Year: 2008

VMware announces today the upcoming release of a new set of of APIs called VAssert (Virtual Assertions).

VAssert aims at simplify the work of code error checking through the Record/Replay feature that VMware introduced in Workstation 6.0.
The APIs allows to probe the state of running program or even to insert debugging code while the virtual machines is being replayed.

VMware published a programming guide for VAssert and an example about finding buffer overflows in the Apache web server.

Workstation 6.5 is currently in beta and should be released during Q3 2008.
Enroll for the beta program here.

Since its launch in September 2007, the US startup Embotics made some steps: it joined the Citrix Global Alliance Partner Program (November 2007) and the Microsoft Accelerator Program (March 2008), appointed a couple of advisors (from CSC and from Atlas Ventures) and hired the former Vice President of Global Alliances at PlateSpin.

Today the company announces the second version of its VM lifecycle management product V-Commander which has some interesting features like:

• VM Policy Attributes (approved, zones, suspect, end-of-life, expiry)
• Custom zone creation, tagging, and enforcement
• Configurable policy enforcement globally or per zone (Approved VMs, VM Expiry, Zones Mismatch, Suspect, End-of-Life)
• Policy-based Reports
• Automatic detection / reaction to unapproved (rogue) VMs
• Web services extensibility including API’s
• Role-Based Access Security with audit logs of V-Commander as well as Virtual Centers

V-Commander will be available July 11 starting at $10,000 (including the license to manage one VMware ESX host) plus $3000 for each additional ESX host to manage.

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

The recently announced startup DynamicOps, founded (and funded) by Credit Suisse, today unveils some of the features of its first product: Virtual Resource Manager (VRM).

As virtualization.info reported in May, VRM is a VM lifecycle management solution which plans to support the hypervisors from VMware (ESX), Citrix (XenServer), Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Sun (xVM Server).

Today DynamicOps formally launches VRM and unveils that the product will offer self-service provisioning capabilities, resources tracking (including abandoned virtual machines) and chargeback, and policy compliancy enforcement.

Additionally, VRM has an extensible architecture built on Windows Workflow Foundation which will allow 3rd party vendors to plug on the master workflow that the product follows.

VMR 1.0 will be available in July 2008 starting at $99 per virtual machine.

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

InovaWave has been one of the few companies in the exploding virtualization market that didn’t survive the early days.

Founded by the former CTO of Surgient, Dave McCrory, InovaWave tried to sell a performance enhancer for virtualization platform. For some unclear reasons the company decided to end its business and start from scratch with a new name in February 2008: Hyper9.

The new corporation keeps McCrory as CTO and Chris Ostertag as President and CEO.
Matrix Partners and Silverton Partners funded this second attempt to conquer the market with $7.2 million.

Surprisingly enough, the company not only has a new name but also a completely different focus: the cross-platform management market.

The new product, called Virtual Infrastructure Search and Analytics, will be released at VMworld 2008 but will only support VMware at its first release.

To convince VMware customers to drop their trusted VirtualCenter (or to use two management consoles at the same time), the company bets on a new interface built around a search engine which indexes all resources in the virtual data center and provides some easy to read analytics about them.

Hyper9 may show something interesting in this area, replicating the innovation brought by Splunk in the auditing world. But the need for such approach implies a massive amount of VMs to look at, and the number of such big implementations is very limited at today.
Additionally, Hyper9 will have to compete with a big number of cross-platform management solutions, which already offer support for at least two hypervisors.

We’ll see the company market strategy on September 15.

Today VMware releases one of the most wanted product in its growing portfolio: Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0 (build 97878).

This is the second company’s attempt to enter the security market: VMware started with Assured Computing Environment (ACE), which could represent an effective endpoint security solution but had very acceptance.
With SRM VMware moves to disaster recovery but differently from ACE, this product is not a security solution that can be used in any environment. SRM is a DR solution for VMware Infrastructure only.

SRM 1.0 comes as a VirtualCenter 2.5 plug-in and allows VMware customers to design, test and execute a seamless migration of virtual machines from the production site to the recovery site and vice versa (if you want SRM to bi-directionally protect both sites).

The product allows to define virtual machines groups with different recovery priorities (including non-essential VMs which just stay off), the single VMs restart order, and the SLA for recovered VMs.
Additionally, SRM takes care of which site is in read/write state and which is in read-only state during the whole process.

