Year: 2008

It’s not a secret that VMware has a special attraction for Linux. Unfortunately the sentiment in these years didn’t seem reciprocal:

• it took two years before the company could slip its paravirtualization interface into the Linux kernel
• the community, including notable representatives, questioned VMware about its use of the open source code
• the company is still unable to offer a Linux version of its key product VirtualCenter, despite the users ask it aloud

With much irony, now that it’s guided by a former Microsoft general, this relationship is improving so much that VMware is even welcome as member of the Linux Foundation.

The company didn’t unveil its plans for Linux, but there’s a remote chance that VMware could open the source of one of its products, Server, now that its flagship hypervisor ESX is free.

In May 2008 VMware announced a new certification for virtualization architects: the VCDX or VMware Certified Design Expert.

To get the new title, virtualization professionals have to hold the VCP certification, pass an Enterprise Administration Exam (which includes live labs), pass a Design Exam (which includes simulations) and finally present and discuss a project, covering both the design and the implementation.

The VCDX is now available for the brave ones that want to try it.

For the ones that still have to pass the VCP exam there are some news as well: the mandatory class VMware Infrastructure 3: Install and Configure is still mandatory but at least it can be attended online.

VMware in fact released new e-learning facilities, Live Online and Flex Online, where students can attend several classes (including the one above).
The Flex Online offering is specially interesting as it allows to attend the class over 2 weeks, maybe during after-hours or weekends.

VMware just launched a new partner program for the system builders: with the new program the national or local OEMs will be able to sell the entire line of VMware products.

With the move VMware may greatly extend the number of certified systems on the market, attracting the smaller company that produces hardware for the SMBs.

Before the OEMs the company targeted the ODMs in June, allowing them to release on the market certified components.

The entire effort aims at reducing the time required to include new systems in the strict hardware compatibility list.
The process can be long and resource-consuming both for VMware and its partners so that the competitors like Microsoft highlights it as a remarkable downside of the ESX architecture.

It’s obvious that owning VMware grants some benefits to the parent company EMC, but so far they never appeared too evident.
Now EMC decides to show some muscles and prove that the investment on VMware wasn’t limited to its acquisition in 2003.

On Tuesday the company announced its new enterprise storage array, the CLARiiON CX4, which features a series of features specifically VMware.

Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance, is becoming the new public face of EMC through its personal blog and wrote a long insight about the strategy behind the new CX4:

…in the VMware environment my main interest is in the UltraFlex I/O modules.

Why are these important?   The following are true statements from where I sit, and lead (at least for me) to a couple obvious conclusions of where datacenters are headed:

• Any x86 workload can be virtualized, and what can be done, will be done (we’ve shown only a small sampling of that here, here, and here)   There’s too many good reasons to do this.   This will include all sorts of workloads that even on their own, have a heavy I/O impact.  Put them together and it’s straight addition.
• Consolidation ratios are only going to increase.    With Intel (and in this cycle, AMD to a lesser extent – but I’m sure they will come out swinging) making a quad core proc for $250 now, and setting clear expectations for 8-core and more in 2009, and memory innovation to come, we will quickly move from 10:1 to 20:1 (I would argue we’re already well past that!) to 40:1 to 100:1 and beyond. 
• BTW, please think about what that sort of hyper-consolidation future implies about: 1) Memory Page Sharing (aka memory dedupe) and about those that CAN do it (VMware) and those that can’t (Hyper-V and Xen); 2) whether you care that you can do live, non-disruptive movement of VMs when you have 100 on a single host – is that going to become more important, or less?
• The bottleneck is moving to the I/O layer (both the network and storage transport and the back-end).   This is particularly acute on network and IP storage today (again, know that I’m an IP super-fan, and no-fanboi of FC for it’s own sake) – where many, many GbE interfaces off a single server are common, and blades once again come into vouge, not for power/space/density issues (VMware makes the only question power/space/density per VM the question) – but rather for IO aggregation/virtualization/management reasons.
• Above all, flexibility is paramount (i.e. the ability to non-disruptively adapt to unforeseen changes) with things like Vmotion and Storage VMotion – and those constructs will increasingly appear in all parts of infrastructure.

Now, making storage built for VMware is only part of EMC’s strategy – our view is that everything needs to adapt to a world where nearly every host is a hypervisor, and every app is a VM or VM appliance.   This affects infrastructure operations (backup/recovery/DR, etc), management (understanding and adapting to pervasive mobility, PtoV mapping and relationships) and skillset (we’re at 400 VCPs and still adding at 50/quarter)…

Please note that this is the only major announcement that EMC made at the Pacific Crest Technology Conference.
The company didn’t unveil any acquisition, merge or spin-off as rumored few days earlier.

Oracle continues to keep a very low profile on the virtualization market, silently improving its free-of-charge hypervisor based on Xen: Oracle VM.

