Year: 2007

Quoting from CNET News:

…

Sun’s chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, is scheduled to discuss Sun’s virtualization strategy and roadmap at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday, as well as some of its partners for the free, open-source datacenter virtualization and management platform. MySQL and Quest Software, for example, have signed aboard as xVM partners…

Read the whole article at the source.

After the Provision Networks acquisition this is another positive news for Quest, which is clearly trying to address an audience with growing needs for multiple virtualization plaforms management.

Now the company just needs to formally disclose the strategy to raise customers attention.

Quoting from the Intel official announcement:

Built using an entirely new transistor formula that alleviates the wasteful electricity leaks that threaten the pace of future computer innovation, Intel Corporation today unveiled 16 server and high-end PC processors.

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Called the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years by Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore, the processors are the first to use Intel’s Hafnium-based high-k metal gate (Hi-k) formula for the hundreds of millions of transistors inside these processors. These Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme and Xeon® processors are also the first to be manufactured on the company’s 45-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process, further boosting performance and lowering power consumption.

…

New to the Intel line-up of server processors are 15 server dual-core and quad-core 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2GHz up to 3.20GHz, with front side bus speeds (FSB) up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 12MB. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40GHz, an FSB of up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 6MB.

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Additional processor performance enhancing architectural features include:

• Enhanced Intel Virtualization Technology — Virtual machine transition (entry/exit) times are improved by an average of 25 to 75 percent through hardware with no changes to software required.

…

eWeek is reporting an interesting story:

Microsoft has gotten religion on hosting, and in a big way.

Windows Server 2008, to be released Feb. 27, 2008, includes tools and features intended to make Microsoft partners better hosts.

It includes tools to ease the deployment and provisioning of Web sites during a data migration, said Michael van Dijken, lead marketing manager for Microsoft’s hosting business.

During the company’s road show here for partners, van Dijken said Microsoft has even partnered with virtualization vendor SWsoft to provide virtualization tools in WS2008 that can be used during a migration…

Read the whole article at the source.

The statement seems to imply that Microsoft will embed in Windows Server 2008 the OS virtualization technology Virtuozzo, with an OEM agreement.

In the past Microsoft disclosed its interest for this technology approach despite no solutions were discussed so far. An agreement with SWsoft would be a very consistent first step.

Almost one year after groundbreaking launch of Server 1.0, made free after being the commercial GSX Server for many years, VMware is ready to open beta program for the second version.

The first beta (build 63231) introduces some new features and improvements like:

• New ESX-like web based management interface
• Support for 64bit host OS (Linux only)
• Support for 8GB RAM per VM
• Support for para-virtualization guests (VMI interface)
• Support for USB 2.0 devices
• Support for VIX API 1.2

In a following beta VMware is also expected to introduce support for VirtualCenter 2.5, as disclosed during VMworld 2007.

Enroll for the beta program here.

While new features and extended support is welcome, mostly the central management capability provided by VirtualCenter, it seems that VMware is failing to bring innovation into this product.

It’s evident the company is spending most of its R&D and marketing efforts around ESX Server and Workstation. In 11 months no company (in a big ecosystem of over 200 technology partners) developed products for VMware Server, despite its price and wide feature-set could push adoption like no others.

Customers seem to confirm this when only 50 people over 11,000 attend the first and only technology preview session about the product at VMworld. Also considering that all of them already were adopting ESX Server.

With more features being included in Workstation 6.x and a cheaper ESX Server 3.5, this VMware Server 2.0 is becoming less relevant than ever and the company may find hard to justify its development to shareholders.

The second beta has to bring in some remarkable innovation or customers will have a hard time to recognize the value and adopt it.

VMware releases the first minor update for the Mac OS version of its desktop virtualization solution.

The new build (62573) introduce some bug fixes and UI enhancements as well as new support for:

• Mac OS X 10.5 (codename Leopard) as host OS
• Windows Vista (32bit and 64bit) as guest OS
• Windows XP (64bit) as guest OS
• DirectX 9.0 (experimental support only)

Download a trial here.

