Year: 2008

One of the most complex tasks in any virtualization project is recognizing the best candidates for P2V migrations and correctly mixing their workloads into the new virtualization hosts. virtualization.info rates the capacity planning as the third biggest challenge in virtualization adoption since 2007.

A very limited amount of competitors offer products in this space: VMware (with its Capacity Planner), Novell (with PlateSpin PowerRecon) and CiRBA (with its Data Center Intelligence).
Available through monthly subscriptions or as part of consulting services, all these tools are not exactly cheap: the immediate result is that the assessment phase significantly impacts on the overall virtualization project budget discouraging several companies from doing a proper capacity planning.

A free of charge alternative surprisingly comes from Microsoft which never advertised the product: Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP).

Originally published in February 2008, Microsoft seems to do everything to hide this critical tool despite its great flexibility:

• Support for Virtual Server 2005 R2, Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) and the upcoming Hyper-V 1.0
• Support for domain and workgroup machines agentless discovery (with multiple login account credentials) or import list
• Support for multiple companies or departments
• Support for multiple format reporting

As expected in any capacity planning tool, MAP first has to discover the physical machines available on the network, and then start tracking their performances over a customizable period of time. Once the analysis is completed the user can generate a report revealing which servers are good candidates for virtualization and which workloads can be mixed together.

Unlike other products mentioned above, MAP is not able to coordinate a P2V migration accordingly to the reports or to continuously track the virtual machines performance after the migration to suggest workloads rearrangements, but provides more than enough features to address most capacity planning needs.
Its price makes it a valuable tool to consider for any project.

Download MAP here.

Today a new startup enters the crowded VDI market: Desktone.

The company already exposed few details about its technology last year, but only today announces its strategy and offering.

Desktone is a US company founded in 2006 and based in MA.
So far it collected $17 million in a first round of investments from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Tangee International and Citrix.

The company is managed by a notable management team with several members coming from the successful Softricity experience: its CEO, Harry Ruda (former co-founder), its Director of Strategic Development, Jeff Fisher (same role in Softricity), its VP of Product Management, Julian Weinstock (same role in Softricity).

Desktone appoaches the VDI market in a new way: instead of offering a connection broker like most competitors in the space, the startup targets service providers with an architecture that it’s designed to resell hosted desktops.

Called Virtual-D, the Desktone VDI solution is made of several components like:

• a management console for ISP administrators
• a self-service portal for customers
• a desktop manager which integrates with 3rd party hypervisors and provides the actual connection broker capabilities
• a policy manager which defines provisioning rules through SLAs or other parameters
• a guest OS agent (Windows only) to monitor the virtual desktop performance and automate the provisioning according to the policy manager

These tiers are arranged in elements which communicate with each other using a P2P network.
Additionally, each element can support different hypervisors (even if the first release only supports VMware ESX) and different hardware, so that a service provider can start with some elements powered by VMware and Dell for example, and add several others over time powered by Citrix and HP.

This approach gives the ISPs maximum flexibility in designing their elements and provides the scalability to extend the offering over time.
The only risk is that an ISP may design its element in a way that it’s not performing good enough to grant a successful experience to its customers. Desktone may want to introduce something like an element certification program over time to avoid this kind of shortcomings and provide guidance to its customers.

The product has several others interesting features like the integration with Microsoft Active Directory and RSA SecureID, the support for multi-tenant configurations and an API for 3rd party solutions plug-in (like billing products).

The company didn’t provide a price for its Virtual-D and sells it only through a network of sales partners.

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

Just a couple of months after its first appearence at VMworld Europe 2008, the new Vizioncore product vCharter Pro is ready for the prime time.

As already disclosed last month, the biggest improvement in this new version is the GUI, completely redesigned:

Another interesting feature is the capability to define custom rules for reporting.

Download a trial here.

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

The most-wanted new disaster recovery solution from VMware, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), originally announced in September 2007, just reached the Release Candidate status (build 85007).

Mike Laverick provided some details about how SRM works:

The replication of the VM is not being done by VMware but by your SAN, iSCSI or NAS vendors replication technology. SiteA can protect SiteB, and SiteB can protect SiteA.

…

The Vi-Client has a plug-in extension that speaks to the SRM Service – and orchestrates the whole process. Creating “Protection Groups” (groups of VMs you need to have DR for) which are very closely linked to “LUN Groups” (where their storage is located). The SRM plug-in handles the “mapping” of Virtualcenter object in the VC environment in SiteA to SiteB such as folder and reasource location…

VMware continues to keep the beta program private but announced that the product will be released in Q2 2008.

After launching its first backup product, Veeam is working to further extend its enterprise offering with an Enterprise Edition of its popular Reporter solution.

