Year: 2008

Over the last two years virtualization.info has been constant in repeating that support is the most challenging issue in any virtualization project.

Some companies are working hard to make their support policy more virtualization-friendly, while others are not even near the minimal level of commitment that the customers are demanding.

Today Microsoft makes a further step to simplify the process with the launch of a Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

The program is open to any vendor which offers hosted or bare-metal (aka hypervisor) virtualization platform that is able to run Windows Server guest OSes (Win2008/2003/2000 only).

Since Microsoft is not able to grant that its software will run as expected on any virtual stack and doesn’t want to lock-in customers like Oracle, is trying to solve the problem at the root, directly validating the virtual stack.

As long as the 3rd party virtualization platform is validated Microsoft will be sure that Windows runs correctly on its virtual machines and will provide the same support that it’s already offered for physical servers.

The virtualization providers that adhered the program so far are:

• Citrix
• Novell
• Sun
• Virtual Iron

a list easy to guess considering that Microsoft already has interoperability agreements with all of them.

At this point customers may wonder if VMware, which is very careful in tracking the Microsoft support strategy, will adhere the program as well.

Almost one year ago, much before the Citrix acquisition, XenSource signed an OEM agreement with Symantec to include Veritas Storage Foundation into the once called XenEnterprise platform.

Since that time nothing happened because the Citrix involvement implied a review of the whole deal.

Now finally the two companies are ready to go even if the final arrangement seems slightly different from the original plan. 
Is not the hypervisor (Citrix XenServer) that embeds the storage management console (Veritas Storage Foundation) but the other way around.
The resulting product that Symantec announces today is called Veritas Virtual Infrastructure.

It features a unified web management console to provision virtual machine and storage partitions, to monitor the relationship between VMs and physical storage, and to analyze the storage usage.

Additionally, backups can be performed at storage level with a block-based approach (which also supports Microsoft Volume Shadow Service), without requiring the an entire virtual machine snapshot.

Last but not least the integration between the two products allow to create or modify storage pools in a transparent way for virtual machines.

The solution is expected for this fall at the price of $4,595 per 2 socket server.

The name choice is interesting and seems to imply an intent to compete with VMware.
Symantec has now some serious tools to achieve the task: the application virtualization and streaming products acquired by Altiris (Jan 2007) and by AppStream (Apr 2008) may be integrated in future versions of Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, giving the company a platform that can compete with the VMware, Microsoft and Citrix ones.

It’s just surprising that Symantec, the undisputed leader of mergers & acquisitions (at least in the IT security world), preferred to adopt the Citrix hypervisor rather than buying its own.

Despite capacity planning is one of the most critical phases of any virtualization adoption project a limited number of customers know that VMware offers a solution for it.

The product, acquired by AOG in 2005, is called Capacity Planner and has a unique capability: after monitoring the workloads performance on physical servers it can compare them against a big database of known values so that customers can recognize if an application has an abnormal behavior before running a P2V migration.

The product is available only through the VMware partners, which have to purchase a license (which expires after six months) to use it at customers site.
Only some customers recognize the value of capacity planning and are glad to pay for it because the operation implies an investment just to understand if virtualization makes sense or not. So the consulting firms sometimes have a hard time to sell the service.

But VMware is about to dramatically change the process: virtualization.info has learned that Capacity Planner will be available free of charge starting on July 1st.

Partners will not be required to buy any license anymore (even if they will still have to attend a classroom course that doesn’t come cheap). They will just have to login on the online portal, create a new profile and start monitoring the customer’s infrastructure.
The data will stay online for six months and then will be archived.

This move will create serious problems to competing companies like CiRBA and Novell (through PlateSpin) which obviously target the VMware customers.
It’s very likely that these companies will shift their focus on Microsoft and Citrix audience very soon.

Stratus Technologies is a well-known company for its 99,999% fault-tolerant hardware, ftServer, which is made by a couple of identical machines that act as one, providing out-of-the-box HA capability.

Stratus ftServer isn’t exactly a cheap solution so the company today launches something completely different: a software-only HA solution for SMBs called Avance.

To achieve fault tolerance Stratus integrates Citrix XenServer and requires its customers to run their applications inside virtual machines.
The Avance platform has a web management console which allows to create new VMs with a very easy interface.

Once the VMs are in place Avance will take care of replicating them on all nodes, without the need to have any shared storage (FC or iSCSI SAN).

Any application supported by Citrix XenServer will be automatically supported by Stratus as well.

