Year: 2008

After the September launch, the US startup Virtual Computer (formerly known as Old Road Computing), co-founded by the Virtual Iron founder and former CTO, seems ready to build its leadership team.

The first one joining the two co-founders on the Board of Directors is Rick Faulk, President and CEO of Mzinga, a startup that launched in November 2007 that is focused on social networks.

Certainly Faulk has a vision about the so called Web 2.0 universe, but it’s not clear how his experience will benefit an emerging virtualization company like Virtual Computer.

Fifteen days ago virtualization.info launched a web survey to try to understand the state of the union for hardware virtualization.

We invited our readers to answer the survey at the very end of a post about Gartner and IDC, questioning the marketshare numbers that the two recently published.

Despite this very unofficial launch, in just three days we collected over 500 responses, and now we surpassed 750. 
Of course our questionnaire is not comparable with the studies of the tier-1 analysis firms, but it certainly collected one of the biggest number of answers so far in a virtualization survey. And the emerging picture is surprisingly interesting.

We’d like to wait another 15 days or 1000 responses before stopping the survey. After that we’ll publish the results on virtualization.info for free.

If you didn’t participate yet please do: http://virtualization.info/surveys

It’s more than one year that the virtualization community waits to puts its hands on the first 3rd party virtual switch for VMware Infrastructure. At that time Cisco was reported as the networking provider but the company never confirmed.

Finally, at VMworld 2008, Cisco and VMware unveiled such piece of software, called Nexus 1000V, but so far nobody gave a precise release schedule.

Now trusted sources informs us that Cisco will start the Nexus 1000V beta program in December.
VMware Infrastructure 4.0 beta testers will be able to join even but it’s not clear if this will be a public beta or not (probably not considering that VI 4 beta itself is private).

In September, just before VMworld 2008, virtualization.info broke the news about the upcoming VMware Infrastructure 4.0 and its beta 1 feature set.

Immediately after the conference moved in beta 2 phase where it stayed for a while now.
At this point VMware may be near the release time so while waiting for this major upgrade here a meaningful screenshot that was leaked online:

More at source.

VMware just announced its intention to join the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council.

The virtualization leader hopes to influence the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) so that virtualization doesn’t represent an obstacle to security compliance.
At today in fact, as Christopher Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys, noted on his personal blog, the PCI Council didn’t do anything to put virtualization on top of its priority.

Additionally, VMware is now fully busy pushing its cloud computing vision, and if the company wants to convince large corporations to move their data into the cloud better have some security standards supporting the scenario. Otherwise this is what is likely to happen.

VMware is not the first virtualization firm interested in the PCI standards. In March Fortisphere joined the PCI Security Vendor Alliance demonstrating its commitment to comply with DSS standards.

The Canadian startup Lanamark (see virtualization.info coverage here) is taking serious steps to promote its capacity planning service after just one month after the launch.

The company now offers a free, one-time capacity planning assessment for up to 500 desktops and servers, for a maximum of 10 days.

As expected, customers signing for this service will receive a performance trend report containing information about physical machines and workloads inventory, as well as CPU and memory usage.

This is a smart move from Lanamark: capacity planning is one of the fundamental steps that every company embracing virtualization should take but its cost is often too high to justify the investment.
With a one-time free assessment the startup may demonstrate the value of its service.

Nonetheless the company may have other reasons behind this promotion: the competition with VMware on is harsh as the virtualization leader is offering its hosted Capacity Planner for free since July and it includes a basic capacity planning tool in VI 3.5 at no additional cost.

Egenera is mostly known as a hardware vendor offering its own blade system, BladeFrame, but the most interesting proposition of the company is its management console: PAN Manager.
This software layer is able to aggregate the hardware resources of each blade and abstract them in a sort of computing cloud in a box.

For a long time Egenera tightened PAN Manager to the BladeFrame, making it almost unknown for the wide audience. But more than one year ago, Egenera finally allowed to use the software on other hardware provided by a number of OEM partners.

The resource pool provided by PAN Manager is a perfect companion for a virtualization engine so the company developed a special module called vBlade, which allows a hypervisor to manage the abstracted hardware.
Rather than develop (or acquire) its own virtual machine monitor, Egenera preferred to sign an agreement with XenSource to adopt its XenEnterprise.

Read more

Exactly one year after the last update, Veeam finally revamps Configurator, its product for configuration and change management.

In this new major release the company re-engineered the engine, which now automatically discovers VMware ESX and ESXi configurations, saving them in so called host profile templates. 
The administrator can apply those saved profiles to multiple new VMware hosts at the same time.

Then Configurator 2.0 can scan the hosts on recurring basis and allow the administrator to reapply the correct profile.

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Trilead, one of the youngest virtualization startups that emerged during the last VMworld 2008, went out of beta phase and released officially launched its product: VM Explorer (VMX) 1.5.

VM Explorer is a virtual machines backup/recovery solution that puts Trilead in competition with well-known companies like Vizioncore and Veeam.

The solution is able to copy VMs between different VMware ESX hosts (ESXi is supported as well), or on Linux and FreeBSD file servers.
VMX also offers an integrated SSH client to administer the servers where users want to copy the VMs, and a snapshot manager, where VMware administrators can create and remove VM snapshots without passing through VirtualCenter.

Read more

Parallels certainly has a lot of challenges these days: in the server space it’s about to introduce its first bare-metal hypervisor, Parallels Server, what will put the company in competition with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle and Sun; in the desktop space, specifically in the Apple market, it has to bank the spread of VMware that is raising much consensus with its Fusion.

On this second front the company is specially combative and demonstrates its capability with the new Desktop for Mac 4.0.

This release introduces some fifty new features. Among the others:

• Command line interface
• API and SDK for 3rd party developers
• Capability to scale Windows virtual machines desktop to fit the Mac OS screen
• Simultaneous access to removable storage devices from guests and host.
• Remote control from Apple iPhone
• Voice control (24 commands available)
• Support for 4 vCPUs per VM
• Support for Apple Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest OS
• Support for DirectX 9.0, DirectX Pixel Shader 2.0 and OpenGL 2.0 graphical primitives on Windows guest OSes
• Experimental support for Apple Mac OS X codename Snow Leopard

Download a trial here.

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