Year: 2008

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

We think that at this point there is a concrete need to have a truly impartial stage where we can all see what the market can really offer, without discrimination between dominant players and young startups.

It seems that we are not alone having this perception.

The four major virtualization providers (Citrix, Microsoft, Parallels and VMware) will be present in full to show their newest technologies at the ExCeL Conference Center in London.

With them we’ll have other key virtualization vendors ready to compete: Quest, ManageIQ, Phoenix Technologies, Marathon Technologies, Vizioncore, Symantec and many more.

Among them there’s a real protagonist in a pretty unique position, HP, which will have a lot to show on stage:

The Virtualization Congress 2008 is set for October 14-16, 2008 in London, UK.
The first day (Oct. 14) is just for distributors and resellers and it’s free to attend.
The other two days (Oct. 15-16) are for the attendees.

Register now!

From the corporate blog Diane Prescott, Product Manager of System Center, unveils the planned date for the much expected System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008: Q4 2008.
virtualization.info was told that the release is coming at the beginning of the quarter rather than at the end as many would expect.

The product, currently in beta, will have some interesting capabilities but most of all it will be able to manage the competing hypervisor: VMware ESX.

It’s the first time that Microsoft crosses the frontier of its domain to interact with 3rd party products but it’s unsure if the customers will appreciate the effort as SCVMM 2008 will still require the existence of VirtualCenter to manage ESX.

This expensive limitation doesn’t depend on Microsoft, which would be more than happy to cut VMware out as much as possible, but on VMware itself which allows the access to its management APIs only through VirtualCenter.

Update: As several readers reported another Microsoft employee detailed the exact date for SCVMM 2008 release: September 8,2008.

Additionally, his article discloses that Application Virtualization 4.5 will be released the same day, along with a formal presentation of Hyper-V 1.0.

It’s clear now that Microsoft is arranging a big launch day to disturb the VMware VMworld 2008 conference, held the week after in Las Vegas.

Second update: Despite what written in the previous update (and the official words from a company employee) Microsoft just contacted virtualization.info to dismiss the claim that SCVMM 2008 will be launched September 8.

The official date, as stated in the original article we published, is set for early Q4 2008.
No words on Application Virtualization 4.5 release date.

Third update: Microsoft also stated that Application Virtualization 4.5 will be released at the end of September, and that it will continue to be part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

The only think happening Sep. 8 is a big US kickoff event, the first of a 6-months long series across the world.

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

iTWire published today a more than hazardous prediction coming from VMware: the end of Windows and other monolithic operating systems by the next 5-10 years.

The source of such statement is Paul Harapin, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, who predicts the virtual appliances as capable of replacing the existing OSes.

Harapin adds that the change is already happening:

According to Paul Harapin, managing director for Australia and New Zealand at VMware, Windows and other large operating systems are already starting to be replaced by virtual appliances running on thin layers of Linux.

VMware launched the virtual appliance concept in February 2006 but in over two years virtualization.info couldn’t record a single customer that confirmed a full adoption of the technology (if there’s any we invite to comment this post and give an extensive feedback).

The feedbacks we got in these months confirm that at today the virtual appliance are seen as no more than another distribution vector, comparable to DVDs and USB keys.

We feel confident in saying that we are far, far away from the vision of a modular data center where the virtual appliance is the fundamental building block.
And this partially depends on the many issues that hinder the evolution of this technology: the lack of standardization (a challenge that the new OVF format is attempting to address), the many security risks that VA imply (at least in the current implementation), the complexity of the fine tuning, and much more.

While data center modularity (which doesn’t necessarily imply the disappear of Windows) certainly is a key milestone to reach the cloud computing infrastructure that VMware envisions, the timeframe to reach it seems much longer than mere 10 years.

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

In February VMware announced an upcoming set of security APIs called VMsafe.
This new interface has the potential to dramatically change the way the IT infrastructures are secured by offering a new point of detection (and prevention) for any vendor offering anti-virus, firewalls, IDS, endpoint security solutions, etc.

