Year: 2008

While most vendors are focusing on VMware or Microsoft hypervisors, Ericom is one of those smart companies trying to support all of them and more.

The US firm announced the support for Oracle VM in May, giving away its connection broker for free, and now announces the support for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers.

With a growing number of valid alternatives, this is a good move for the company. 
Unfortunately Parallels recently signed an OEM agreement with Quest/Provision Networks to use their connection broker for VDI environments, so reaching out the customers for Ericom may be a little hard.

It’s not a secret that Microsoft did a poor job in the past to pitch Virtual Server 2005 giving VMware a competitive advantage at least in terms of exposure.
They are recovering now with Hyper-V, calling to action the entire industry.

On Monday over 20 partners, including AMD, BMC, CA, CiRBA, Desktone, LeftHand, NetApp, rPath, SteelEye, Sun, Surgient, Tripwire, Unysis and more, announced the immediate and future support for the new hypervisor, as well as interoperability agreements.

The whole list is here.

Of course the round of announcements was aimed at disturbing the VMworld, the VMware conference that will take place next week in Las Vegas.
The 14,000 (this is not a typo) delegates expected will have a hard time deciding who’s worth their time.

virtualization.info just received a confirmation from a trusted source: VMware co-founder and Chief Scientist Mendel Rosenblum resigned.

His wife, Diane Greene, that founded the company with him and led it as CEO since 1998 was removed by the board of directors in July for much unclear reasons. After that, the risk that her husband would follow was very high.

VMware told virtualization.info that Rosenblum took a month of vacation immediately after that meeting, and this delayed the decision to leave the company.

Also, maybe fearing an impact on the upcoming VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, VMware may have requested to postpone the resignation until the event registration was almost complete: this year VMworld achieved a ground-breaking record of 14,000 delegates so there’s no more need to wait.

While Diane Green was the keeper of the VMware culture and engineering tradition, Rosenblum was recognized as the company visionary, designing technologies to be implemented in the next few years.
For example, the upcoming security APIs called VMsafe, which has the potential to change the way we secure the data centers, were developed by the scientist in 2002.

virtualization.info was told that Rosenblum will go back working full-time to the university where he and his wife started VMware: Stanford.

With him VMware has already lost three key leaders.
The third one is the Executve Vice President of R&D, Richard Sarwal, who left just last week to go back to Oracle. Now it seems clear why.

This departure comes at the worst moment: yesterday Microsoft officially presented its competing product, Hyper-V, and while the hypervisor is still years behind the VMware technology, the entire industry announced support for it.
VMware will need a solid strategy to counter that: cutting-edge technologies rarely wins against Microsoft marketing war-machines and ubiquitous alliances.

Update: The New York Times reports that also Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development will leave the company next month, after resigning in August.

Second update: After the news VMware lost almost 7% at Wall Street today:

As you may know by now, some vendors will show new products on stage at the Virtualization Congress 2008, the independent conference that virtualization.info is preparing in London for October 14-16.

Last week we unveiled that Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, will show new unannounced features in the work.

Besides Microsoft, there is at least another vendor that has a lot new to show: Phoenix Technologies.

Phoenix was one of the first companies to develop a version of the Xen hypervisor for clients: HyperCore.
The company revealed that the virtualization platform is embedded into the BIOS, and that it features special virtual machines side by side with Microsoft Windows. But besides that we don’t know much more.

On stage at the Virtualization Congress, Gaurav Banga, CTO at Phoenix Technologies, will show HyperCore and the new HyperSpace platform in details:

The full abstract of Gaurav keynote is available on the agenda (second day tab: Oct. 16), along with all the other great keynotes that we’ll have.

As well known, the first version of Hyper-V lacks a key capability for many (all?) enterprise customers: the virtual machines live migration.

In an attempt to address the complains from its user base and the critics from VMware, Microsoft announced today that the next version of its hypervisor, included with Windows Server 2008 R2, will have that feature.

The new version of the OS anyway is expected no earlier than 2010 according to ZDNet.

