Year: 2008

Just two days ago Dell took the stage announcing a number of new product and services focused on virtualization.
Easy to imagine, the most interesting piece of their news release was about a new feature called Auto-Snapshot for VMware Infrastructure, a VirtualCenter plug-in available at the end of the month for free to any EqualLogic SAN customers.

Of curse EMC, fully committed to invest on its own subsidiary VMware, had to answer in an appropriate way: the company announced a new version of its Replication Manager for VMware Infrastructure.

…

With the latest version of Replication Manager, management of copies and complete recovery of both physical and virtual environments is handled through a single console.  Now, the EMC data protection software provides integrated array replicas at the VMware virtual machine level and integrates with VMware ESX Servers and Virtual Center APIs to ensure virtual machine consistency.  This streamlines virtual machine file system (VMFS) replica management by providing near-instant, virtual machine consistent backup and recovery of VMFS delivered via EMC’s array based snapshot and clone technology.

This new functionality can be used for direct integration with VMware VMFS providing instant VMFS level backup and virtual machine level restore.  Automating and scheduling VMFS replicas has become much easier through intuitive easy-to-use wizards and a point-and-click user interface.  Customers can leverage replicas created by Replication Manager for a single virtual machine level restore through VMware’s VirtualCenter management software…

The new version of the product, Replication Manager 5.1 Service Pack 2, is available now.

Looking at the latest announcements It’s clear enough that virtualization is not only boosting the storage sales. It’s also exacerbating the competition as the storage layer will become one of the key differentiation in a world where the hypervisor is a commodity and the customers look for VDI and data center automation.

Along with the new Auto-Snapshot capability for VMware Infrastructure (implemented in its EqualLogic storage arrays) and a bunch of other products and services focused on virtualization, Dell also signed two key OEM deals.

The computer giant will integrate in its offering both PlateSpin PowerRecon and PowerConvert, for inventory, capacity planning and P2V/V2P migration, and Vizioncore vRanger Pro, vCharter and vReplicationro for backup and recovery as well as performance tracking.

Another major achievement for both these successful companies after the acquisitions by Novell (for PlateSpin) and by Quest (for Vizioncore).

After an unexpected delay, Microsoft finally released the much expected Linux Integration Component for Hyper-V.

Without them any Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux guest OS (the only supported) running on the new hypervisor wouldn’t really perform at its best.

The components included in this first package are:

• Driver support for synthetic devices
  The Linux integration components include support for both the synthetic network controller and synthetic storage controller that have been developed specifically for Hyper-V. These components take advantage of the new high-speed bus, VMBus, which was developed for Hyper-V.
• Hypercall adapter
  The Hypercall adapter is a thin layer of software that translates the Xen-specific virtualization function calls from a Xen-enabled Linux kernel to Microsoft Hyper-V hypercalls. This results in improved performance for the Linux virtual machine.
• Fastpath Boot Support
  Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance.

The support for the Integrated Mouse is still missing.

Download the Linux Integration Components here.

Now that Red Hat acquired Qumranet, the maintainer of KVM, the interest around the open source virtualization engine included into the Linux kernel is raising over the top.

Those customers considering the product should be happy to know that the newest version, KVM 75, introduces the memory ballooning.

The ballooning is the most common approach to achieve memory overcommit, a feature available only in VMware ESX at today.

While the real value of ballooning has been questioned several times, it’s really notable to see that the youngest newcomer in the virtualization arena is already stacking up the right features to compete with the most mature products.

Of course KVM is too new and its diffusion too limited to really prove its reliability against the well-known competitors. With or without cutting-edge features, Red Hat will have to work a lot to build confidence in the new platform.

After raising an undisclosed amount of money in August, PHD Technologies continues to expand its leadership team.

In August the company hired Sridhar Murthy as CEO, now it’s the turn of Igor Saulsky, as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales:

…As part of his more than twenty-five years of technology sales experience, Saulsky spent nine years at Symantec/Veritas Software, during which time the company’s sales grew from $70 million to $2 billion. Saulsky held a variety of instrumental sales roles, including managing the worldwide sales launch of Veritas’ Storage Virtualization and Computing Utility solutions, and leading the Symantec/Veritas sales integration in the New York region.

More recently, Saulsky led sales organizations at Ingres and Quest Software, where he was responsible for recruiting, training, and managing regional enterprise sales teams. He joins PHD Technologies from Sunpower Corporation where he engaged Fortune 500 customers to develop large-scale solar power projects…

Today virtualization.info hits its 5th anniversary and would like to celebrate in a special way.
Before that anyway, we are proud to highlight how nice the website is growing.