By design the product only supports two nodes, but Stratus doesn’t exclude the possibility to extend the number of nodes in future.
The product is currently certified to run on Dell servers only but the interesting thing is that the two nodes are not required to be identical machines.

The price for Stratus Avance is $2,500 per node (so the minimum price is $5,000 for each twin) and includes the Citrix XenServer license.

The introduction of virtualization platforms on mobile devices has been advocated by vanguards like VirtualLogix, Trango, Open Kernel and SYSGO since few years. But unless a few conditions happen it’s unlikely that the technology will become as popular as inside the data centers.

The first condition is having a concrete reason to bring virtualization on mobile devices.
The second, mandatory one is having a mobile device enough powerful and usable to make really useful a virtual machine.
The third one is having a major virtualization player that announce the plan to go mobile.

A good reason to bring virtualization on mobile devices could be the need to have the home or corporate desktop available anywhere.
The VDI startup Desktone made the first step, signing an agreement with Verizon, one of the biggest US phone carrier, and VMware may do the rest with the OnDemand streaming technology that it’s developing since a while.
It’s easy to imagine the popularity that virtual desktop streamed on mobile devices could have among business users.

The just announced iPhone 3G (and the horde of competitors that will come) may be powerful and friendly enough to run virtual machines.

The last problem is which major platform will be the first to land on phones. It may be KVM.

LinuxPlanet published an article by Dor Laor, Software Director at Qumranet, where says that the virtualization platform is ready for embedded devices.

It’s probably the first time that a major virtualization vendor clearly states its intention to go on mobile and may mean that the time for embedded and mobile virtualization is coming.

VMware just announced that the acquired Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite, now dubbed ThinApp, will be available within July 10.

The price is set at $5,000 and includes a copy of VMware Workstation and licenses for 50 clients.
Any additional client will cost $39.

A free limited edition would be greatly appreciated, mostly now that Endeavors Technologies just released a free edition of its new Application Jukebox.

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

Endeavors Technologies, one of the companies recently involved in the Microsoft SPLA-gate, just completed the release of Application Jukebox, its the next generation of its application virtualization and streaming platform.
Application Jukebox replaces the existing AppExpress despite the company doesn’t detail which are the new features included.

The product was announced in October 2007 and partially released in April 2008, but only now all the three versions are available: the SaaS edition, the Enterprise edition and the Lite Edition.

With the Lite edition Endeavors breaks the common marketing model used by many application virtualization companies, which allows to download a bunch of pre-virtualized programs to taste how the technology works (something that even Endeavors does on the Stream24-7.com website).
Application Jukebox Lite is a fully functional product which lets the customers virtualize and stream the software they like.
The only limitations are: a maximum of 25 concurrent sessions and the single-server installation (no multi-tier setup).

Download the free Lite edition here.

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

Almost one year after the first release VMware is ready to publish the first minor update for its benchmarking framework VMmark.

The biggest change in this new version is the introduction of 32bit and 64bit mixed workloads: now the web server, the database server and the Java server tiles are 64bit.

Download it here.

Against any prediction to see the product at the just started Apple WWDC conference, it seems that Parallels is not ready yet to launch its dual mode (bare metal/hosted) virtualization platform Server.

The product is in beta since one year (despite the company’s original plan was to release it for mid-2006), and so far had four beta builds.

Parallels will release a hosted version of this product for every major platform, Windows, Linux and Mac OS, but only this last one is now in Release Candidate status.
The Windows/Linux one is still frozen at beta 4 stage.

It’s impossible to know when the product will be finally available, but it’s easy to imagine that Parallels wants to have it out in time for the upcoming VMworld 2008 in September.

The US startup ManageIQ is preparing the second version of its products EVM Insight and EVM Control, bundled as EVM Suite.

EVM Insight 2.0 includes a much broader capability to discover the virtual data center elements and track their changes.
The product now discovers both network and storage logical partitions, VLANs and LUNs, it recognizes the new virtual machine format OVF and any VM snapshot.
All these elements, along with other inner details like the virtual hardware metadata or the guest OS registry settings are now tracked and correlated.
The user can visualize how the whole data data center changed over time on revamped Virtual Timelines, and can be even informed of changes over RSS.

EVM Control 2.0 instead includes additional features to simplify the configuration policy management.
Among them a Policy Template Library, a more granular customization for the snapshots and clones policy, support for multiple policy profiles, and role delegation.

ManageIQ plans to release the new products in July 2008.