So it doesn’t surprise that a large number of well-know security firms confirmed their involvement in the project even if VMsafe is not yet available.

What may surprise more is that a company like Fortisphere, more focused on the management of large-scale virtual infrastructures and the VM lifecycle management, is announcing its support as well.

The strong focus of Fortisphere on security was clear even before this announcement as the company joined the RSA Secured Partner Program and the Payment Card Industry Security Vendor Alliance.

It must be seen what’s the strategy that the company will pursue with all this effort in the security area.

Trying to resurrect from the fatal experience as InovaWave, the new Hyper9 continues to reshape its leadership team for this second attempt to win the virtualization market.

In February the company hired Ben Rouse as Chief Product Officer, coming from United Devices where he was the CEO.
Now Hyper9 is appointing a couple of key figures in the search engine area:

Jim Snyder, Ph.D., is a search expert with 25 years of experience architecting and developing complex infrastructure technologies. Prior to Hyper9, Snyder created search-oriented intellectual property and led development of the search platform at 21st Century Technologies. He also created the analytics/reporting platform at Core Metrics and the web-based configuration platform at Trilogy, where he served as principal architect.

Brian Baker is a seasoned entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience creating and delivering enterprise infrastructure solutions. At Hyper9, Baker focuses on the data collection, aggregation and management activities needed to fuel the search engine. Previously, Baker served as a principal engineer at United Devices which was acquired by Univa. Prior to that, Baker founded Journee Software, a real-time enterprise data hub solution which was acquired by Initiate Systems.

This should further clarify how Hyper9 aims at becoming the Splunk of virtualization, hopefully generating the same level of buzz and innovation.

Just two days ago VKernel hired a new Vice President of Sales, Gene Fay, coming from EMC/RSA.

Today the company announces a new executive reinforcing its leadership team: Dan Kelly.

Previously, he was CFO of geoVue, a provider of dynamic location optimization software.  Prior to that position, Kelly held CFO positions at Ecora Software and Scribe Software.  He also has Big Four accounting experience and earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Notre Dame.

After a blazing fast acquisition and integration of Thinstall, today VMware officially launches ThinApp (formerly project North Star), its first application virtualization product.

With this release VMware starts a transformation process, morphing its identity of hardware virtualization vendor in something new.
Last month VMware unveiled how its vision contemplates cloud computing but to go there the company must be able to offer an unprecedented level of flexibility and automation.

At virtualization.info we call such flexibility liquid computing and we believe that it requires nested layers of virtualization to further abstract the traditional architectures.
The launch of ThinApp seems the first step in this direction for VMware.

As it was not enough, with this release VMware further exacerbates the competition with Microsoft and Citrix.

ThinApp 4.0 (build 2200) is the next major release of the former Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite 3.2, released in September 2007, which already included a nice set of capabilities:

• Zero-runtime execution (no agent installation required)
• User Mode execution (no need of administrative privileges)
• Block-by-block application streaming (served by SMB shares or iSCSI targets)
• Execution from USB key with portable profiles/user settings
• 64bit OS support
• MSI packages support
• Active Directory integration

Additionally, this new build introduces a couple of new features:

• Application Sync
  This feature enables you to deploy application updates. Application Sync automatically checks for and installs updates to your packaged applications. Updates might include changes such as a new version, service pack updates, or configuration changes in the package.ini file
• Application Link
  This feature connects deployed applications. For example, you can establish a relationship between a deployed instance of Microsoft Office 2003 and a new Microsoft Office plug-in. Application Link enables you to establish a link between applications without having to encapsulate them into the same executable package

ThinApp is offered in bundle with VMware Workstation under the name of ThinApp Suite.
The reason behind this choice is to simplify the creation of the virtual packages: the user is required to save a snapshot of a clean OS before installing the application that he wants to virtualize. After that ThinApp can analyze the changes in the environment and generate a proper virtual EXE or MSI.
The whole process is much smoother and safer in a VMware Workstation guest OS where the virtual machine snapshot capabilities can be used to keep the environment unmodified.