Microsoft will show this feature today during its launch webcast at 9am PDT.

Update: The videos of the event are available here.

With a big event in Bellvue, Microsoft officially presents today its new hypervisor, Hyper-V 1.0, released in late June.

To celebrate Microsoft has a big surprise: a new version of the hypervisor, Hyper-V Server 2008, made to compete with VMware ESXi.

The existing versions of Hyper-V loads into its parent partition a full copy of Windows Server 2008 or the lightweight Windows Server 2008 Server Core edition.

The new product that the company is announcing today loads in the parent partition even less than Server Core: Microsoft developed a minimal version of Windows which only includes the OS Kernel, its driver model and little more (it’s not clear yet how much more).

This implies that the Microsoft virtualization platform is even less oversized by Windows, an aspect of the product heavily criticized by VMware.

The other versions of Hyper-V allows one, four or unlimited virtual machines, depending on the Windows Server 2008 version loaded into the parent partition. But what happens with Hyper-V Server 2008?
The minimal version of Windows included in this release doesn’t allow any virtual machine, so customer will have to buy a license for each guest OS they want to use (up to 128).

While this solutions seems strange, Microsoft went for it to serve all the companies that want to adopt Microsoft virtualization but don’t want to invest in Windows Server 2008.
Those customers will be able to move their existing Windows Server 2003 OSes into the Hyper-V Server 2008 virtual machines, without paying any additional license fee.

According to that, Microsoft will release this new product free of charge, within 30 days.

This new product will be supported by the upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, to be released within 30 days as well.

While waiting for the RTM availability, expected for early October, Microsoft TechNet Magazine published a long overview of the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Of course the article covers the two most expected features:

• the management of VMware ESX
• the capability to advice on virtual machines placement for server consolidation

The entire October issue of TechNet Magazine is dedicated to virtualization, so there may be other interesting article to read.

Thanks to HyperVoria.com for the news.

After a short beta program, Veeam publishes today the third version of its performance monitoring tool: Monitor 3.0.

The final release doesn’t introduce new features compared with the beta, but what’s available is more than enough:

• Data aggregation from multiple VMware VirtualCenters
• Alarm simulation (test the effect of your new alarm filter against the events history)
• Trend analyzer (forecast the virtual center growth and the most-consumed resources per host to simplify the capacity planning)
• Data correlation between registered events and virtual machines performance
• Analysis of the historical data available inside VirtualCenter

Download a trial here.

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

The startup Embotics, focus on the VM lifecycle management market, last week released a scaled down version of its upcoming V-Commander 2.0.

Called V-Scout, the product provides the inventory of online and offline virtual machines integrating with VMware Virtual Center, tracking how the size and the cost of the data center is changing over time.
The inventory can be searched looking for several attributes and several reports can be generated accordingly.

Customers can have the product for free but they must deal with a privacy issue: by default V-Scout sends back to Embotics a basic set of operational information.
The privacy statement published by the company describes what data is actually collected:

…the total number of successful logins, the number of user accounts, the number of custom attributes defined, the number of times a report is generated, uptime since last restart, and processing volume. Embotics V-Scout also collects information on the number of managed systems connected, various categories of the number of VMs being tracked, and the number of virtualization hosts under management. V-Scout does not collect information specific to individual users or details about specific VMs.

From time to time, V-Scout will log this information. Also, from time to time, V-Scout will send the information contained in the log, along with installation details, such as license key and registration email address, to Embotics over the internet.

Embotics allows customers to disable the feature anyway.

The product is available here.

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

The US startup VKernel, focused on performance monitor and chargeback, has just launched the first beta of a free tool called SearchMyVM.

The product will index over 75 attributes for any supported virtual infrastructure (VMware only at the moment), including virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, snapshots and more.
Customers will be able to search for any of them through a minimal interface that mimics Google.

For large-scale deployments administrators the product is definitively interesting and, on paper, may disturb the work of another startup, Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave), that is developing something similar.

Enroll for the beta program here.