After a much criticized launch in November 2007 (mostly because of the closed support policy that the company currently adopts), the product jumped to version 2.1.1 in March 2008.

The company now announces the so-called Oracle VM Templates, the Oracle version of the well-known virtual appliance concept that VMware pioneered at the beginning of 2006.

The first four pre-configured virtual machines offered are:

• Oracle Database 11g
• Oracle Enterprise Manager
• Oracle’s Siebel CRM 8
• Oracle Enterprise Linux

All of them can be downloaded here.

The US startup rose from the the ashes of InovaWave, Hyper9, has just completed its second round of funding:

Hyper9 Inc., the leader in search-based software for managing dynamic virtual environments, today announced that Maples Investments and Managing Partner Mike Maples Jr. have made a strategic investment in Hyper9. This investment complements Hyper9’s July 2007 Series B round of funding, which was led by Matrix Partners with follow-on from Silverton Partners…

The US startup Qumranet is growing and is now ready to welcome aboard a Vice President of Sales and Channels, Craig Bauman, coming from Altiris.

With nearly 20 years of high tech sales experience, Bauman joins Qumranet from TriActive, a
venture- based pioneer in SaaS for systems management, where he was executive vice pesident in charge of worldwide sales and service channels.

Prior to joining TriActive, Bauman was an enterprise sales director at Microsoft responsible for sales of the Windows enterprise management products in the U.S. and Canada driving sales
growth. Bauman was also a key stakeholder in driving Microsoft’s acquisitions of AssetMetrix and Softricity.

Additionally, he has held sales leadership roles at Altiris (now Symantec) assisting in the
successful IPO and helping to grow the company from $10 million to $200 million revenues, along with a 300 percent increase in partner-led sales.

The first thing that Bauman will go is starting a new Partner Program.

In March, virtualization.info announced its first independent conference about virtualization technologies: the Virtualization Congress 2008.

After many months we are finally able to announce the agenda:
http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/agenda.htm

Shaping it has been (and still is) one of the most challenging tasks ever done at virtualization.info:

• We have to grant equal exposure to all the first-class speakers that will present on stage
• We have to balance the contents in a way that every attendee will have a great show, no matter what technology he’s most interested in
• We have to ignite that competition that is healthy for the customers and the entire market

Of course the best part of this agenda is that every session will not contain any marketing slide decks.

Every speaker listed here will show one or more products in action, addressing the challenges of real-world, complex use cases.

The agenda published today is not complete yet. Unfortunately we can’t announce yet few great speakers and their sessions, but a large majority of the contents are online.

Read it online or download the event program below (with the Speakers, the Agenda and the Sponsors):

The usual amount of rumors about EMC and its subsidiary VMware reached an unprecedented level when a suspect number of stock options were traded over the last week.

The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and others are reporting at least a couple of rumors:

• EMC may be acquired by Cisco
• EMC may finally spin-off VMware 

The first scenario is particularly interesting: Cisco dreams a liquid computing future but at the moment the company has a firm leadership only in the networking area; EMC and VMware could fill the holes in the storage and platforms area to complete the vision.

As further confirmation that something is about to happen, in July the company’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center, Switching and Services Group answered the question:

Q: Do you plan to invest in another hypervisor vendor, similar to your relationship with VMware?

A: No announcements to date. We’re continuing to work with all the hypervisor vendors. We are interested in virtualized data centers and to the extent that hypervisor and virtualized servers exist in the data center we think that’s a very powerful construct for customers and one that’s going to take network support.

Nonetheless in June the company’s CEO, John Chambers, explicitly said that Cisco is not interested in buying VMware.  Maybe that was an attempt to clarify that EMC has to sell all or nothing.

Some financial analysts expect the news to be announced later today, at the Pacific Crest Technology Conference, where both EMC and VMW are present.

Update: The EMC calendar for investors now includes an announcement set for tomorrow August 5 @ 10am EST.
The speaker will be Dave Donatelli, President of Storage Division.

Second Update: virtualization.info has received an anonymous tip suggesting that tomorrow EMC will unveil its CLARiiON CX4.

This is more than enough to justify the announcement planned for tomorrow, but it seems not enough to explain the abnormal trade of options of last week.

Just two weeks ago virtualization.info reported about the suspension of the Endeavors Technologies share from the London Stock Exchange.

In this timeframe nothing happened so the company management announced the intention to enter into administration:

Notice of intention to appoint administrators

Further to the announcements of 15 and 18 July 2008, the directors of Endeavors plc have concluded that it is necessary for the Company to enter into administration and accordingly have instructed lawyers to file a notice of intention to appoint administrators.

If no potential buyer or venture capital firm will show up, the company will go into administration in five days.

At that point the 25 patents in application virtualization and streaming that Endeavors still hold will become target for expensive bids, the last hope for the company’s investors.