Year: 2008

With a huge delay virtualization.info reports the official release of the new VMware product Stage Manager 1.0 (build 1561).

The product was launched on May 30, with ten days delay on the announced date.

As detailed in previous posts, Stage Manager (VSM) adopts the same logic used in VMware Lab Manager (VLM) but for a different purpose (and in fact some VSM beta testers recognized the same underlying engine and the same agents in both applications).

The product offers the capability to control and authorize the virtual machine lifecycle in all the stages between the testing and the production.

In some ways VSM is the extension of VLM, and it’s not clear why VMware didn’t make a single product with two different modules rather than creating and maintaining two separate code branches.

VSM 1.0 integrates with VMware VirtualCenter and requires at least two ESX hosts and some shared storage to offer most of the features already found on VLM, like:

• Deployment of multi-VMs configurations
• Availability of a VM templates library
• Support for overlapping network configurations (fenced networking)
• Web management console

Download a trial here.

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

Eleven months ago Scalent released version 2.2 of its data center automation suite Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE). The release 2.0 was out almost two years ago.
Now finally the company releases a new update: V/OE 2.5.

The product, which already automates the provisioning of virtualization platforms on bare metal, now also offers physical to virtual (P2V) and V2P migration capabilities.

Additionally, the product now supports the Sun hypervisor for SPARC architectures: Logical Domains (LDOM).

V/OE is a very interesting product but one year of development to release a minor update seems a poor accomplishment.

So far Scalent secured three rounds of investments. The last one of $15 million arrived in January 2007.
The company hired a president in October 2007 and a CFO in January 2008, and closed partnerships with HP (in November 2007) and Enigmatic (in April 2008).

Hopefully all of this will help releasing the next version of V/OE earlier than 2009.

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

After 11 months, Trustware finally a new major version of its application virtualization platform BufferZone.

The only major feature mentioned in the official press announcement is what the company calls Privacy Zone: a way to save a list of trusted web sites in the same virtual layer where the browser is.
Hopefully the company has more than that to justify the 3.0 version numbering.

In April the company appointed a couple of new Vice Presidents, for Sales and Marketing, but this doesn’t seem enough to boost the company credibility: after almost one year of development the product is not even ready for Vista, a version which is still in beta.

Download a trial here (home edition) or here (enterprise edition).
Sign up for the beta program here.

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

As most virtualization.info readers know, Microsoft offers Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) and soon Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspaces) only through a special bundle called Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

The offering is peculiar because the MDOP is only available for those customers which agree to buy the Microsoft Software Assurance: a 3-years deal which allows to receive the newest version of a certain product without paying the software as brand new.

Obviously the Software Assurance comes as a premium service which some customers are not happy to pay.

Over the last two years virtualization.info collected a number of complains about the way MDOP is offered, and a superficial search on the Internet will return enough clarifications that a SMB company with no more than 50 desktops can’t consider the Software Assurance as the right option to go.

A further confirmation comes from CRN which publishes the testimonials of a couple of system integrators:

“The majority of my customers are not at all happy with Microsoft regarding the Software Assurance requirement on MDOP and Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop licensing (VECD),” said Chris Ward, senior solutions architect at GreenPages Technology Solutions, Kittery, Me.

…

“I understand that Microsoft is trying to add value to Software Assurance. But it’s a shame that really useful products are going that way, because SA isn’t right for all customers, particularly SMBs,” Sobel said.

“Microsoft is trailing VMware [in virtualization], so for them to take their useful innovations and make them not completely available to the whole potential marketplace to me is an unfortunate choice,” Sobel added.

How many Application Virtualization license could be sold without the Software Assurance lock-in?

SearchStorage.com just published an interview with Symantec CEO about the new Veritas Virtual Infrastructure platform launched Wednesday.

The interviewer mentions an interesting rumor:

SearchStorage: There is talk that VMware might be looking to replace VMFS with a different clustered file system. Is Symantec working with them on that?

Thompson: If they’re looking for that, we’re all ears.

If true this will imply a major change in the VMware strategy and its relationship with storage vendors.

One of the most valuable tool for virtualization is free and comes from Microsoft.
It’s called Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP), it’s a capacity planning product that supports hardware and application virtualization platforms, and it’s able to agentlessly discover and take into account over 50,000 computers.

The version 3.0 released in April supports both Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5.

The new version 3.1, now in private beta, is 64bit and supports Hyper-V.

Enroll for the beta program here.

In November 2007 Apple made a modification to its EULA to allow the virtualization of Mac OS X 10.5 Server. And in these months the two firms competing in this space, Parallels and VMware, worked hard to make it happen.

Parallels will probably offer Mac OS X Server support on its upcoming server virtualization product Server 1.0 (now in Release Candidate).

VMware instead just announced that it will offer that support on its upcoming desktop virtualization product Fusion 2.0 (now in beta 1).

Unfortunately nor Parallels neither VMware can offer a virtual machine with Mac OS X on an hardware which is not Apple branded.

Our most loyal readers know how fast the virtualization market is expanding. Almost every month there is at least one new company announcement or an acquisition.
Tracking what each company is doing is a time consuming activity that no customer can do on daily basis, and yet there is a compelling need to recognize the players and the products they offer in different market segments.

For this reason we created a free database that lists all the companies that we track at virtualization.info: the Virtualization Industry Radar.
In no time it became the most visited resource we offer, both for the English and the Japanese version of virtualization.info.

Unfortunately the virtualization vendors extend their activity so fast that the current version of the tool is a bit limited. So today we announce a new, important update.

The Virtualization Industry Radar now shows the full list of market segments where a virtualization company operates and all products offered for each segment.

Additionally, it features a hopefully useful dashboard which provides a pretty good idea of how the market is evolving at first glance, showing the newest entries, the amount of tracked companies over the years and the distribution of these companies in the different market segments.

And last but not least the tool now has some filtering capabilities: companies can be filtered by their market segment, their rating or their status.

This is just the beginning: we’ll work to further improve the Virtualization Industry Radar to keep it the most valuable tool to track the virtualization market.
If you have suggestions to add more features we’d be happy to hear.

Go to the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar

Launched at the end of April, the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 beta didn’t support the latest build of Hyper-V, the Release Candidate 1.

Now Microsoft updated the SCVMM 2008 build to introduce the missing support.

Enroll for the beta program here.

After years of clandestinity Microsoft virtualization professionals will finally have an official recognition.

MCPmag.com in fact reports about a new certification exam currently in beta phase: 70-652: Windows Server Virtualization-Configuring.

Easy to guess, the test is about the upcoming Hyper-V and will probably ready by the launch time (expected no later than August).

But if there’s a Configuring exam it means that Microsoft is also preparing a much more interesting Designing and this implies that an entire certification track may be dedicated to virtualization, probably including exams about System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Terminal Services, Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) and the upcoming Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspaces).

Microsoft published a generic announcement which partially confirms this plan.