Year: 2008

Exactly one month ago, HP announced a new product called ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC) able to manage a Citrix XenServer edition that comes without XenCenter.

The product is a part of an initiative called ProLiant iVirtualization, is now including VMware and soon Microsoft (look at the bottom of the announcement).

At the moment the project  involves VMware only in the sense that ESXi can be pre-installed in new ProLiant servers, but the lightweight hypervisor comes without VirtualCenter, so it’s possible that HP may want to offer a PVC for VMware ESXi (and Microsoft Hyper-V) in the coming months.

Bloomberg just published a rumor about the possible sale of VMware.

Their article doesn’t mention any potential buyer.

virtualization.info can confirm that this rumor is spreading since several months with a key additional detail: the potential buyer mentioned so far by multiple sources is Intel.

While it’s possible that this rumor is spreading just to artificially increase the VMW stock, if confirmed such acquisition may give VMware a unique competitive advantage, slipping the hypervisor directly onto the CPU, and may completely change the IT industry order, with new alliances and competitors.

In any case an acquisition isn’t like to happen before January 2009, when EMC will be able to do a tax-free distribution of shares.

Update: Obviously EMC denies the possibility to sell its VMware stake.

Second update: Two months later (July 7) RBC Capital Markets publicly embraces the idea that VMware may be sold in early 2009 and updates its EMC stock rating to outperform.

The result is a temporary performance boost of 4.5%

The enterprise firewalls leader Check Point just added a new product to its portfolio for consumers called ZoneAlarm (a brand obtained from the acquisition of ZoneLabs in 2003): ZoneAlarm ForceField.

ZoneAlarm is a personal firewall and this ForceField edition seems to bundle an application virtualization engine which virtualizes the browser (both Internet Explorer and Firefox).

What an application-proxy firewall has to do with application virtualization? Nothing, but trying to use application virtualization for security purposes is not a bad idea.

Unfortunately, despite what the Check Point press release states, the company is not a pioneer in this area: two years ago a startup called Trustware launched on the market an application virtualization engine, BufferZone, selling the product as a security solution to isolate all those applications that interact with Internet and may bring in malicious contents (browsers, mail clients, P2P clients, instant messengers, etc.).

A little later, a stealth startup called GreenBorder was developing a similar technology, so good that Google acquired the company before it could hit the market.

It’s not clear how the security giant thinks to sell application virtualization through personal firewalls, but it’s very likely that if Check Point demonstrates interest in this approach, the entire security industry will follow shortly.

Both Parallels and Microsoft recently introduced support for the newest Windows editions:

• Parallels updated its Desktop 3.0 to the build 5600.
  The new update supports Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3.
• Microsoft updated its Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 to the build 1.1.629.0 and Virtual PC 2007 to the Service Pack 1.
  The new updates support Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3 and Windows Server 2008.

VMware may introduce the support for these three new OSes in its upcoming Workstation 6.5.

Download the Parallels Desktop 3.0 build 5600 trial here.

Download Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 SP1 build 1.1.629 here.

Download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 here.

On May 15th, 1999, a unknown startup founded in 1998 and called VMware launched its first product on an empty virtualization market: VMware for Linux 1.0.

The company was founded by Diane Greene (now President and CEO), Mendel Rosenblum (now Chief Scientist), Scott Devine (now Principal Engineer), Edward Wang (now Principal Engineer) and Edouard Bugnion (now CTO at Nuova Systems, funded and soon to be acquired by Cisco).
Along with these five, another five composed the original ten persons group which started to change forever the way we think, design and implement our IT infrastructures: Jeremy, Patrick, Beng, VJ and Reza.

The virtualization market they created is now populated by tens of vendors, hundreds of resellers and thousands of customers worldwide.
The virtualization technologies that they delivered have the brightest perspective to grow and become the fundamental brick of every computing architecture in the coming years.

In these last ten years VMware hit several milestones, bringing virtualization to new markets through a plethora of products, spreading the knowledge and confidence in the technology thought free tools, demonstrating the absolute value of the innovation through the EMC acquisition and one of the most impressive tech IPO in the stock market history.

Happy Birthday VMware!

Thanks to an anonymous for the news and to the Linux Journal for the image.

Over one year ago, in collaboration with its trusted partner Kybernetika, virtualization.info launched its on-demand data center that our readers can rent and manage from any part of the world: Rent-A-Lab.

