Year: 2008

Quoting from DesktopLinux.com

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it’s making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository.

…

buntu users must add the Ubuntu Partner Repository to their software channel by Navigating to “System” > “Administration” > “Software Properties.” Then, once they have added the ‘Multiverse’ channel, they can launch the Package Manager and click the “Preferences” button. Next, by clicking on the “Third-Party Software” tab, users can check on the Ubuntu Partner Repository software libraries. That done, the Ubuntu user can then add Parallels Workstation for Linux.

…

Trial versions of the Parallels Workstation for Linux software are available through the Add/Remove function in Ubuntu and keys for permanent use can be purchased directly through the Canonical online store or at the Parallels Web shop. The program costs $49.99.

Read the original article at the source.

This is a great achievement for Parallels: Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distribution (DistroWatch ranked it 1st in 2007) and reaching its userbase through an online download service will greatly improve the chances to widespread Parallels Workstation.

Quoting from the VKernel official announcement:

VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, announced today the
company has raised $4.6 million in its initial institutional round of funding. The round was co-led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.

VKernel will use the funds to advance product development, increase sales, and expand market awareness. Additionally, Mitchell Kertzman of Hummer Winblad and Dave Barrett of Polaris will join VKernel’s Board of Directors…

In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news about a historical vendor entering the virtualization market, Phoenix Technologies, with a brand new hypervisor called HyperCore. The company officially confirmed the news one month later, with a further strategy announcement, dubbed PC 3.0.

Waiting for the official announcement, virtualization.info is able to show an interactive presentation realized by Phoenix itself which overviews the PC 3.0 architecture and HyperCore role:

(click to start and touch the arrow inside the movie)

(Copyright © 2008 Phoenix Technologies Ltd.)

It’s evident that Phoenix aims at consumer market, shaping the hypervisor to create one-purpose computers for vertical markets.

Phoenix Technologies has been included in the (just revamped) virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar

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Yesterday Microsoft finalized Windows Server 2008 (formerly codename Longhorn) code declaring it Ready to Manufacture (RTM).

For this release the company took an unusual step including a beta version of its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-V (formerly codename Viridian) inside the gold image (x64 version only).

For those customers which don’t want the beta hypervisor inside their operating system Microsoft released a version of Windows 2008 without Hyper-V. Here the complete list of available SKUs:

• x64 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V included (server role and management console)
• x86 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V partially included (management console only)

• x64 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V not included
• x86 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V not included
• x86/x64 Web Edition – Hyper-V not included

The Hyper-V build included inside the RTM is the same released in December and included inside Windows 2008 Release Candidate 1.

Customers will be able to update the current version through the Windows Update service (and possibly also through the WSUS product), despite it’s unknown how this will impact the virtual machines availability: since Hyper-V features a microkernel architecture lying below the so called parent and child partitions, it’s likely that customers will have to reboot the entire system at least one time to upgrade the hypervisor.

The final version of Hyper-V is expected 180 days from now, accordingly to the current Microsoft roadmap.

In December 2006 Citrix acquired Ardence, a company providing an operating system streaming technology.

For the past year Ardence operated as an independed subsidiary, while its technology was being integrated into Citrix products, but the merge is now complete.

Last Friday Citrix published Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5, which joins the already released Provisioning Server for Datacenters 4.5.

This new product offers two different streaming approaches: the Standard-Image Mode and the Private-Image Mode.

In the first case a common disk image is streamed to each corporate desktop (no matter which hardware differences they have) and each user modification is recorded inside a delta saved on desktops (either RAM or HD) or on server. In the second case each desktop get streamed a dedicated disk image.

Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5 will be probably integrated with upcoming Citrix VDI connection broker called XenDesktop.

Watch a demo of Provisioning Server here.

VMware stock market performance suffered a bad hit last Tuesday when the company announced its Q4 2007 financial results. Despite the remarkable growth VMware was unable to match financial analysts forecasts, which led to investors’ panic.

As result VMW lost almost 30 points on NYSE, moving from $83 to $54.87.

One week after the situation doesn’t seem much better, with an opening price set to $58.05, despite the release of its new VDI connection broker VMware Desktop Manager 2.0:

A common opinion is that this bad performance depends on the renewed threat of Microsoft, working to gain market control through its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-V and several major partnerships (with Citrix, with Novell, with Sun).

The more Microsoft unleashes its marketing war machine, the more VMW investors start to feel the competitive pressure, and any financial result under expectations is perceived as a first signal of the VMware failure.

The fact that Oracle CEO compares the company to Netscape or that Burton Group compares it to Novell (when it lost its battle against Microsoft) doesnt’ help.

It’s possible that VMW performance will not get much better until the final release of Microsoft Hyper-V: at that point the market’s answer to the product will clarify if VMware can maintain its market leader position for a while (until Hyper-V 2.0 at least).

