Year: 2008

Quoting from the Storwize official announcement:

Storwize Inc., the only provider of primary storage data compression solutions, today announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.

Field-tested installations running VMware and Storwize solutions achieve compression ratios between 60 to 80 percent, resulting in reduced CPU, memory, and disk utilization. In addition to simply freeing up primary storage, and delaying the purchase of new hardware, Storwize allows more virtual machines or more instances of ESX Server to run on the same NAS device. VMware users backing up virtual machine disk (VMDK) files will find Storwize data reduction technology similarly shrinks backup loads and backup windows, working throughout the data lifecycle…

When ESX Server 3i was announced in September 2007, Sun was one of the very few OEMs which didn’t compare in the VMware supporting partners.

That was not too much surprising considering that Sun is coming with its own hypervisor, xVM Server, and may make the most of an exclusive hardware support to take a competitive advantage.

Now seems that Sun chanced its mind and it’s ready to support ESX Server 3i on its servers.

It’s possible that Sun is trying to maintain a good relationship with all virtualization vendors until it’s competitive enough with xVM Server.
An interoperability agreement with Microsoft was the first step. This is the second one.

Immediately after the announcement of VMsafe APIs, McAfee published a supporting press release to confirm its commitment to the new VMware program.

Anyway the most interesting news contained in that statement is another: McAfee will offer a OEM version of VMware ESX Server 3i for some future products.

No other details are provided and it’s unclear how McAfee could use the hypervisor for its own purposes. Maybe the security player is considering to replicate the model already used by PlateSpin, which combined together its P2V migration technology PowerConvert and the VMware platform to deliver an out-of-the-box disaster recovery solution: Forge.

In any case McAfee seems to have plans for serious investments in the virtualization space and this may drive the challenge with its competitors in new directions.

Symantec is one of the first expected to answer. Considering its history of wild acquisitions (already including Altiris and its application virtualization platform SVS), it wouldn’t surprise much if the company would proceed with an acquisition to match McAfee efforts.

The only true major announcement made at VMworld Europe 2008 is about the release of VMsafe APIs.

VMsafe is an interface allowing security vendors to protect virtual machines without having to install agents inside each guest operating system.

While security products like antivirus will still have to install inside a dedicated VM, they will be able to monitor what’s happening inside other virtual machines from a completely new perspective: the hypervisor level.

This will allow checking which traffic is entering or leaving a VM, or even which data is being executed inside it (looking at CPU states, memory pages and OS processes list). All done in a transparent way.

The revolutionary approach has two remarkable benefits: first of all it saves precious physical resources and management efforts without duplicating the same security agent inside each guest OS, secondarily it prevents the security agents from being directly attacked and possibly disabled.

Several malicious codes usually try to disable the existing protections before infecting the system, granting themselves the longest lifetime possible. With the new architecture made possible by VMsafe the chances to succeed in this task are much less.

VMware announces VMsafe with the support of notable security players: from the anti-virus ones (Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos, Symantec, Trend Micro) to the firewall ones (Check Point, Fortinet), passing through several other categories.

Unfortunately nor the new interface neither the related products are available today: VMsafe will be included in future versions of VMware Infrastructure, complemented by security products built specifically for it.

So far VMware didn’t open the documentation for the APIs and doesn’t seem possible to apply for the technology program.

With VMsafe VMware has the unique chance to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of security products like never before.
If the company will release the interface soon enough and its partners will execute properly, VMsafe alone will be a reason valid enough to adopt VMware Infrastructure.

Just one month after Thinstall acquisition, VMware is ready to offer the application virtualization technology to its customers as beta program.

The product, once known as Application Virtualization Suite, is temporarily recognized with the codename Project North Star.

The beta program page reveals a couple of new features under the work:

• Application Link
  Connect virtual application packages to enable streamlined deployment.
• Application Sync
  Fast, low-bandwidth update model for deployed virtual applications.

The product is expected to be available during this year. Despite that VMware CEO Diane Greene, presenting the technology on stage, didn’t provide any details about the long term strategy behind this acquisition.

Enroll for the beta here.

Trying to raise the hype as much as possible during the just ended VMworld Europe 2008 (read virtualization.info coverage for day 1 and day 2 keynotes), VMware issues a press announcement to remind customers that it’s working on two new products for automation (Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager) and one new product for security (Site Recovery Manager).
Additionally, the press announcement reminds that one product is already availalbe: Lab Manager.

