Year: 2008

In July 2003 XenSource and Symantec signed an OEM agreement to embed the Veritas Storage Foundation inside the XenEnterprise product, which seemed an interesting competitive advantage considering that VMware doesn’t provide yet any native capability to manager storage in VirtualCenter.

Seven months and a Citrix acquistion later that project has yet to take off, and the upcoming XenServer 4.1 doesn’t show any trace of Symantec code.

The Register published an interesting article on the subject revealing some plan changes:

…

What you won’t find in Version 4.1 is the support for Symantec/Veritas’ Volume Manager software that the pre-acquisition XenSource folks promised last year to customers. Many of you were told that the Volume Manager would become a standard part of XenServer when 4.1 arrived. Not so.

…

All of the “integration” work with Symantec’s Storage Foundation software is completed, according to Crosby. The problem is getting that software to customers – apparently. XenSource used to talk like customers would receive the storage management goodies for free, but it now sounds like you’ll end up paying.

“We said we would bundle it as part of the product,” Crosby said. “It turns out that not all customers wanted us to do that. It is becoming an add-in option for the customer.”…

Update: Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, promptly replied to The Register article:

…

When Citrix acquired XenSource, our route to market changed – or rather was amplified – by the Citrix channel partners. The Symantec agreement, which we still view as critical to our ability to address the massive installed base of storage without requiring customers to change their processes, training or technologies for storage management, is now being re-drafted to expand its scope and to ensure that there is complete alignment between Symantec and Citrix in the market. A key part of this is ensuring that the channel is trained to distribute, install and support our product and all of its component technologies, including those of our partners where relevant. Although our integration work against Symantec Storage Foundation is complete, we have not yet completed the work necessary to ramp the channel training, support and certification with the additional Symantec storage management capabilities, so it has been omitted from the XenServer 4.1 release.

…

The omission of Storage Foundation from XenServer 4.1 should not be read as any change in the strength or strategic nature of our partnership with Symantec. On the contrary, Symantec is possibly our most strategic ISV partner, because Citrix is not, and never will be a storage management vendor and Symantec offers one of the industry’s most powerful capability sets for managing the diverse storage infrastructure used by our customers today…

Qumranet is the US startup behind KVM, the open source virtualization platform which was included in the Linux kernel after just 6 months of development.

While supporting KVM, pretty much like XenSource supported Xen before being acquired by Citrix, Qumranet was working on a commercial offering and in September 2005 launched SolidICE: a complete VDI solution for KVM.

Today, after just 5 months since it left the stealth mode, the company loses its Vice President of Marketing, John-Marc Clark, who moves to eEye, a popular security vendor.

Qumranet didn’t publish any announcement yet about who’s going to replace Clark.

Today Microsoft opened the beta program for its System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, introducing support for the upcoming Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid), in beta as well.

Enroll for the beta program here.

With a surprising move Sun just announced that will acquire the German virtualization vendor innotek.

Right today virtualization.info covered the beta release of VirtualBox for OpenSolaris, stating that it could be a major opportunity to finally address the need for desktop virtualization products in the Solaris empty market.

Just few hours later Sun unveils its move:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market.

…

The stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed during the third quarter of Sun’s 2008 fiscal year. The terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is not material to Sun’s earnings per share…

With this acquisition Sun further extends its virtualization strategy and becomes more aggressive against VMware.

The recent virtualization.info Q&A with Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM Server at Sun, can now be read with a broader perspective, mostly for the Ops Center part.

After Propero (UK) and Dunes Technologies (Switzerland), both acquired by VMware, innotek is the third virtualization vendor which is acquired in EMEA. Is this finally a sign that even the old continent is a place for successful startups?

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

Quest involvement in virtualization has increased substantially over the last two years. The company initially made a controlling investment in Vizioncore in 2005, acquired Invirtus in June 2007, then Provision Networks in November 2007. Last month Quest finally completed the acquisition of Vizioncore.

While the acquired companies are focused on different virtualization segments (disaster recovery, VDI, P2V migration and virtual machines performance optimization), Quest itself has long been well-known for its focus on software management of applications, databases and operating systems like Windows.

So while Quest is becoming a major virtualization player, its parallel business focus, its acquisition strategy and its current relationship with its subsidiaries in virtualization can be confusing to customers. virtualization.info met Scott Herold, the new Lead Architect of Quest’s Virtualization Business Unit, to ask for clarification about the big picture.

With this Q&A virtualization.info opens a new section of the website called TechTalk, which collects all the exclusive interviews we published over these years.

Each of them contain precious informations unavailable in official press announcements, and reading some of the oldest ones knowing how the virtualization market evolved in these last three years really provides a unique perspective.

Read the entire interview with Scott Herold here.