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

Quoting from the Thinstall official announcement:

Thinstall, the leading independent Application Virtualization Platform Solution, today announced the appointment of Jeanne Morain as vice president of marketing.

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Morain joins Thinstall from BMC Software, Inc., where she was senior manager of the Configuration Automation Products Group (BMC Performance Assurance, Configuration Automation – aka Marimba, and Customer Programs for the Service Management Business Unit). During her 6-year tenure at BMC, Morain led several initiatives that helped improve product quality and drive millions of dollars in revenue for the company. These include creating Customer Programs for Agile Development, Best Practices and Templates for implementing BSM, Channel Strategy for Marimba products (ISV and Partners) and several products and releases from inception to launch—Device Management, Marimba 6 releases, Desktop Management, Integration to Remedy, Marimba integration to Installshield Adminstudio, and many others…

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Prior to BMC/ Marimba, Morain held positions in senior product management and marketing at Selectica and before that at Centigram Communications and Mitel Communications Corp…

Steven Bink, live from Microsoft IT Forum 2007 in Barcellona is reporting that next version of System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 will include integration with upcoming Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5, just entered the beta stage.

The product is expected summer 2008.

Microsoft didn’t provide additional informations so far.

Quest is the most hidden company in the virtualization market. It acquired two virtualization startups over last few years, Vizioncore and Invirtus, and operates through them to offer a broad range of solutions, complementary to VMware and Microsoft virtualization platforms.

The company doens’t seem ready to leave the stealth mode yet but is surely working to further extend its presence: virtualization.info has just learned that Quest acquired the popular VDI vendor Provision Networks.

At this point is unknown if Quest will maintain Provision Networks as an independent unit or will merge the offering into the Vizioncore one, like it did for Invirtus (Provision Networks already has an OEM agreement in place with Vizioncore so it’s a very likely scenario).

In any case while other vendors are fighting to control hypervisors, Quest is silently building the widest offering of tools for them, aiming at bigger profits. It probably just misses a virtual lab management framework (Surgient and VMLogix are good candidates for this).

Update: virtualization.info has learned that Provision Networks declined other offers from top IT players, both software and hardware, before closing the agreement with Quest. While names are not disclosed it’s worth to remind that Provision Networks already have partnerships in place with IBM and with HP on hardware side, and with Virtual Iron on software side.

In any case this information implies that major OEMs and virtualization vendors which didn’t make the agreement may be looking for other acquisitions in the space in the near future.

Second update: Quest just released an official announcement confirming the acquisition:

Quest Software, Inc. today announced the acquisition of the assets of Provision Networks Inc., a privately held leader of enterprise-grade presentation and desktop virtualization solutions. The addition of Provision Networks’ award-winning virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and management offerings helps position Quest as one of leading providers of heterogeneous virtualization management solutions across both physical and virtual desktops, applications and servers. The companies’ combined products bring to market technical, customer and channel synergies, enabling Quest to extend its leadership in infrastructure management from the desktop to the datacenter.

…

Effective immediately, Paul Ghostine, co-founder and CEO of Provision Networks, will report directly to Smith and lead this newest addition to Quest…

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

By surprise Oracle today announces its own hypervisor based on Xen: Oracle VM.

The new product includes a web management console and will be released for free (with optional support agreements) on November 14.

The move comes completely unexpected for a couple of reasons:

• So far the company was totally reluctant to embrace virtualization, refusing to change its licensing model and support policy
• Until today Oracle had a pretty good relationship with VMware: despite its official position on the technology it never discouraged the VMware salesforce to push Oracle RAC in virtual machines

On one side the announcement and all related documentation reveals how Oracle is just partially changing its position about virtualization. The Oracle VM FAQs report:

How are Oracle products priced and licensed for use with Oracle VM?
There is no change in pricing and licensing of Oracle’s products for use with Oracle VM. Oracle counts and licenses physical processors on which the licensed programs are installed and/or running.

