Year: 2008

The first european edition of VMworld is almost here. VMware will open the conference within 2 weeks in Cannes and in the days before the event it’s rushing to put in place an impressive infrastructure (10 racks) for the Hands-on Labs.

virtualization.info will be in Cannes and will cover the keynotes and all new announcements. Check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice (part 1 and part 2) and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.

Since January virtualization.info is presenting a number of VMware product managers and staff engineers coming from US to present many VMworld Europe lectures. Last week we introduced Devaki Kulkarni, Senior MTS, and Jeffrey Buell, Senior Staff Engineer. Today we have Mostafa Khalil, Staff Product Support Engineer:

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Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

TechCrunch is reporting about a new major outage suffered by Amazon on its on-demand virtual infrastructure EC2, based on Xen.

This is the second time that Amazon cannot grant business continuity on such mission critical service.

While this outage lasted only two hours, the previous one, in October 2007, lasted a couple of days and led to the lost of several virtual machines.

One year earlier, in October 2006, EC2 suffered instead a security issue.

On-demand datacenters that virtualization makes cheap and easy to maintain seem still far away from production use.

BetaNews just published an interesting story about a UK hosting company, Fasthosts, which is able to stream Microsoft Office to its customers using application virtualization and streaming technology from AppStream.

Putting aside the legal aspects of who signed what to make this possible, and which Office licensing term has been broken, the fact remains ironic considering the huge effort that Microsoft is putting in stimulating the adoption of application virtualization.

The Redmond giant started in 2006, acquiring Softtricity and including its SoftGrid product into the company offering. The strategy was then renewed this January when Microsoft officially announced support for virtualized versions of Office and hinted at a future server version of SoftGrid (now renamed Application Virtualization).

All of this while its competitor AppStream virtualizes its own office suite.

Worldwide customers (and sales managers) were waiting for this moment since the day Citrix acquired XenSource, in August 2007: the moment when VMware includes its own analysis of the acquisition among its guerrilla marketing strategies.

The company never took a too neat position until late January 2008, when it sent to its sales channel a scornful email instilling the doubt that Microsoft will cut Citrix out of the virtualization game despite their current partnership.

VMware took so much to become openly against Citrix probably because the two were great partners before the XenSource acquisition. But Citrix suddenly became a competitor offering the second most popular hypervisor on the market, tightened a partnership with VMware’s biggest threat (Microsoft), and plan to cut support for ESX Server on its upcoming connection broker XenDesktop.

There’s enough to radically change the relationship with Citrix, and after the January email, it comes a second even worse indirect attack, explictly commenting the value of XenSource deal and the announced strategy.

The author is Mike DiPetrillo, Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis department at VMware, which goes pretty bad on his personal blog:

…

Unfortunately I can’t disclose what VMware was doing revenue wise at the time but I can say that is was a LOT more than what XenSource was doing when Citrix bought them. In Q4 of 2007 XenSource did $2 million in revenue with expenses around $5 million. So basically they lost Citrix a couple of million. Ouch. Don’t worry, the future looks brighter, or does it. For 2008 Citrix expects revenue to hit $50 million for XenSource but expenses will be around $60 million. Another loss. So why did Citrix buy this company again?

…

In Q3 XenSource announced 1,000 customers. On the call they said they added another 400 customers. Good growth! That puts the total at 1,400 customers. Then came the partner count – 1,817 partners certified to sell XenSource. Hmmm. So now we have 1,817 partners trying to get business from the 1,400 customers that total $2 million in revenue (that’s $1,100 in revenue per partner). Good days to be a Citrix partner.

…

OK. So Citrix didn’t buy XenSource for the revenue. They didn’t buy XenSource for their partners to get rich. Maybe they bought them for the products and to be the #1 virtualization company in the world (that’s VMware’s goal).

…

Well, Mark Templeton (CEO of Citrix) said it himself: We’ll be the third player in server virtualization after VMware and partner Microsoft.

…

OK. So the strategy is go and spend $500 million on a company that’s losing money, switch all of your current successful products and branding over to the losing company, and then exit the market when your larger partner moves into the market. Is this the end of Citrix then? Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 closes the gap pretty nicely. Virtual Desktops are also taking large chunks of market share. Time will tell where Citrix ends up.

…

Between Citrix moving everyone from XenSource to Hyper-V later this year and Ubuntu starting the Linux vendor migration to KVM the future looks pretty bleak for XenSource…

Read the whole post at the source.

While it’s true that this is an employee opinion appearing on a personal blog it’s worth to note that Mike’s position in the company is highly relevant, and that VMware has a very strict policy about personal blogging efforts.

It’s hard to believe that this post appeared without being reviewed first (no matter what’s the official position of VMware).

Update: virtualization.info just received a notice from VMware which grants that there is no policy about personaly blogging (besides obviously revealing company secrets) and Mike DiPetrillo’s post wasn’t reviewed at all before publishing.

Last week CRN reported about a new product coming from Citrix called Workflow Studio, able to provide an automation framework for XenServer, XenDesktop, XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and NetScaler.