Obviously virtualization makes the implementation of a recovery site a much cheaper project, but the real selling point of SRM is that customers can actually test the DR plan.
Verifying a disaster recovery plan is a very expensive and time consuming task, and it interrupts the services availability.
Since the mission critical services are the ones that should be tested, only some companies really try their recovery procedures. The others simulate them on bogus or secondary services which makes the whole test useless.
SRM instead allows to test the recovery plan on the entire data center without down times.

To make the whole thing possible SRM coordinates a block replication between storage arrays at both sites, and this implies that each storage vendor produces a plug-in, Storage Replication Adapter or SRA, to makes the equipment SRM-aware:

At the release date five storage firms SRM: Dell EqualLogic, EMC, FalconStor, LeftHand Networks and NetApp.
VMware created an architecture which allows the vendors to certify and support their SRAs in autonomy, so that the adoption process for customers is much faster.

The price for SRM alone is $2,187.50 per processor, including 1 year Platinum support, which implies to buy at least two licenses.
On top of that customers have to buy two VI 3.5 licenses if they are not already available and obviously the supported shared storage at both sites.

Download a trial here.

The virtualization Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Tresys Technology is a US firm busy in the IT security market since 1999.
So far the company mostly focused on providing solutions around the OS hardening framework Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux).

Now the company decides to enter the virtualization market and leverage its expertise in hardening to build a security wrapper (aka sandbox) for virtual machines: VM Fortress.

This market has few but notable competitors: VMware, with its not so popular ACE (which may even disappear into Workstation over time), Microsoft with the just acquired Kidaro Managed Workspaces (now renamed Enterprise Desktop Virtualization), Sentillion, with vThere and recently MokaFive with their brand new Virtual Desktop Solution.

At its first release VM Fortress only supports VMware Workstation 6 and Player 2 virtual machines but unlike its competitors the product is available for Linux host operating systems (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6).

The security engine is SELinux so this wrapper is only capable of enforcing strong access control on virtual resources: virtual networks, USB devices, removable storage, shared folders and even the virtual desktop (limiting the cut & paste feature).

There’s no sign of other features that competitors offer like virtual disks encryption or expiration.
If Tresys wants to compete on this segment, despite nobody is currently offering its wrapper for Linux, then it will have to add more features very soon.

The product is available now despite the company didn’t reveal its price and licensing scheme.

Tresys Technology has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

With much delay virtualization.info covers the release of VMLogix LabManager 3.5.

The new version was released in May, introducing a key feature: the support for Citrix XenServer 4.1.
In this way VMLogix becomes a full cross-platform virtual lab automation solution, already supporting VMware and Microsoft products.

LabManager 3.5 also includes some major enhancements to virtual networking management and the user interface.

Download a trial here.

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

At the Application Delivery Conference 2008 in Melbourne Citrix showed on stage an Apple iPhone running a Microsoft Windows XP remote desktop.

There’s no need to comment all the press articles written by those journalists not aware of virtualization. But the technical implementation of the demo (below) and how it relates to what Citrix is really doing on the iPhone still needs some clarifications.

What Citrix really showed on stage is an iPhone with Mobile Safari, which embeds the ICA client, remoting a virtual desktop. And this is nothing breakthrough.

Nonetheless the demo hints at something more, a really innovative project that will come in the future: a Citrix client offered as a native iPhone application through the AppStore.

It’s unknown if this client will connect to a XenDesktop infrastructure or just to a XenApp farm.
It’s unknown how Citrix will manage the lack of keyboard.
There is no eta for this project and the company didn’t even said if it will officially support it.
And we don’t even know if it will be distributed for free on the AppStore or not.

So at the moment this is just a research project, brought on stage to demonstrate the Citrix tireless research for what they call the Nirvana device.

One thing is for sure: the Citrix effort in this area demonstrates how mature the time is becoming for the mobile virtualization.

No matter what the official version says, the Red Hat virtualization strategy has always been problematic.

It started in December 2004, when the company revealed the plan to adopt the open source hypervisor Xen as virtualization engine for its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.0.
Unfortunately such plan didn’t become reality earlier than two years later, when Red Hat finally released RHEL 5.0 with Xen in March 2007.

In mid 2006, being already in late, the company decided to play an interesting game: it declared Xen immature and accused its main competitor, Novell, for being irresponsible in integrating Xen in its enterprise distribution (SUSE Linux).
Probably to support such claims, Red Hat did its best to ship RHEL 5 with a minimal, under any enterprise standard, GUI for Xen: Virtual Machine Manager.

