Year: 2008

In September Citrix silently released the first minor update for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The new XenDesktop 2.1 becomes a serious multi-hypervisor connection broker, as it introduces the support for Microsoft products (both Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008) that goes side by side with the existing support for Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX.

The product also includes the new Provisioning Server for Desktops 5.0.

To celebrate Citrix has released an interesting evaluation guide: Citrix XenDesktop 2.1 with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

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

Yesterday Symantec announced a new partnership with VMware to integrate its much appreciated Veritas Cluster Server with VMware Infrastructure.

As first step Symantec has enhanced VCS to cluster vCenter.

Additionally, the two companies may bundle together VCS with Site Recovery Manager (SRM) as the announcement mentions a very vague complementary HA/DR solutions as part of the joint operation.

The VDI market gets more crowded every day. All the biggest players in the space are developing, releasing, or rearranging their solutions to offer an end-to-end VDI platform to make the client consolidation through virtualization a viable option.

This is a space where Citrix, VMware and Quest/Provision networks lead, followed by aggressive newcomers like Red Hat (which acquired Qumranet and plan to use KVM), Pano Logic (which has its own platform), Leostream, Ericom (which supports many hypervisors but seems to bet on Oracle VM), Propalms and more.

Each one is trying to working to offer some sort of performance booster for the RDP protocol (while we all wait for Microsoft to enhance it with the technology acquired by Calista), or to completely replace it.

HP has some technology to push in this space so yesterday with a notable marketing exercise it relaunched its offering under the name of Virtual Client Essentials.

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In June Veeam completed its first acquisition: NWorks, a company focused on management plug-ins for enterprise management systems like HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).

After six months the company is ready to release the first rebranded version of NWorks technology under the new name of Veeam Management Pack for VMware 4.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

Beside the fact that maybe Veeam has to work a bit on the name, the new release is interesting because it gives to SCOM a much detailed visibility of the VMware Infrastructure 3 environment.

The biggest change is that now the product allows ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 host hardware monitoring through VMware Virtual Infrastructure SDK.

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DynamicOps releases today the first minor update of its Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) 3.0.

VRM is a VM lifecycle management product that offers self-service provisioning capabilities, resources tracking (including abandoned virtual machines) and chargeback, and policy compliancy enforcement.

Following a questionable trend, the company jumped from VRM 1.0 (released in June) to this 3.1 in just six months.

Nonetheless this new version introduces a couple of key features:

• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V
• Support for Citrix XenDesktop (including its Provisioning Server component) and VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) connection brokers
  (support for the new VMware View 3.0 will come in early 2009)

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Tripwire is an old and well-known security vendor focused on host intrusion detection (specifically file integrity checking).
Over one year ago the company saw an opportunity in virtualization and joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program.
In June 2008 they release a free tool (and a blueprint developed in collaboration with VMware) to verify the ESX configuration.

The product was so successful that Tripwire must be in the process of reconsidering its corporate mission. Today in fact it was announced the recruitment of a well-known virtualization expert: Stephen Beaver, former System Engineer at the Florida Hospital in Orlando.

Beaver will work at Tripwire as Virtualization Evangelist and will write on a new blog that the company will formally launch on Dec. 15.

In the last period Virtual Iron lost a number of key executives: the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Strategy Officer (still working as consultant), and the Director of Corporate Marketing.
Even before this, the company decided to not show up at industry events like the VMware VMworld for a couple of times.

Considering these facts the impression is that Virtual Iron is trying to contain the costs and avoid to burn the $65 million that raised in five rounds (the highest financing ever in the virtualization industry, excluding VMware).

Virtual Iron may not have another chance to collect capital, so it must to gain a more significant market share (Gartner reports no more than 1%) or to be acquired.

While there’s obviously no news about an acquisition, the company revealed some information about its growth: 130% revenue increase from Q3 2007 to Q3 2008, and 2,000 customers worldwide.

While these are great numbers the real problem is understanding if they are great enough to survive against the competition with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Sun and Parallels (and probably more coming).

Immediately after the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin, Stephen Pollack, joined Embotics as board advisor the company announced its second round of funding.

Despite the credit crunch, Covington Capital Corporation managed to raise $4 million for this Canadian startup focused on the so called VM lifecycle management segment. 
The entity of the first round stays undisclosed.

The number of financing rounds in the virtualization industry dropped near zero in the last six months, and it doesn’t seem it will go any better for a while.
Embotics is certainly lucky as this money will grant oxygen for the next few quarters.

Virtual Bridges is a company founded at the end of 2006, that always offered commercial flavors of QEMU for Linux, BSD and Solaris platforms.
After KVM made its appearance Virtual Bridges started to implement support for it on its products for Linux. Where KVM is not available KQEUM is automatically used.

In August it significantly extended its scope by releasing its first VDI connection broker for KVM: Win4VDI.

Compared to other products in this space, Win4VDI doesn’t connect the user to the actual guest OS, but rather to the underlying host. From there the user session is started.
In this way Virtual Bridges can leverage the authentication methods and profiles that the host is using.

The choice has been courageous.
Even if KVM is part of the Linux kernel and even if its maintainer, Qumranet, has been acquired by Red Hat, the spread of a new virtualization platform must surpass a huge obstacle: the ISVs support.
And at this point no ISV formally supported its applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Despite that, Virtual Bridges has been rewarded as IBM just closed an agreement with them to resell a bundle made by:

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Last week VMware silently released the first update for its disaster recovery solution: Site Recovery Manager 1.0.

The new build (128004) introduces some important new features like: a more granular permissions scheme that differentiates between users allows to test the recovery plan and users allowed to actually run it, and the support for raw disk mapping (which brings in the support for Microsoft Cluster Server)

The bad news is VMware doesn’t offer backward compatibility for the Update 1, so all SRM 1.0 clients must be updated along with the servers.

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