Now Rich Crusco, Technical Evangelist at Frameworkx, publishes on his blog a long, detailed preview of the product and reveals interesting details:

…

Workflow Studio unlocks the potential in Microsoft PowerShell and the Windows Workflow Foundation by providing an easy to use, graphical interface for workflow composition that virtually eliminates scripting. Workflow Studio is pre-populated with task libraries that interface with all Citrix products, Citrix-ready solutions and 3rd party offerings, providing out of the box capabilities to drive provisioning, configuration and other management functions in an automated fashion.

…

Through a graphical workflow designer, you can build full automation of your business and/or IT processes including user account management, server and application provisioning, security enforcement and automation, disaster recovery automation, and routine and emergency maintenance on data center resources.

…

The Workflow Control tasks provide you the control logic necessary to truly create workflows that automate manual processes. These control tasks give you all of the power of an advanced programming language without having to write a single line of code. These tasks allow you to direct/alter the path of workflow execution in order to automate the decision-making that otherwise has to be done by individuals. Additionally, some of the Workflow Control tasks allow you to create a multi-threaded (multi-tasking) workflow, handle errors that may occur in your workflows, and terminate your workflow…

The preview is still a work in progress and Rich will post the 4th part soon. It’s a highly recommended reading.

The approach and capabilities seem much similar to the Dunes Technologies VS-O automation framework that VMware acquired in September 2007.

VMware is expected to unveil (or at least to provide more details about) the integration of Dunes product into its offering at VMworld Europe 2008. We’ll see how the two products will compare to each other.

VMware customers really seemed to dislike the way the new Storage VMotion feature has been implemented in VI 3.5.

virtualization.info had feedbacks about several scripts and web interfaces to simplify its use, and just a couple of days ago we posted a GUI for Windows from Alexander Gaiswinkler.

Andrew Kutz went even further and created a plug-in for VMware VirtualCenter 2.5.

Several users are reporting it works well even in production environments. Download it here.

As side note this is the very first 3rd party (and totally unsupported) plug-in for the new modular architecture introduced for VI 3.5 management.
Andrew achieved the goal using reverse engineering techniques to understand the VirtualCenter internals.

Citrix XenServer doesn’t currently offer a high availability feature but the achieving fault tolerance in a virtual infrastructures is one of the hardest challenges in today’s virtualization adoption.

Customers which want to address the issue today may look at Marathon Technologies, which offers a demo of its everRun:

(click the image to start the movie / see it larger here)

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A consistent part of the competition between virtualization vendors is not played trying to place more sales, but trying to hire more bright minds. This can happen at different levels, not just in R&D.

A critical place where VMware wants to hire is the sales engineering department, where highly skilled virtualization professionals may debunk any vague and misleading messages from competitors in the proper way.

If the skilled sales engineer also has a past as influencer VMware wins two times cause the value of his intervention is much more trustable.

So it doens’t come by surprise that in October 2007 VMware hired Massimiliano Daneri, author of the highly popular VMBK.pl, the hot backup script for ESX Server.

And doesn’t come by too much surprise that the company now hired Andrew Dugdell, the well-known blogger at WindowsVirtualization.com.

The fact that he spent last two years mostly blogging about Microsoft virtualization technologies, and even won the Microsoft Most Valuable Professiona (MVP) award about virtual machines for two years in a row, is ironic but even more useful for VMware: customers will find hard to not believe that the new Sales Engineer is a reliable source in technical comparisons.

The hystorical BIOS brand Phoenix Technologies announced in January that it’s shaping hardware virtualization technologies to power a new generation of platforms dubbed PC 3.0.

This new system will have as foundation a hypervisor called HyperCore, able to run instant-on, single-purpose virtual machines (for web browsing for example) along with Microsoft Windows virtual machines, to address the multiple needs of daily computer usage.

A couple of weeks ago virtualization.info published a company’s flash demo which presents the architecture of HyperCore and reveals a third virtual machine, called ManageSpace, which will be used to transparently manage the entire PC even when the main Windows environment is compromised.

Today Phoenix announces the first partner, SupportSoft, that may use the ManageSpace virtual machine to centralize troubleshooting of million of computers in the world:

Phoenix Technologies Ltd., the global leader in core systems firmware, and SupportSoft, a leader in technology problem resolution, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver the industry’s first remote PC management solution that allows users to continue running key productivity applications while the Windows operating system is being remotely diagnosed and repaired. The new solution will be built on Phoenix Technology’s new HyperSpace platform which hosts instant-on applications or appliances before, during and after Windows Vista boots up and shuts down.

…

“Our partnership with Phoenix Technologies will further our mission of 24/7 remote management servicing and provisioning,” said Josh Pickus, President and CEO of SupportSoft. “When a PC crashes due to malicious programs or other reasons, the system is inaccessible making it impossible to diagnose the failure’s cause and often making data stored on the disk drive inaccessible. As a result, the PC is unavailable when it’s needed most and sometimes requires an onsite visit by skilled technicians. Now we will be able to provide remote maintenance services even when Windows is down and run diagnostic programs while the user continues uninterrupted.”…

The Phoenix strategy is very interesting: the company is trying to build an ecosystem on its hypervisor providing a new, almost invisble spot for 3rd party paid services. And this happens without having to play the time and money consuming role of the general-purpose-virtualization-platform-vendor like VMware and others.

Despite that, in this particular case, Phoenix will have to be ready to answer privacy concerns that customers may raise thinking about a system which includes agents they never required.