Year: 2008

The VMware entrance in the Apple market in August 2007 doesn’t seem to have damaged Parallels business too much.
The company in fact reports over one million Parallels Desktops copies sold worldwide.

Unfortunately Parallels doesn’t reveal how its sales trend is these days, and in which countries the product is more popular than VMware Fusion.

In any case the market may be big enough for both: the third big, Microsoft, decided to discontinue its Virtual PC for Mac in August 2006. Who knows how many executives regret for the choice after seeing the Parallels results?

October 14-16, 2008, in London, virtualization.info will open its first conference about virtualization technologies: the Virtualization Congress 2008.
The Early Bird (£ 200 discount) will end April 30, and before that time we wanted to give our readers an insightful update about the progresses made so far.

Well, the support we are getting from the industry is simply impressive.

Since day one we were able to announce that the biggest market players, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, are with us as Platinum sponsors.
With them other emerging stars supported the Virtualization Congress since the beginning: Quest, ManageIQ, Marathon Technologies, Veeam and VMLogix.

In less than two months since that day, we received a remarkable number of inquiries and we are glad to announce another round of great sponsors: HP, Phoenix Technologies, Vizioncore, Transitive, eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, Metron.

Unfortunately we cannot disclose the names of many others since they are signing in these hours but check back the Sponsors list to see who else is coming.

Obviously we don’t have only top sponsors. A great conference is made by great speakers.

The agenda is still secret, but we can reveal the first three names:

• Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix (see his introductory video)
• Dr. Guarav Banga, Senior Vice President of Engineering and CTO at Phoenix Technologies
• Jerald H. Melnick, CTO at Marathon Technologies

Other top-level technical speakers are coming, along with some exceptional guest stars. We have new announcements in queue.

Another factor that makes a conference a better happening is the surprise element: our Call for Startups competition received several applications from stealth companies and we should be able to show something completely new on stage this October.

Hopefully this is a good start to make the Virtualzation Congress a great event to attend, but just in case we have much more coming. Stay tuned!

The Early Bird (£ 200 discount) ends in one week! Register now!

Today VMware announced the Q1 2008 financial results, beating analysts forecasts with a 69% sales increase.
The immediate result was a 15% increase in VMW trading during the last part of the day.

VMware expects another 55% revenue increase for Q2 2008, but the most interesting information is related to the increased spending: the company investments in R&D doubled in the last quarter while the sales & marketing investments topped a 72% increase as reported by Bloomberg.

Update: Seeking Alpha published the whole earnings call transcript. It’s available here.

Just yesterday virtualization.info covered the launch of a peculiar startup in the VDI space: Desktone.

The company has yet to disclose which service providers will use their technology, but it seems that the first will be one of the biggest phone carrier in US: Verizon.

virtualization.info received a confirmation that Verizon will offer hosted virtual desktops to its customers, despite nor the price (rumored at $75 / month) neither the launch date were disclosed.
Desktone will split the revenue with the phone carrier.

Another missing information is which back-end virtualization infrastructure will be used by the service provider: Desktone claimed support for VMware ESX only in the first release, but its architecture is able to integrate both Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.
If Verizon wants to adopt a different virtualization platform it should be easy for Desktone to satisfy the requirement.

In any case this may become the biggest VDI case study existing today.

After securing $12 million in a second round of investments, the Canadian company CiRBA is back with a minor update of its capacity planning tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

Despite the number assignment DCI 4.6 has some major new features like:

• Selective workload analysis
  The product is able to analyze multiple workloads running on the same server through the most relevant benchmarking systems. This improves the overall capability to recognize good candidates for P2V migrations
• Performance impact analysis
  The product is able to calculate the risk of negatively affecting application performance after the server consolidation
• iSCSI impact analysis
  The product is able to calculate the impact of iSCSI protocol on the physical CPUs in those virtualization hosts not using TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) NICs
• Network Latency Analysis
  The product now tracks the network latency on the physical environment and compares it with the one expected in the virtualization host

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

Andrew Kutz had time to do serious reverse engineering, spot security risks, and produce an impressive number of plug-ins before VMware released the official documentation to achieve the goal.

The guide is very brief (13 pages) but addresses the fundamentals behind the new plug-in architecture.
Along with the document VMware also released the XML Schema Definition to create new plug-ins.

Read it here.

AMD is finally able to deliver its codename Barcellona quad-core CPU (the first OEM to distribute them is Dell) and announces that VMware certified it for ESX and ESXi.

AMD Opteron Quad-Core introduces the nested tables technology called Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) which is expected to greatly improve guest OS performances.
VMware supports it starting from ESX 3.5.0.

The latest version of Linux kernel, 2.6.25, introduces some enhancements in the memory management specifically addressing virtualization platform needs, as Linux Kernel Newbies is reporting:

…

The memory resource controller isolates the memory behavior of a group of tasks -cgroup- from the rest of the system. It can be used to:

• Isolate an application or a group of applications. Memory hungry applications can be isolated and limited to a smaller amount of memory.
• Create a cgroup with limited amount of memory, this can be used as a good alternative to booting with mem=XXXX.
• Virtualization solutions can control the amount of memory they want to assign to a virtual machine instance.
• A CD/DVD burner could control the amount of memory used by the rest of the system to ensure that burning does not fail due to lack of available memory.

…

The new Memory Resource Controller can impact the behaviour of hardware virtualization and OS virtualization platforms, as OpenVZ development team confirms with additional insights.

In just ten days the KVM developement team moved from version 65, which introduced support for IBM s390, to version 66, which introduces support for the Intel Itanium architecture along with a long list of bug fixes.

Download it here.

It really seems that virtualization vendors are aggressively seeking emerging markets where to pitch virtualization.

Citrix is moving in China (through Lenovo) and in Korea.
Microsoft is doing exactly the same bringing Hyper-V in China by an extended interoperability agreement with Novell and in Korea.

Parallels is present in China since a long time, thanks to the massive adoption of Virtuozzo among local hosting providers.
But the company is now extending its interest to Russia, where SWsoft (as it was originally called) was born: Sergey Belousov, Founder and CEO, announced plans to invest $10 million in this country within 2011.