organization, where he managed the implementation of end-to-end virtualization solutions including application, server, storage and network virtualization. Before EXENET, Foti was Global Citrix Manager at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals…

Quoting from the Emulex official announcement:

Emulex Corporation today announced its LightPulse® Virtual Host Bus Adapter (HBA) technology is now available for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007. This marks the first integrated storage area network (SAN) connectivity solution with industry-standard N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) support for Microsoft Windows Server virtualization environments.

Emulex’s LightPulse Virtual HBA technology, composed of Emulex 4Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs supporting NPIV, enables customers to effectively ‘virtualize’ SAN connections so that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage. In addition, Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBA technology enables administrators to leverage standard SAN management tools and best practices, such as fabric zoning and LUN mapping/masking, and, enhanced management and migration of virtual machines. It also provides the most efficient utilization of the HBAs in the server while ensuring the highest level of data protection available in the industry…