Year: 2008

Citrix is finally ready to open the public beta program for its new orchestration framework introduced for the first time in February.

The product will be able to automate tasks in XenServer, XenDesktop, XenApp and NetScaler, possibly matching the capabilities that Dunes Technologies used to offer with its VS-O before the VMware acquisition.

The product is definitively interesting also because of the integration with Microsoft PowerShell and the support for 3rd party plug-ins.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Announced in January, Propalms makes its move in the VDI space and includes connection broker capabilities in the new TSE 6.0 beta.

The available documentation doesn’t provide much details about the feature that the new component will offer, besides the support for Microsoft Virtual Server and the upcoming Hyper-V, as well as for VMware ESX.

It’s interesting to note how Propalms put out of focus this major enhancement in the available documentation, despite VDI seems the market segment on which almost every vendor is betting.
Even if the company will use the cross-platform support as the major selling point, it will have to compete with Quest/Provision Networks, Leostream, Ericom and possibly also Sun.

The final version of TSE 6.0 is expected for the end of this month.
Enroll for the beta program here.

eG Innovation is a US company which produces a product called VM Monitor, able to merge and correlate performance data collected inside the virtual machines (on the guest OSes) and inside their virtualization host (both the VMKernel and the Service Console in case of ESX).

This approach greatly helps to have the big picture of the virtual infrastructure and pinpoint bottlenecks accordingly. 

With the new version of the eG Enterprise Suite, which includes VM Monitor, the company introduces the capability to do agentless monitoring and the support for VMware ESXi and Sun Solaris Containers.
Additionally, eG Innovations plans to extend this support to Citrix XenServer later this year.

Pricing is per ESX server monitored and starts at at $50,000 for a 25-nodes VMware Infrastructure.

Xiotech, a storage company which VMware already certifies for ESX, just created a new plug-in for its management product, ICON Manager, to interact with the hypervisor through the VMware APIs.

This add-on called Virtual View allows to create new VMFS volumes, virtual machines virtual hard drives (VMDK) and even guest OS (Windows 2003 only) NFTS volumes inside them, all from one single management console.

Xiotech published a nice video to introduce the issues of multiple management points (the storage, the ESX and the virtual machine) which clarifies how Virtual View can be useful.

In February 2008 Sun acquired the German company innotek, obtaining control on two virtualization platforms: VirtualBox, an open source hosted VMM for desktops, and hyperkernel, a bare-metal VMM (aka hypervisor) that was still in private beta.

There is the maximum secret around hyperkernel: innotek never disclosed any detail about its architecture (despite there are some good hints available), and nobody ever provided a feedback about the preliminary version available.
Sun never told which are the plans for this hypervisor but it’s easy to imagine that, if it’s good enough, it could replace the current one (Xen) in the upcoming xVM Server.

VirtualBox instead was immediately rebranded and distributed for free through the Sun website. This allowed the company to reach the remarkable amount of five million downloads in less than 4 months.

So it seems that Sun has something to compete with free virtualization veterans: Microsoft achieved 1 million downloads for Virtual PC 2007 in 38 days.

The ONStor clustered NAS Bobcat just entered the VMware HCL.
The storage array is supported for both ESX 3.5 and ESXi.

Today VMware announces the acquisition of B-hive for an unknown amount, a San Francisco startup which approaches virtual data center automation in a very advanced way.

The B-hive virtual appliance, Conductor, is able to discover  the applications running inside each virtual machine in the virtual infrastructure, to track how the end-users are interacting with them and how the apps are interacting with different resources (storage, network, other applications).

At this point, following service level agreement (SLA) rules Conductor can interact with VMware Virtual Center and improve the performance of those virtual machines running relevant applications.
This goal can be achieved in several ways: by restarting the VMs if they are down, by granting them a higher priority access to physical resources or by moving them on less busy virtualization hosts).

Conductor is even able to shut down the VMs hosting applications which are not needed or to interact with 3rd party load balancing applications to change their load sharing settings depending on how the virtualized applications are performing.

B-hive supports both VMware Infrastructure 3 and Citrix XenServer, but mysteriously the page about this last offering is already reporting an error.
It may be a coincidence but it’s very likely what customers have to expect after the acquisition.

With B-hive the total number of (known) VMware acquisitions reaches nine:

• Asset Optimization Group aka AOG (capacity planning) – May 2005
• Akimbi (virtual lab automation) – June 2006
• Propero (virtual desktop infrastructure) – April 2007
• Determina (intrusion prevention system) – August 2007
• Dunes Technologies (VM lifecycle management) – September 2007
• Sciant (software development) – October 2007
• Foedus (consulting services) – January 2008
• Thinstall (application virtualization) – January 2008

With this move it’s evident that VMware is moving more and more away from its role of manager of virtual machines as empty containers, trying to extend its control on what’s inside the virtual machines: the applications, the actual important part of the data center.

And this is probably done not just because it allows the company to be a real game changer for a long time thanks to the data center automation, but mostly to fight Microsoft, which is already using a dangerous mantra to compete against VMware: we have control of the virtual machines as well as of the application (the reason why they integrates some virtualization features on Operation Manager and Configuration Manager rather than aggregating everything on System Center Virtual Machine Manager). 

A very interesting additional information contained in the press release reveals that VMware is building a new development center in Israel. A savvy move considering the impressive amount of virtualization startups raising in that country.

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

VMware already announced that its upcoming application virtualization product ThinApp 1.0 (acquired from Thinstall in January 2008), now in beta 2, is expected somewhere in H2 2008.
Now virtualization.info has learned that it may be out as soon as the end of July/beginning of August 2008.

It seems that VMware also plans to release its free server virtualization product Server 2.0 in the same timeframe.
Server 2.0, in beta 2 as well, may see an additional beta (release candidate?) build before the RTM, possibly in June.

VMware may want to release both products around August to disturb the release of Microsoft Hyper-V, planned exactly for that timeframe.

On his corporate blog Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, published a new post about the recently acquired VirtualBox, this time focusing on how virtualization can simplify the software development lifecycle.

The article is pretty generic but contains two key informations.
First of all the included slide implies that VirtualBox virtual machines will be importable in the upcoming Sun hypervisor xVM Server.
Secondarily, the fact that Wilson put so much emphasis on the topic today means that Sun already recognized a big opportunity to leverage virtualization for its JAVA developers communities. And this implies that Sun may be looking for virtualization companies focused on the so called Virtual Lab Automation segment.

The only companies in this space are VMware (after the Akimbi acquisition), Surgient, VMLogix and the newcomers StackSafe and Skytap.
StackSafe is the only one in this list that supports Xen at the moment (despite VMLogix is coming) and since xVM Server is based on Xen it may be an interesting target.

In any case this interest is very positive: besides Microsoft, which is wasting the MSDN opportunity since a long time, Sun is the only other major vendor which has enough influence on the developers to successfully sell virtualization for software development lifecycle.

VMware has just released the first minor update for its connection broker Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM), acquired by Propero around April 2007.

The 2.1 version (build 596) introduces a number of new features including:

• Multiple sessions per user within a pool
• Pools spanning datastores in order to better manage resources
• VDM Configuration Backup (command-line only)
• Integrate MMR multimedia extensions DLL with VDM Client (Windows XP)
• Allow blocking of incoming RDP connections that are not from VDM Clients
• Allow end users to change password
• Allow end users to restart their VM

Download a trial here.

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