What is really changing is the support policy. Oracle now officially covers following products installed in its virtual machines:

• Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle Database 11g Release 1
• Oracle Application Server 10gR2 and 10gR3
• Oracle Enterprise Manager 10.2.0.4
• Oracle Berkeley DB 4.6
• Oracle TimesTen 7.0.3.1
• Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 and 12
• Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.4.x and 9.0
• PeopleTools 8.49.07 and above
• Oracle Siebel CRM 8.0
• Oracle Hyperion 9.3.1

On top of that Oracle also states that is working on para-virtualization drivers for Microsoft Windows guest OSes, which performances the company doesn’t consider acceptable at today.

On the other side with this release Oracle drastically changes its position towards VMware.

First of all the official support statement quoted above implies that any other hypervisor (including VMware ESX Server) will not receive similar support:

Will Oracle support customers who are using Oracle products on other x86 server virtualization environments?
Oracle VM is the only x86-based server virtualization environment on which Oracle products are supported.

Secondarily another part of the Oracle VM FAQs states that Oracle applications on Oracle VM (so we are talking about Xen hypervisor) are far better than on ESX Server:

How is Oracle VM three times more efficient than existing x86 server virtualization products?
Oracle ran many performance benchmarks comparing Oracle products running with Oracle VM against the existing leading server virtualization product and also with Oracle products on non-virtualized operating systems on x86 and x86-64. Oracle consistently saw much better resource utilization with an average of three times less overhead using Oracle VM, and also saw significant scalability with virtual SMP. In many cases, the comparison with real hardware was approximately equal in performance.

Now the announcement will have two side effects:

• All VMware customers which decided to trust company salesforce and migrated Oracle into ESX Server virtual machines will have a serious problem and will need to move away as soon as possible
• Oracle example may push other major ISVs to adopt same policy, supporting virtual versions of their applications only on their own hypervisors, which would lead to an uncontrolled proliferation of virtualization platforms. And this will boost demand for management solutions which support multiple virtualization vendors.

Update: VMware promptly reacts to the Oracle announcement and contacted virtualization.info to provide its answer:

We are pleased to see major application providers like Oracle beginning to understand and recognize the benefits of virtualization. We believe Oracle’s announcement is in response to the overwhelming number of customers that have standardized on VMware to run enterprise applications including Oracle. We hope this will be the first of many steps that Oracle takes towards broad enablement of virtualization. Our many mutual customers are looking for stronger virtualization support from Oracle, including clear and consistent licensing guidelines for running Oracle software in virtualized environments.

Along with Hyper-V (formerly codename Viridian / Windows Server Virtualization) and Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) announcements, Microsoft unveils a new program to support its operating systems and back-end servers on 3rd party hypervisors: the Server Virtualization Validation Program.

With this new program Microsoft will allow companies like Citrix, VMware, etc. to self-test and validate a specific virtualization stack (hardware + hypervisor) to provide customers out-of-the-box support for Windows guest OSes.

This will imply, starting from June 2008, that customers will not have anymore to buy expensive Premium Support to receive commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues with Microsoft software running together with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. Once a 3rd party vendor will validate its hypervisor in the new program, customers issues will be addressed in a transparent way, at no additional cost, by the vendor itself or Microsoft.

The first vendor announcing its support for the new program is Virtual Iron:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software solutions, today announced its plans to join Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program when available in June 2008. With this program, Virtual Iron will test and validate the Virtual Iron platform running Windows Server 2008 and prior versions of Microsoft’s server operating system. Once the platform is validated, Microsoft will offer support to Virtual Iron customers running Microsoft Windows Server as guest operating systems in Virtual Iron virtual environments. As a result, mutual customers will have greater access to Microsoft’s comprehensive support capabilities, improved support hand-offs between the two companies, increasing satisfaction and adoption…

Given the tight partnership between Microsoft and Citrix also this one is expected to adhere the new program. VMware instead may be not so happy to apply, which would imply additional costs for its customers.