The latest company entering the consumer virtualization market, innotek, is demonstrating once again some interesting progresses: its open souce virtualization platform for desktops, VirtualBox, is now available as beta product for OpenSolaris (64bit architectures only).

Already available for Windows and Linux, with a version for Mac OS in the work (the 3rd beta is launched today), VirtualBox is the first product with a commercial support available for the Sun operating system.

Sun itself is working on a server class hypervisor called xVM Server, but so far the company didn’t reveal any plan to adopt the technology also for desktop usage.

If the product will be released fast enough, innotek may experience the same populary that Parallels was able to obtain launching its Desktop product on the empty Apple market. With the major difference that the average Solaris user is an experienced system administrator, and he may influence its company opinion on future server-grade products from the virtualization vendor (like the hyperkernel hypervisor).

Download the beta here.

Citrix has yet to release its new XenServer 4.1, expected for March, and already talks about the following version. InternetNews reports the news with a very short quote from Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division:

…

After XenServer 4.1, Citrix’s next XenServer release is expected in the second quarter. Crosby said that while he doesn’t know if it will be called 4.2, the company will introduce some new high availability features to the product.

If this is confirmed it will be a further sign of company’s notable acceleration in the hardware virtualization space.

After a couple of months of beta, Vizioncore is finally ready to release its first P2V migration product since Invirtus offering inclusion.

This version is notable for the conversion speed and the support for all major virtualization platforms (VMware, Citrix, Virtual Iron and Microsoft ones).

With this release Vizioncore is officially in competition with the others P2V migration providers like PlateSpin, Leostream and even VMware.
PlateSpin in particular becomes a major competitor since the company is invading the disaster recovery market where Vizioncore is a popular player.

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

The VMware performance department published a new study about VMFS peformances when a system with 64 blades running VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and concurrently accessing the same shared volume through a 2Gbps Fibre Channel link:

…It is clear from Figure 1 that except for sequential read there is no drop in aggregate throughput as we scale the number of hosts. The reason sequential read drops is that the sequential streams coming in from different ESX Server hosts are no longer sequential when intermixed at the storage array, and thus become random. Writes generally do better than reads because they are absorbed by the write cache and flushed to disks in the background.

…Virtual machines deployed in typical customer environments may not have as high a rate and therefore may be able to scale further. In general, because of varying block sizes, access patterns, and number of outstanding commands, the results you see in your VMware environment will depend on the types of applications running. The results will also depend on the capabilities of your storage and whether it is tuned for the block sizes in your application. Also, processing very small commands adds some compute overhead in any system, be it virtualized or otherwise…

InovaWave is a US virtualization startup founded by former Surgient employees and launched in November 2006 with a product to optimize VMware and Microsoft platform performances: DXTreme.

In just 1,5 years the company changed its CEO and renamed its flagship product (from DXTreme for ESX to VirtualOctane).

Now it announces a complete indentity takeover:

Hyper9, Inc., formerly known as InovaWave, Inc., today announced the completion of a revised corporate identity, which will better align and communicate the company’s products and business to its target market. At the same time, Hyper9 also announced the appointment of Ben Rouse, an industry veteran with more than 20 years experience in enterprise systems management, enterprise information integration and high performance computing, to the new role of chief product officer. Rouse will also serve on the Hyper9 board of directors.

…

Before coming to Hyper9, Rouse served as the CEO of United Devices, a developer of policy-driven automation solutions for next generation data centers, where he was responsible for the company’s continued growth and overall strategic vision. Prior to United Devices, Rouse was the president and CEO of Journee Software Corporation (acquired by Initiate Systems), a pioneer in the Enterprise Information Integration market. Before Journee, Rouse was the general manager of a $200 million business unit at Tivoli Systems, which was acquired by IBM. In five years at Tivoli, Rouse managed five different divisions through explosive growth and helped the company drive revenue from $50 million to $2 billion. Rouse began his career at LTV Corporation and has held various customer engineering and sales positions at Dallas-based start-up Pinpoint Communications and Convex Computer Corporation, a company acquired by Hewlett-Packard…

A company identity change is always a painful experience which ruins years of marketing efforts in building a solid brand awareness.

In some cases it may make sense: the brand awareness of Parallels was definitively superior than its parent company SWsoft and it’s easy to imagine how the name change is part of a strategy to maximize the exposure obtained on Apple market against VMware.

But when a startup which still has to impose itself as a popular brand decides to change its name, this basically means an attempt to start from scratch because of a major failure in the existing business proposition.

It’s also concerning that the new CEO took 7 months to decide for the identity switch, possibly meaning that the operation wasn’t planned since the first day.

It’s worth to see how the market will react to this move and if the new Hyper9 will be able to collect any trust from the already cautious prospects.

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