Year: 2008

Sun just announced a new minor release for its recently acquired desktop virtualization solution VirtualBox.

The new version 1.6.2 introduces a lot of bug fixes and performance enhancements.
The only major feature is the support for Intel VT-x and AMD-V CPU extensions on Sun Solaris hosts.

Obviously the product is still open source and free of charge.
Download it here.

VMware just published a 164-pages step-by-step guide to install and configure its new connection broker Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.1.

The document was written by Douglas Brown, author of popular Methodology in a Box, the step-by-step guide to install a complete Citrix environment.

Download the paper here.

In July 2007 IDC predicted that the virtualization services market would reach $11.7 billion by 2011.
While it’s too early to verify the accuracy of this forecast, there are some evident signs that consulting firms are becoming an interesting acquisition targets as much as the virtualization startups.

In July 2007 Glasshouse Technologies acquired RapidApp, and now INX acquires AccessFlow for an undisclosed sum.

AccessFlow is a top performing firm in the consulting industry: in 2007 won the Rising Star of Americas award at VMware VMworld and in 2008 won the Rainmaker award at VMware Partner Exchange.

The acquisition is specially interesting because INX currently has a major consulting business around Cisco IP communication solutions.
Virtualization can obviously serve IPC needs but seems a far-away area where to invest, so INX must have serious reasons to extend so much its range of activities.

Virtual Iron has just announced the certification of Quantum’s DXi disks and Scalar tapes for virtual machines backup.

Quantum is the latest technology partner included in the small but relevant pool that Virtual Iron managed to build over the last three years.

Last week Virtual Iron announced another partnership with 2X for VDI.

June 25th I’ll be at the Catalyst Conference 2008 in San Diego, giving a lecture on a topic I consider specially important: the security myths and reality of virtualization.

The adoption of virtualization implies a mind shift in the way IT data centers are designed, implemented and managed. But do we also need to change the way they are secured?
Can virtual infrastructures be blindly trusted? Or do they introduce a new level of insecurity that needs protection?
Can we still use the products we invested in, or do we really need a new class of tools?

Easy to imagine, my session will try to answer these key questions.

The virtualization track that Burton Group shaped for this event will feature top speakers like Simon Crosby, CTO at Citrix, Steve Herrod, CTO at VMware, and Winston Bumpus, President of the DMTF, which will demonstrate the OVF support publicly for the first time.

For this reason virtualization.info will report from the conference, publishing interesting news and announcements launched during the sessions (more details about what to expect here).

If you plan to attend and you didn’t register yet there’s a great gift: Burton Group was kind enough to grant virtualization.info readers the Early Bird price.
To use the discount go here and use this code: CAT2008.

And obviously, if you come please stop by and say hello: it’s always a great pleasure to meet virtualization.info readers in person!

Alessandro

(just in case you are interested but cannot attend, I’ll speak at other events this year. My full schedule is here)

virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab is our premier on-demand virtual data center located in Zurich, Switzerland.
Less than one month ago we announced a major expansion, with twenty Intel eight-cores (2 CPUs x 4 cores) servers from HP and four storage arrays from Dell EqualLogic, HP and Pillar.

Now we are proud to announce that NetApp SANs has been added as well: a couple of massive FAS3020 with 14 x 320GB ATA drives + 14 x 144GB FC drives are now occupying half of our sixth rack.
The hardware doesn’t come alone: virtualization.info readers will be able to use some very high-class (and very expensive) software like the MetroCluster and the FlexClone.

Additionally, we’ve extended the HP presence in our facility with a couple of EVA 3000, each featuring 14 x 72GB FC drives.

Here’s a picture of the additions (NetApp on the left, HP on the right):

The Rent-A-Lab overall storage capability now exceeds 35TB.
The entire infrastructure (including the software management products) is worth over $1 million which up to three customers can rent at the same time.

How is the experience from different locations worldwide?
To give you an idea we published few testimonials online. More are coming.

So, if you want to test the upcoming VMware Site Recovery Manager (or any other virtualization product on the market) but you don’t want to visit the VMware offices, virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab sounds like one of the best places to go at today.

Check the full equipment list and a short demo.

In January 2006 virtualization.info published a post titled Virtualization is the first step of a long walk called Grid Computing, stating that VMware could move its virtualization offering to a higher level and go for grid computing.
Over two years later it seems that the time has come.

Diane Greene, President and Co-Founder, at JP Morgan Technology Conference in May 21 and Reza Malekzadeh, Senior Director of Products and Marketing, at Nordic Virtualization Conference in June 2 started to introduce a new VMware mantra.

Both executives presented a five stage vision where virtualization is used first for test and development, then for server consolidation, then for infrastructure on demand, then for data center automation and finally for cloud computing.

In the last year and a half with its EC2 service Amazon demonstrated that there is enough interest for this market and a huge opportunity to innovate. And after Amazon other companies like Desktone (for VDI) and Skytap (for Virtual Lab Automation) are pushing virtualization for cloud computing.
So doesn’t surprise much that VMware is preparing to enter the space.

It must be seen anyway when and how the company will make its move.

In an interview given to CIO.com, Chris Akerberg, President and COO of Vizioncore, reveals three major areas where the Quest subsidiary is looking at: capacity planning automation, monitoring of applications inside virtual machines and VM lifecycle management.

This last point implies that Vizioncore is working on correlates what happens at virtualization level and at the guest OS level, providing a better understanding of the virtual data center performance trends.

To do so Vizioncore will leverage the long-term Quest experience in applications, database and OS management that made the company famous, but will have to compete with other firms entering this critical space.
The long term partner VMware is one of them now that announced the acquisition of B-hive. Another one is eG Innovations with its VM Monitor.

The last and apparently most imminent news is related to the entrance of Vizioncore in the VM Lifecycle Management space, where the company plans to launch something this year.

Not too surprisingly, in the interview Akerberg also confirms that Vizioncore is having discussions with Microsoft and Citrix but at the moment they will stay focused on VMware support only.
We’ll see if this strategy will change as soon as VMware integrates the B-hive technologies.

One year ago virtualization.info published a report called Virtualization Industry Challenges, which describes the major issues that a customer has to address when embracing virtualization.

The very first one was (and still is) the lack of support.

Andrew Dugdell points at a critical VMware document which summarizes how customers can receive support for Microsoft software installed inside virtual machines. 
Reading it gives the impression that there are an endless number of restrictions but Microsoft actually is one of the best at supporting the virtual environments.

Obviously this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Some major vendors are so hostile to virtualization that have to invent their own hypervisor to allow their products inside VMs.
Others simply prefer to ignore virtualization completely.

It seems impossible that DMTF is working on interoperability standards to manage virtual machines when the market cannot even agree on a way to provide interoperable support for them.

virtualization.info has just learned that NetApp is aggressively distributing its storage in VMware briefing centers across the Europe.

The move is justified by the upcoming release of Site Recover Manager (SRM), the much expected disaster recovery product that VMware will launch next week.

SRM needs an enterprise storage back-end to work and NetApp has all the interests to demonstrate how its arrays and software (SnapMirror on top) integrates with the newest VMware solution. Better than the ones provided by the VMware’s parent company EMC.

Even if EMC acquired VMware in 2003, probably the wave of big storage investments in the virtualization market begins now.