We offer full control on nearly every aspect of the configuration for all the equipment (servers, SAN zones, network switches), providing a blazing fast and reliable connectivity, and an absolutely qualified support.
Probably for these reasons, in a short amount of time Rent-A-Lab became an absolute blockbuster and it often happens that the entire data center goes overbooked.

We started with just nine dual-core servers and two fibre channel SANs, all from the same vendor.
Today we are glad to announce that the Rent-A-Lab infrastructure is much bigger and most of all is finally multi-vendor.

First of all we have twenty quad-core servers from HP. Each one has 2 Intel CPUs, 4GB RAM, 6 Gigabit Ethernet and at least 2 Fibre Channel adapters.

But is in the storage area where we excel. Now we have four enterprise storage arrays: the Dell/Equallogic PS5000E and PS5000XV iSCSI SAN, the HP StorageWorks MSA 1000 Fibre Channel SAN, and the Pillar Axiom 500 Fibre Channel / iSCSI SAN.

A unique equipment to test the soon to be released VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and all the other virtualization products that we daily cover at virtualization.info.

We’ll continue to update the infrastructure, adding more hardware from multiple vendors, so that Rent-A-Lab becomes the preferred on-demand data center for worldwide virtualization professionals.

Meanwhile enjoy the equipment that we can offer today.

A new startup prepares to enter the virtualization market: DynamicOps.

The company, which didn’t publish a formal announcement yet, was founded in US in early 2008 as spinout of Credit Suisse. 
Its founder and CTO, Leslie Muller, comes from Credit Suisse while its CEO and VP of Marketing, Rich Krueger and Rich Bourdeau, come from Incipient, a very interesting company in what is tentatively called storage virtualization market.
Last but not least the DynamicOps VP of Field Operations comes from XenSource.

DynamicOps will face a tough competition give the high number of startups that recently entered the same market: Embotics, Fortisphere, ManageIQ and even VMware.

Like the others mentioned above it’s clear that the company is developing a cross-platform solution, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), given the technology partnership with Citrix, Microsoft, Sun and VMware.

And like the others mentioned above the DynamicOps product will offer some mandatory features in this category: a provisioning engine based on a virtual machines library, a web-based self-service portal for end-users, a lifecycle policy engine to control how and where new virtual machines are deployed, a prolific reporting engine, etc.

Additionally, VRM has some interesting new capabilities: a command line console, support for network load balancing, an extensible workflow engine (each corporate department can define and customize its own part of the overall deploying process or 3rd party solutions can define a part to it).

It’s worth to note that DynamicOps is the first VM lifecycle management company that invades the virtual lab automation space, specifically mentioning the solution in its website.
In both scenarios the engine is similar: it has to take care of how a single VM or a group of them is deployed on the available virtualization hosts, how the physical resources are assigned to the VMs, which users are authorized to access the VMs and how the VMs are decommissioned after use.

Thus was definitively expected that sooner or later virtual lab automation companies like Surgient or VMLogix would extend their focus over time to become lifecycle management vendors, or that lifecycle management vendors like DynamicOps would try to sell their products for virtual lab automation tasks.

At the moment virtualization.info has no informations on when the company will formally launch and release its product.

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

VMware just announced the release dates for two of its newest products: Stage Manager, expected by May 19, and Site Recovery Manager, available within 30 days from today.

The choice to split its virtual data center automation offering in three different products (Lab Manager, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager) was not welcome by several customers.

Somebody saw the move only driven by profit and would rather prefer to see the features that these products offer as a premium option for VirtualCenter (like VMotion or DRS). A more natural fit since all of them depends on VirtualCenter in any case.

Maybe VMware is listening and changing its mind since will soon sell two bundles.

The first, called IT Service Delivery, offers together Lifecycle Manager with one of the other two: Lab Manager or Stage Manager.

The second, called Management and Automation, instead will include all the three above plus the much expected Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

Is it a sign of a future re-union into a single suite?

It’s evident that Desktone has some numbers. No other virtualization startups so far closed monumental partnerships as soon as it left the stealth mode like this one.

On April 21, at company launch, one of the biggest US phone carrier, Verizon, revealed the plan to deliver virtual desktops managed by the Desktone platform.
Today, at company Partner Program launch, one of the biggest OEM in the world, HP, beaten Verizon on time and announces the deal as the first partner.

It’s worth to highlight that currently Desktone is only supporting VMware Infrastructure 3.x as the back-end hypervisor, so the startup fortune is the VMware fortune right now. But there are clear plans to support XenServer (also because Citrix is an investor) and Hyper-V.