Compared with the standard version of Reporter, this new edition will introduces several major features like:

• A web console
• A multi-tier architecture (supporting Microsoft SQL Server as back-end database)
• Scheduled data collection

The product still support VMware ESX only.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Trustware is an Israeli startup launched in 2006 which pitches its application virtualization product, BufferZone, as a security solution.

In almost two years the company made almost no progresses: the product is still frozen at version 2.x, and the marketing approach is still oriented to the low-budget consumer market despite the availability of an Enterprise Edition.

Now Trustware tries to change direction appointing two new executives from Check Point and Sun:

• H. Peter Felgentreff joins Trustware as the Vice President of Worldwide Sales. With more then two decades of technology sales and management experience, Peter will oversee Trustware’s global sales execution strategy including direct channels, field operations and partner recruitment. He joins Trustware from Kerio Technologies where he served as Vice President of Worldwide Sales. As Vice President of Sales at Zone Labs (NYSE:CKP), Peter was responsible for building the foundation that led to the eventual acquisition by Checkpoint. At Aladdin Knowledge Systems (NASDAQ:ALDN), Peter’s efforts resulted in his sales division generating nearly half of the company’s annual revenues.
• Martin Hack joins Trustware as the Vice President of Marketing. He has more than 15 years of marketing and information security expertise. Prior to joining Trustware, Martin was the Director of Marketing at GreenBorder Technologies, a security virtualization company that was acquired by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). He also held management positions at Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA), where he was responsible for the Trusted Solaris Operating System. During his tenure, Trusted Solaris achieved triple-digit revenue increase over three consecutive years and became the de-facto standard for secure and classified communication platforms. As a security advisor and risk assessment expert, he consulted to numerous Fortune 500 companies and government organizations.

It’s interesting that Hack is coming from GreenBorder, the stealth application virtualization startup acquired by Google in 2007.

These two exec will have a hard job because, security pitch or not, the competition in the application virtualization market is fierce: Trustware will have to do something incredible if it wants to race along consolidate players like Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and Microsoft, as well as aggressive startups like InstallFree and Endeavors Technologies.

Answering one question at the end of his keynote at the MVP Summit 2008, Ray Ozzie, Chief Architect at Microsoft, said that virtualization is absolutely fundamental in the company vision.

He also added that customers will see aggressive investments in the this area.
In particular Ozzie mentioned the OS virtualization approach offered by Parallels, saying that Microsoft is working to provide additional tools for server and desktop virtualization.

Update: Gus Pinto, the Microsoft MVP (and Citrix Evangelist) that submitted the question, published on his blog the whole transcript of Q&A about virtualization.

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, announces on his corporate blog a new major feature that the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is about to offer: support for persistent raw block storage devices stored in the Amazon S3 storage cloud.

At today the EC2 virtual machines have a non-persistent virtual hard drive (from 160GB to 1.7TB) which is destroyed as soon as the VM is powered off. The access to persistent volumes on S3 is limited and complex to manage.

But before the end of this year (the feature is currently in beta testing) each EC2 virtual machine will be able to mount persistent volumes (from 1GB to 1TB of space) stored on S3.
These volumes, just like SAN’s LUNs, can be formatted with any file system and support snapshots, saved into S3 as well.
Additionally, the snapshots will be clonable, allowing for example the re-spawn of a crashed virtual machine starting from its last snapshot.

As expected each operation on the volumes will be controlled by a set of APIs, allowing to reach high levels of automation.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Thanks to Tim Freeman for the news.

VMware just released a new SDK specifically for virtual hard disks manipulation.
The Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) includes:

• The Virtual Disk library, a set of C function calls to manipulate virtual disk (VMDK) files.
• C++ code samples that you can build with either Visual Studio or the GNU C compiler.
• Virtual Disk Manager utility to manipulate offline VMDK files on Windows or Linux (clone, create, relocate, rename, grow, shrink, or defragment).
• DiskMount utility to access files and file systems in virtual disks on Windows or Linux.
• Documentation about the Virtual Disk library and the command-line utilities.

The move seems part of an effort began with the announcement of VMsafe: VMware is opening its infrastructure to 3rd party security vendors, which can access the virtual machines without the direct interaction.

VMware itself suggests to consider the use of this VDDK to achieve goals like:

• Creation of virtual machine disk files to store backup of physical images
• Read access to virtual disk, enabling off-line centralized anti-virus scanning of virtual machines
• Write access to virtual disk, enabling off-line centralized patching of virtual machines
• Read access to virtual disk, enabling off-line software package analysis of virtual machines

Download it here.

Trigence, an application virtualization startup based in US, seems pretty busy reshuffling its management team since few months.

In the whole 2007 were hired a new Vice President of Sales, a new COO, a new Director of Product Management and Marketing and a new Director of Consulting Services.

Anyway the COO, John Hamilton, already left, after just one year to join another startup: xkoto.