Quoting from the Fortisphere official announcement:

Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced that it has joined the RSA Secured Partner Program to provide organizations with more control of their virtual infrastructures. Fortisphere Virtual Insight has now been certified to meet the stringent standards for technical interoperability with the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication solution from RSA, The Security Division of EMC.

…

The RSA Secured certification is designed to ensure that our virtual machine lifecycle management solutions meet the strict interoperability requirements of RSA SecurID, an industry-leading two-factor authentication solution that can help to positively identify users before they interact with the mission-critical data and applications residing within virtual machines…

One of the most popular virtualization.info resources is the Virtualization Industry Radar.

It lists all the companies that we track on daily basis. They are focused on application/OS/hardware virtualization markets, they can offer hypervisors, VDI connection brokers, P2V migration tools, etc.

The Radar includes well-known players and startups (even some still in stealth mode) but it includes only those companies carefully screened so to grant a relevant and reliable list of players. In other words we don’t include each company on the market that claims to be a virtualization vendor.

So if you don’t see a vendor you know listed on the Radar this means that either it’s not screened yet or that it doesn’t relate to the application/OS/hardware virtualization market in our opinion.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar is a unique (and free) tool in the virtualization world, and it’s so popular that it was the 7th most seen post in the entire 2007.

Today the Radar gets better: we included a summary to quickly locate a specific vendor, a detail of when a company was acquired, and most of all we included a category definition which describes which market segment a virtualization company is working on.

We selected a list of categories which were meaningful and, where possible, recognized by most vendors:

• Platform (which includes vendors providing hypervisors and hosted virtualization platforms)
• Platform Management (which includes vendors providing cross-platform virtualization management consoles)
• P2V/V2V Migration
• Reporting
• Disaster Recover (which includes vendors providing HA and backup solutions at host OS level)
• Connection Broker (which includes also those vendors offering a management interface for VDI)
• Virtual Lab Automation
• VM Lifecycle Management
• Chargeback
• Optimization

The category definition is a complex attribute to assign since many companies are busy on different markets (think about VMware or Veeam). Instead of listing all categories for each vendor, we decided to pick the category where a vendor is most known. This may be an arguable decision and it may be subject to changes, so at the moment it should be considered experimental.

At virtualization.info we hope this revamped version will be even more useful than the previous one. Enjoy it.

At the end of next month VMware will open the doors of its first VMworld Europe conference, an extended and enriched version of well-known Technical Solution Exchange (TSX).

On stage the company is expected to unveil some interesting news considering all acquisitions completed in the last months (Determina, Dunes Technologies, Thinstall). Most of the message may be focused on data center automation as revealed by the following session:

• From the Virtualized to the Automated Datacenter [SM3]
  At the most recent Gartner Datacenter Conference in November 2007, the leading analyst firm proclaimed that “As virtualization matures, the “next big thing” will be automating the composition and management of these virtualized resources”.
  As the leader in x86 virtualization, VMware will lead the way from the virtualized to the automated datacenter. In the first half of 2008 VMware will introduce a line up of new products that will help customers automate and streamline key IT processes such as IT service delivery and IT service continuity.

virtualization.info will be in Cannes to 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.

The whole January virtualization.info published exclusive introductory videos of some US product managers and staff engineers describing their sessions:

• Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement
• Ashwin Kotian, Product Manager for Physical Virtualization
• Bing Tsai, Staff Engineer
• Kit Colbert, Staff Engineer

This month we start with a specially interesting guest, Eddie Dinel, Product Manager for the just unveiled Stage Manager:

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Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

SkyRecon is the last vendor focused on security which partners with VMware. Many others already re-aligned their offering to conquer the emerging virtualization market: Reflex Security, Blue Lane, Catbird, SteelEye, etc.

While having some security products supported inside a virtual machine is mandatory (virtualization.info recognizes the lack of support as the top challenge in virtualization adoption today), unfortunately none of these companies is bringing serious innovation in the space.

No matter if the solution is endpoint security, continous data protection (CDP), intrusion detection system (IDS) or something else. Each of them is just the traditional product inside a virtual machine (with support for this scenario).

No product in these categories acts at hypervisor level, introducing a new way to centralize security control and management, despite virtualization provides the unique opportunity.

This implies two major problems, one technical and another strategical:

• from a technical point of view these solutions deploy an agent in each protected/monitored/etc virtual machine, duplicating several times the same identical software and wasting precious physical resources which could be used instead to achieve higher consolidation ratios.
  Besides being inefficient this approach doens’t mitigate at any level the security management hell that we already experience today, having to handle at least three different agents per protected computer (typically: patch management, antivirus and firewall).
• from a strategical point of view these solutions will soon see their own major partner, VMware, becoming an unbeatable competitor.
  It’s well-known in fact that VMware is exploring how to introduce security at hypervisor level since many years and its recent demonstration of continuous availability (along with Determina acquisition) is a confirmation of the effort.

Once VMware (and the other virtualization players) will start offering these features at the hypervisor level, providing more effective security control while avoiding physical resource wasting, which product customers will buy?