Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Just one month after the 1.0 version launch, Veeam provides the first minor update for its new product: Veeam Backup.
This new build is mainly for bug fixing but it also introduces support for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) 1.1.
Download a trial here.
After over one year since the acquisition, Symantec is finally operating the integration of Altiris in its corporate departments.
It’s not clear anyway if and in which way the security giant will pitch the successful Altiris application virtualization product: SVS.
The subsidiary in fact will disappear inside the Symantec Security and Compliance department, while a brand new Endpoint Virtualization department will be created, as reported by eWeek.
There are no details available yet but this reorganization may mean just two things:
In the first case Altiris SVS would be clearly out of the application virtualization market. In the second case Symantec may soon need more than just SVS to compete with the other players.
BinaryKarma is an Indian startup focused on the virtualization management market segment.
The company just opened the beta of their first product, FluidVM, which has some interesting features.
Besides managing hypervisors (only Xen at the moment) it also supports OS containers (only OpenVZ at the moment) providing a unified web interface to control both technologies.
On top of that FluidVM already comes with support for virtual machines live migration, virtual machines automatic redistribution among physical hosts, iSCSI SANs and more.
Download the beta here.
By providing management for hardware virtualization and OS virtualization at the same time anyway, BinaryKarma is playing a game where two big vendors may arrive soon: Parallels (formerly SWsoft), which owns Virtuozzo Containers (and its open source version OpenVZ) and the upcoming hypervisor Parallels Server, and Sun, which owns Solaris Containers and the upcoming hypervisor xVM Server.
Both companies anyway will probably offer a combined management which locks-in customers to their portfolios, while FluidVM may just extend its support to more virtualization platforms to have an appealing selling point.
It’s not a case that BinaryKarma roadmap already includes future support for VMware products.
After signing a major OEM agreement with Lenovo for the Chinese market, Citrix is now closing an even bigger deal with HP.
In October 2007 Citrix already announced a distribution agrement with HP (and with Dell) to offer XenServer on certified ProLiant and BladeSystem hardware, but the just announced deal goes a little further than that.
The two companies have developed a special version of XenServer (Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition) which comes pre-installed and provides basic management capabilities integrated into the HP GUIs.
For remote control customers will be able to use the well known HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO), while for local control HP and Citrix developed a new ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC).
Obviously this version of XenServer is ready for enterprise management: first of all it integrates an HP agent to control the whole system with System Insight Manager (SIM), secondarily the product can be upgraded to Enterpise and Platinum edition (to use it with XenCenter) through a simple change of the license key.
HP will offer this configuration for ten different ProLiant models starting on March 31. The company didn’t provide any information about the price.
With this agreement and the other already signed so far, XenServer is now a factory option for over 50% of enterprise servers.
A strong answer to the VMware strategy, which is letting slip its new ESX Server 3i hypervisor into most enterprise servers out there (hopefully for free).
But just like in VMware case, while the move will greatly attract the SMB market, it may also negatively impact the sales channel, which now has to focus on selling the premium management options only.
After launching its first product in October 2007, the US startup VKernel is preparing to release a second one: the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer.
This new product integrates with VMware VirtualCenter to recognize the virtual infrastructure elements (virtual machines, clusters, resource pools) and track their performance over time.
Through collected data, which can be shared between all VKernel solutios, the product predicts when and where a new bottleneck wil appear.
Enroll for the beta program here.
With the upcoming release of new Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, now in Release Candidate status, several virtualization firms usually linked to VMware are reconsidering their technology partnerships.
Surgient, a popular vendor focused on the so called Virtual Lab Automation market segment, is one of the first announcing its support for Hyper-V.
The first version of Surgient VQMS, just reached 5.4 version, is expected for Q4 2008.
At a point in time after completing the Quest acquisition, David Bieneman, CEO of the well-known virtualization vendor Vizioncore, left his position.
virtualization.info contacted Quest to have further details and the company confirmed that Bieneman is no more an employee:
After an incredible run making Vizioncore the leader in virtual server management solutions, David Bieneman has decided to step down from the daily operations of Vizioncore as CEO and focus on new product development, meeting customers’ developing IT needs and “the next big thing” in IT. Chris Akerberg, vice president of sales and marketing for Vizioncore, will cover Bieneman’s previous responsibilities in his expanded role as President and COO of Vizioncore. The change will be transparent to customers and have no impact on Vizioncore’s strategy and direction.
Gartner released a new report about virtualization management firms, awarding few companies as cool vendors.
ManageIQ, a US startup focused on multiple hypervisors and VM lifecycle management (see virtualization.info coverage), is one of them.
The others mentioned companies are CiRBA, VKernel and Akorri, a startup focused on the so called storage virtualization.
During its development lifecycle, the brand new hypervisor that Microsoft is creating to compete with VMware suffere delays and major features loss.
The release schedule that Microsoft always provided was: within 180 days after the codename Longhorn release. And because of the issues mentioned above nobody is really expecting Hyper-V to come any earlier than August 2008 (180 days after the February launch of Windows Server 2008).
But Microsoft seems to have some surprises.
First it released the Hyper-V beta 1 in December 2007, one months ahead of its last schedule update, and now it launches the Hyper-V release candidate, which means that the product is almost ready.
Unless Hyper-V will have same destiny of Windows 2000 (which went through three RC phases), customers (and competitors) may now start to consider the hypothesis that Microsoft may go RTM earlier than August. Much earlier.
The Release Candidate that Microsoft offers today is, as expected, feature-complete.
It extends support to the following guest OSes:
The RC code should be available through Windows Update for those customers already adopting the beta 1 (despite Microsoft didn’t provide any fresh news about this).
Others that never tried the product before may want to do that downloading Windows Server 2008 here.
ETNews is reporting an interesting statistic about the diffusion of virtualization technologies in the Korean market: less than 0.5% so far, with VMware as the only player.
Both Microsoft and Citrix are approaching the country with their hypervisors so the market share is expected to surpass 1% (no mention of when this is expected to happen).
In the whole 2007 virtualization.info collected several feedbacks reporting that the whole APAC market may become a serious playground for virtualization between the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.
A confirmation of this may come from some key steps that some virtualization players took in these months like the Citrix OEM agreement with Lenovo.
Hopefully the Japanase edition of virtualization.info, launched last month, may accelerate the customers evangelization and technology adoption.