None of the first three has been formally announced or released anyway: Stage Manager is in beta since just one month, Lifecycle Manager (formerly VS-O) is being integrated into VMware portfolio after Dunes Technologies acquisition, and Site Recovery Manager is not even available as (public) beta.

The only good information contained in the announcement is that VMware will release all these three products in Q2 2008.

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

Second day here in Cannes, France, for the VMworld Europe 2008. Yesterday’s coverage has been seen over 8,000 times. Thank you for staying with us.

The today’s keynote will be performed by Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Founder and Chief Scientist.

Dr. Rosenblum is on stage.

He starts reviewing the history of virtualization and the phases of innovation: a phase 0, aimed at server consolidation and a phase 1, about VMs live migration (throuhgh VMotion an DRS), VI and VDI.

Before introducing the ongoing phase 2, where he expects a peek of innovation up to 2010, Mendel calls on stage Fujitsu Siemens to introduce its dynamic datacenter strategy and validate the VDI initiative.

Unfortunately the argumentations of FS don’t seem to help much the VDI cause: a comparison slide between the traditional computing approach and the VDI one clearly shows much more computing layers between the end user and the applications he’s trying to reach, and most of these layers are completely new. This basically means a raise in the overall complexity and a huge investment to sustain.

After a 20 minutes of shameless plug (even worse than the IBM/HP/Dell ones yesterday), Mendel is finally back on stage.

He’s now pushing for the 2 years old concept of virtual appliance as alternative to traditional services deployment.

Unfortunately he doesn’t spend any time trying to explain how VMware plans to solve the multiple problems that plague the today’s implementation of virtual appliances.

Now he moves on the phase 2 of virtualization progress and introduces the concept of vService.

The vService is a virtual appliance with metadata informations embedded into the VMware Open Virtualization Format (OVF), that describes how to handle the resources allocation and how to configure the application hosted at guest OS level.

A demo is showed on stage:a multi-tier application (made of two virtual appliance) is imported inside a VMware Infrastructure and the VirtualCenter looks at the metadata inside it to decide how to configure and deploy the virtual machine.

It’s not clear how VMware will get the industry cooperation to adopt the configuration approach needed for the OVF metadata.

Now Mendel briefly mentions the groundbreaking technology called continuous availability already seen at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco, and the new Site Recovery Manager (SRM) product.

At this point he moves to security and finally unveils the VMsafe interface: a set of APIs that 3rd party vendors can use to move their security checkpoints from the guest operating systems level to the hypervisor level (note that security applications still have to run inside dedicated virtual machines).

McAfee is called on stage. It’s one of the first vendors that will use this technology.

After another shameless plug about the availability of McAfee products as virtual appliance, a demo of VMsafe interoperability is finally shown.
A Windows XP virtual machine gets attacked with a malicious code that copies away corporate documents but another virtual machine with security engine is able to transparently recognize (by a scan of VM’s virtual memory through VMsafe APIs) the threat and stop it before it compromises the guest OS.

Mendel is back on stage and closes his presentation showing a notable number of partners that already signed for the VMsafe alliance. All major security vendors are there.

That’s all from VMworld Europe this year. During the rest of this week virtualization.info will start re-publishing all announcements that VMware partners and competitors released since last Monday. And after that we’ll publish a summary with the impressions about the announcements and the event.

Update: VMware published the recorded videos for both keynotes. Watch them here.

As announced, virtualization.info is here at VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes to live blog during the opening keynotes for the first two days.

Diane Greene, VMware Founder and CEO, is on stage.

She starts introducing the virtualization phenomenon, the VMware historm, results and technology evolution, along with some major customers case studies (today the company has more than 100,000 customers worldwide).

To further validate the customers portfolio, Greene calls on stage one of the biggest case study: British Telecom.
BT deployed VMware technology over 11 datacenters (+900 platforms) worldwide and it’s using it to re-provision workloads across the globe, to delivery virtual desktops to travelling users, to achieve automated disaster recovery.

The approach taken so far seems to assume that the European audience is pretty new to virtualization and still needs basic evangelization.

Greene is back on stage.

She reveal a reliability record achieved by one customer: no reboot for ESX Server since 1461 days.

She now moves to the green hype, describing how Europe has a chance to go greener with VMware.