After that, a series of dramatic events happened.
First Microsoft signed a series of alliances with the some of the key Xen contributors: with XenSource, with Novell and with Virtual Iron. Then Citrix acquired XenSource in August 2007.

So, in less than one year Red Hat lost much of its capability to influence the Xen development despite it contributes to the open source project since the early beginning.
It was easy to guess that the company would quickly evaluate an alternative. And the only valuable alternative for Red Hat was KVM, the young virtualization platform that was included in the Linux kernel after just six months of development.

KVM offers a lot of advantages to Red Hat.
For example it ships as an official kernel module, avoiding major investments in maintaining it.
For example Novell is not using it and it’s unlikely to do so for a while (it has too much to do with Microsoft and Citrix right now).
For example it brings a new powerful allied, IBM, which clearly has no more interests in heavily investing in Xen.
For example its inclusion in the kernel makes very hard for Microsoft, its allied, or any other uncomfortable player to influence its development.

So yesterday Red Hat did the much expected move to announce the adoption of KVM.

The company will offer a new lightweight distribution which integrates KVM, selling it as the Red Hat virtualization platform (Embedded Linux Hypervisor).
Additionally, the company will offer a new enterprise-wide management solution called oVirt, which is based on the standardized libvirt APIs and is designed to scale up to thousands of virtual machines.

What happens to Xen now? What happens to the Red Hat investment on it?
The official press announcement don’t say it explicitly but the choice of words lets clearly understand that Xen is the past and KVM is the future.
It’s unknown if Red Hat will continue to support Xen or what will happen to those enterprise customers that adopted RHEL 5 to use the hypervisor (mostly because Xen and KVM virtual machines are incompatible).

In any case it’s unlikely that Red Hat will drop Xen tomorrow: the company sits in the Xen advisory board and its support policy implies that any distribution must be supported for seven years.
Red Hat may want to spend this time convincing its customers that KVM is a better virtualization engine: Virtual Machine Manager, for example, has been already re-categorized as a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines.

Both the Embedded Linux Hypervisor and the oVirt management console are already available in beta here.

Red Hat didn’t mention when both products will be available as RTM.

Today a new virtualization startup enters the market: Lanamark.

The company was founded in 2007 by Mark Angelo, is currently based in Canada and has less than ten employes.
Hard to believe Lanamark is one of the few startups that isn’t funded (yet) by a venture capital firm or an angel investor.

Angelo is a well-known figure in the virtualization industry coming from PlateSpin, where he was Product Line Manager for PowerRecon, and recently from VMLogix, where he was Director of Business Development.

Lanamark enters the capacity planning market, one of the most important segments recognized by virtualization.info in our Virtualization Industry Challenges report, where its CEO accumulated a lot of experience working on PowerRecon.

The capacity planning segment is populated by few but strong competitors which are already present on the scene since a while: Novell (through the acquisition of PlateSpin), CiRBA, VMware and Microsoft.
Despite that Lanamark may not have to compete with most of them.

The company in fact doesn’t plan to directly sell its platform to customers, but rather aims at offering it only to OEMs and service providers.

To create a valuable proposition Lanamark developed a three-tiers architecture ideal for those scenarios where the capacity planning is performed by a 3rd party entity:

• the first component, Explorer, gets installed on a single machine in the customer network. From there it can discover all the physical assets on the site without any additional agent
• the second component, Portal (which is hosted by Lanamark itself), stores the data collected by the Explorer and manages the customers analysis
• the last component, Studio (which is managed by the system integrator), accesses the customer’s data available at the Portal and performs the actual capacity planning

This approach, similar to the one used by VMware with its Capacity Planner, avoids the consultants to waste time at customer’s site, performing the analysis and planning in house.
Obviously it may raise some concerns: the customer has to trust the whole platform when sending out its own precious data about company workloads and performance.
Lanamark will have to demonstrate that the transaction between all the components is secure enough, and that the Portal has acceptable data retain policies.

The company has another problem: VMware will allow its partners to use Capacity Planner for free within the end of this month, and Microsoft is working to offer its own capacity planning tool for free as well.
To win the competition Lanamark may bet on cross-platform capabilities: the platform will be able to perform capacity planning for multiple hypervisors, obviously including VMware, Citrix and Microsoft ones.

The product will be available soon through an early adoption program.
The 1.0 release instead is expected in Q3 2008.

Lanamark has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.