At the moment virtualization.info scores:

• between 6,500 and 18,000 page views / day
• more than 8,000 news feed subscribers / day (over 2,000 of them read our daily newsletter)
• a readership that includes at least 20% of the Fortune 100 and at least 10% of the Fortune 500
• over 50,000 inbound links (as Google stats reports) from all over the Internet
• a healthy 50% growth year over year
• a position in the top 10 results for the keyword virtualization in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live search engines (and without using any SEO unfair trick)
• 20 virtualization vendors that sponsored the site over the last two years
• a just-born Japanese translation with over 1,000 page views / day and almost 500 news feed subscribers / day

We don’t celebrate alone: over 1,700 virtualization professionals joined our LinkedIn network: the virtualization.info Vanguards community.

Note that I use “we” instead of “I” because over the years virtualization.info morphed from a single-man website maintained by Alessandro Perilli to an articulated project that a (small) team of very passionate and talented people keeps alive. 
We have a superb web designer, a great partner and coordinator for the Rent-A-Lab facility, an irreplaceable event manager and her staff for our upcoming Virtualization Congress, and a number of collaborators for other projects that we’ll launch before within this year and the next one.

Of course we want to grow up even more: for the first time virtualization.info is looking for one editor and/or one columnist. If you are interested let us know.

And now the juicy part.
As you know we are arranging our own independent conference in London, the Virtualization Congress 2008, gathering together some top-notch speakers, most popular European influencers, virtualization leaders, brilliant startups and successful venture capitalists at the ExCeL Conference Centre for Oct. 14-16.

The first two readers leaving a comment will win a free ticket each to attend the event (be sure to specify your email address).

Thanks for your support so far and happy birthday!
Alessandro

Today Sun formally presented (video recording) its upcoming Xen-based hypervisor called xVM Server, but instead of announcing the immediate availability as many had hoped, the company said that the product won’t be available for at least another two months.

On his corporate blog Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM products family, reported a short Q&A detailing the current roadmap: within 30 days the Early Access build will be open to general public and within 60 days we’ll have the release candidate.

There’s a major, positive news anyway: the large majority of xVM Server will be released with a GPL3 license at no cost.
Few components will be available at no cost as well but through different licenses that Sun didn’t clarify yet.

The product will be manageable through a web console, a full set of web management APIs, or through the xVM Ops Center 2.0 that Sun plans to release with the hypervisor.

Additionally, in time for the general availability, there will be paravirtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes, something easy to do thanks to the current interoperability agreement with Microsoft.

Sun wants to cash in with the support subscriptions but offers them at a very aggressive price: $500 / year per physical machine (up to 4 CPU sockets, no matter how many cores).

While waiting at least for the beta code, users can check a bunch of new screenshots of the management console and the architecture diagram of the hypervisor.

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

Today Dell announces a number of products and services focused on virtualization:

• a blade server, PowerEdge M905, scoring the best performance on VMware VMmark 1.1 benchmark with 11 tiles (66 virtual machines)
• the availability of Microsoft Hyper-V as preinstalled option in every PowerEdge server
• the integration between Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Dell OpenManage
• the integration between Citrix XenServer and the EqualLogic SANs
• the availability of new consulting services for Microsoft and VMware virtual infrastructures

But more than anything else Dell has just announce a new feature for its EqualLogic storage equipment called Auto-Snapshot Manager.

This software, available for free at the end of the month, integrates with VMware VirtualCenter (probably as a plug-in) and recognizes the VMFS, automating the snapshot of virtual machines.

A well-known problem with virtualization is that it turns upside-down the business practices.
The companies may have a hard time finding a solid operational framework for their new virtual infrastructures.

In the attempt to put order in chaos, VMware released a new portal for its user base: VI:OPS.

Discovered by virtualization.info in March 2007 (and mistakenly recognized as a new product), it seems that the online resource is finally ready for prime time.

At the moment VI:Ops seems a document repository maintained by VMware and divided into five main areas: strategy, applications, security, management and availability.
For each topic there’s a forum where users, 3rd party vendors and VMware itself can request new best practices or advice.

The site has much potential but without a strict moderation and real authorities posting valuable answers it risks to become a place where vendors are free to advertise their services.

While waiting for the final release of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, several companies are working to support the technology and release proper toolkits to facilitate the adoption.

In particular Citrix announced that OVF support will come in beta this quarter, and that a comprehensive toolkit (project Kensho) will be released to perform a basic set of actions.
IBM is working on the open source part of that toolkit, and will maintain it over time.

VMware officially supports OVF since December 2007 and demonstrates the competitive advantage by releasing VMware Studio 1.0.

The first release (build 620) of this tool allows to build OVF images for any virtual machine through a web console for authoring and source control.

Better than that VMware Studio allows to push new updated directly where the OVF image is deployed.

Download it here.
The open source components used in this tool are available here.

Thanks to Scott Lowe for the news.