And finally she (briefly) mentions the four products announced and re-announced yesterday: Lab Manager, Stage Manager, Lifecycle Manager and Site Recovery Manager.

No details or demos are provided about them. Diane Greene prefers to move on and call IBM on stage, describing a performance record achieved with ESX Server 3.5, IBM System x3850 M2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Two things are very ironic about this part of the presentation: the first is that Exchange Server 2007 is not yet officially supported on any virtualization platform by Microsoft (and nobody is mentioning this), the second one is that VMware and IBM are talking about virtualizing a Microsoft product and there’s no sign of Microsoft involvement anywhere.

IBM also announces that the new VMware ESX Server 3i is supported and embedded in the BladeCenter HS21.

Greene is back but just to call HP on stage.

HP describes the synergy between VMware VirtualCenter and HP Insight Control management solution (like IBM also HP pushes blads on screen). A DL 380 G5 with ESX Server 3i, managed by the two products, is demoed.

Could VMware invite IBM and HP on stage without also calling Dell (which is also one of the earliest VMware investors)? Obviously not, so Dell comes on stage as well.

(at this point the keynote turned into a major showroom for the biggest OEMs)

Dell announces full support for ESX Server on every server that VMware HCL currently supports (including blade systems). But the biggest point is that Dell now allows customers to download and buy ESX Server directly online (the VMware Sales Channel will not answer well on this).

Diane Greene is back on stage for the last part of the keynote.

She now pushes for the VDI initiative and introduces a new feature: the Scalale Virtual Image technology.

A demo is provided: VirtualCenter GUI now includes a Scalable Image Management console which is able to creates tents of virtual machines in seconds using the well-known linked clones technology that VMware already offers in Workstation 6.0.

Specifically, Greene shows how patching the master image implies that each single linked clone copy inherits the last patches without any additional effort.

Greene closes talking about the just acquired Thinstall technology. This is the very first time that VMware pushes on stage the application virtualization technology they just adopted.

A final demo showing a virtualized version of Microsoft Visio running from a USB key ends her keynote.

That’s all for today. Tomorrow’s keynote will be delivered by Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist, and will likely cover some new technology enhancements coming from the company.

Update: VMware published the recorded videos for this keynote. Watch it here.

virtualization.info has just learned that PlateSpin, leader in the P2V migration market, has been acquired by Novell.

The canadian firm acquisition further boosts Novell visibility in the virtualization space.

Novell already has a major involvement in the market since the early days of Xen development in 2004, when the company was announcing the inclusion of the open source hypervisor in its SUSE Enterprise Linux.

After that first step another acceleration was provided by the interoperability agreement signed with Microsoft in 2006.

PlateSpin is a valuble acquisition target for Novell not just because of its flexible migration tool, PowerConvert, but also because of the other products in its offering: a capacity planning tool, PowerRecon, and most of all a new disaster recover solution called Forge.

These technologies will probably go integrated with the Novell management solution ZENworks, adjusted to handle virtual machines since end of 2006.

At the moment nor Novell neither PlateSpin officially announced the acquisition. This will probably happen tomorrow, when VMware VMworld Europe 2008 will open in Cannes, France.

virtualization.info will publish a live coverage of the morning keynotes and all the other virtualization vendors announcements. So stay tuned!

Update: Novell announced the acquisition, which is worth $205 million and will complete in Q2 2008.

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

This year virtualization.info plans to announce a series of major projects. The first one is the opening of a Japanese edition of the site.

Our mission is to provide high-quality coverage of the market evolution and to evangelize the technology anywhere possible.
We strongly believe that the APAC region has huge growth potentials and that virtualization will profoundly change the IT industry like it’s happening in North America and EMEA since a while, and so we are delighted to welcome Japanese readers.

Starting since Feb 22, 2008, virtualization.info is available in Japanese language at this address: https://virtualization.info/jp (also linked from this site in the menu bar).

The daily news we publish on the English edition of the website are translated with a delay of just one day.
This will include the VMworld Europe 2008 live coverage that we’ll start publishing since tomorrow morning (9am CET).

Additionally, some of the virtualization.info unique tools like the Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been translated as well. More will come over time.

This project couldn’t be possible without the help of NetWorld, our first sponsor for the Japanese edition.

We are working hard to provide more translations in the coming months. Meanwhile stay tuned for another, huge announcement coming next week…