This lets suppose that future versions of the product may further integrate with Workstation to streamline the virtual packages production.

VMware only targets enterprises for this product, offering a starting package for 50 concurrent clients at $6,050 (including a 12×5 Gold Support yearly subscription).
Any additional client starts at $47.19 (including a 12×5 Gold Support yearly subscription).

Download a trial here.

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

The first mention of Nested Page Tables (NPT) can be tracked back to the end of 2006, when both Intel and AMD disclosed their plans to introduce the technology in future versions of their CPUs.

Processors makers and virtualization vendors promised a remarkable performance boost thanks to this technology, at the point that VMware even stated that the virtualization overhead could be completely eliminated by 2010.
Until few months ago there was no chance to verify the claims.

The first CPU to offer a NPT implementation was AMD in September 2007 with its new Quad-Core Opteron (formerly Barcellona) and the Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) extension.
Intel will not follow until Q3 2009, with its upcoming codename Nehalem CPU and the Extended Page Tables (EPT) technology.

The hypervisors that support AMD RVI at the moment are VMware ESX 3.5, any commercial product based on Xen 3.2.0, and KVM.

AnandTech just published a short but very interesting preview of their analysis, showing the performance improvements obtained by Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 (which implements Xen 3.2.0) running on a 2-way system with AMD Quad-Core Opteron CPUs at 2.3 GHz.

They configured 4 virtual machines with 2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM each to run Windows Server 2003 R2 and the following workloads: 2 IIS web servers serving PHP, 1 Oracle OLTP and 1 MySQL databases.

The benchmark highlighted a performance boost going from 7% (Oracle) to 31% (IIS with PHP).

Almost one year ago several virtualization vendors and key OEMs agreed to work with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) on a standard format to define virtual machines.
The list of companies involved at that time included Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource.

In September 2007, the DMTF was already announcing the first draft of the Open Virtual Format (OVF) and in the following months a lot happened:

• VMware included support for the OVF in its VI 3.5
• VMware hired the DMFT President, Winston Bumpus, as Director of Standards Architecture (and note that Bumpus both roles at the same time)
• The list of vendors working to support OVF grew and included companies like Enomalism and ManageIQ

At the Burton Group’s Catalyst 08 conference, Bumpus revealed that OVF may be ready by the end of this month and linked to the current draft.

XenSource was acquired by Citrix but never formalized the commitment to adopt the standard until today: the company just announced the project codename Kensho to include OVF support into XenServer.

The press announcement also unveil the upcoming support of Microsoft Hyper-V for the the new standard.
So far Microsoft never released any specific statement about its new hypervisor and OVF.

A technical preview of the Citrix implementation of OVF is expected by the Q3 2008.

After raising its first round of investments in May, Leostream started its market repositioning by dropping its P2V migration tool P > V Direct.

The reconstruction didn’t stop there as the company has just hired Jack Hembrough as EVP of Sales and Marketing:

Hembrough comes to Leostream from Application Security, Inc. of New York City, a venture-financed software security company, where he served from its inception as President, CEO, and later as Chairman of the Board, growing the company to over $20 million in annual sales.

Prior to joining Application Security, Hembrough was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales for Authentica, Inc., a venture-financed IT security software company. And as the fourteenth employee at Raptor systems, Hembrough was part of a highly successful initial public offering, subsequently leading Raptor’s expansion as Vice President and General Manager of the European operation, based in Amsterdam.

Additionally, he has held senior executive positions in sales and management at Information Resource Engineering (now SafeNet), and Motorola Corporation.

It’s very likely that Leostream will futher proceed in the process hiring other executives and relaunching the corporate image.