Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
In its quarterly earnings conference call to investors, Citrix CEO, Mark Templeton announced that the XenServer department added 400 new customers during Q4 2007, and that the company expects a revenue of $3 to $5 million for the Q1 2008 (the expected revenue for the entire 2008 is set to $50 million).
Despite these results Citrix reports that its sales channel isn’t focused yet on the product line: the official introduction will arrive next week at Citrix Summit 08 in Orlando, Florida.
ClearCube is usually identified as a vendor offering a locked-in VDI solution, only working with company hardware. But this release introduces a major change of direction.
The new Sentral 5.6, ClearCube’s connection broker, features a vendor-agnostic approach, supporting VMware and Microsoft virtualization platforms (including the upcoming Hyper-V), as well as Xen.
This critical feature and puts ClearCube in the crowded space of VDI vendors, along with VMware, Quest (through Provision Networks acquisition), Leostream, Ericom, the just entered Sun and Qumranet, and soon even Citrix.
Both the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.
Since the beginning of the Hyper-V public beta, Microsoft is slowly releasing details about which features its new hypervisor will offer.
Three of them have been recently detailed:
Thanks to Ben Armstrong for the news.
Quoting from the Endeavors official announcement:
Endeavors Technologies, the pioneer in application streaming and virtualization technology, and its parent company, Tadpole Technology plc, today announced Wallace Systems has incorporated AppExpress into its Logibanque software distribution and management system.
…
Logibanque is a modular solution that utilizes Endeavors’ AppExpress to stream applications for on-demand delivery to users. The solution also provides sales process management, including bill generation, automated bank transfers and user/reseller activity reporting. Logibanque enables ISVs and content providers to smoothly migrate to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model…
Hardware virtualization allows an unprecedented level of flexibility in modern datacenters which can be combined with many degrees of automation. Depending on the purpose this automation is shaped in different tools for different markets.
The very first application has been the so called Virtual Lab Management, a segment where VMware, Surgient and VMLogix are busy today. But a second one is emerging these days: the VM lifecycle management.
On the long term it’s easy to imagine how the today’s Virtual Lab Mangement vendors will start offering VM Lifecycle Management solutions and vice versa.
A recent set of patents secured by Surgient seems to confirm this vision:
Surgient, the market leader in virtual labs that power solutions for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it has been awarded three new patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Reinforcing its technical leadership in the virtual lab management market, the three new patents cover technologies that enable Surgient customers to better allocate, manage and organize virtualized resources used to accelerate the software development and delivery lifecycle.
…
The three patents were awarded during the past year. The technologies covered by the patents were developed entirely by Surgient’s research and development team. The patents include:
- US Patent #6,990,666
“Near Online Server”-Describes a method for providing fractional burst capacity in delivering virtual computing resources from a centralized, shared server resource pool.- US Patent #7,257,584
“Server File Management”-Describes a method for providing portability of virtual server “snapshots” across physical server hosts. One of the underpinnings of Surgient’s library management server, this patented technology provides greater flexibility when developing, managing and deploying virtual machine images.- US Patent #7,287,186
“Shared Nothing Virtual Cluster”-Describes a method for organizing virtual machine resources for rapid recovery, such as that required by advanced disaster recovery, reduced power consumption or business continuity scenarios. Enables virtual machines to dynamically move across physical hosts without requiring data to be moved or copied.
Quoting from the PHD official announcement:
PHD Technologies, Inc. (PHD), the leading innovator of backup and replication solutions for VMware Infrastructure 3, has announced that more than 1,000 enterprise customers have selected esXpress v3 to manage backup, restoration and disaster recovery of their data centers. PHD added significant customers this past quarter to surpass the 1,000th customer milestone including ADP, Barnes&Noble.com, Siemens, Tyco and U.S. Food Service…
Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:
Scalent Systems, Inc., the leading provider of server infrastructure repurposing software enabling real-time infrastructure for large enterprise data centers, today announced the appointment of Karen Randig to the role of CFO. Randig brings to Scalent a wealth of experience in managing finance, accounting, legal and human resource teams.
…
Randig’s distinguished career in corporate finance and administration spans more than 20 years, including interim CFO for several venture-backed companies in the enterprise software, internet, and medical device industries. Previously, Randig was CFO at BizGenics. She also served as vice president of Finance at diCarta. Prior, she held positions at Dun & Bradstreet in the Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions group and as vice president of Finance for the Information Warehouse Solutions group…
In just two days Microsoft completely reshaped its virtualization strategy. Yesteday:
But that’s not enough. Today Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, stated thatapplication virtualization is crucial for desktop and servers.
In other words Muglia announced that Application Virtualization will be available also for servers.
This position has a massive impact on the way virtualization will be sold and adopted by customers.
Despite support and licensing issues that slow down application virtualization adoption today, so far the technology has been pushed as a more efficient and less demanding approach than hardware virtualization for corporate’s clients. But when the technology reaches the corporate servers suddenly an overlap and a conflict with hardware virtualization appears.
Should I virtualized a database server with hardware virtualization (through virtual machines) or with application virtualization (thorugh virtual layers)?
The new Microsoft answer to this question is: with both.
If Microsoft releases Application Virtualization for Windows Server it’s not killing its Hyper-V strategy: it’s implicitly suggesting to use hardware virtualization for OS delivery and application virtualization for services delivery.
And the nested use of both technologies is a major step towards a dynamic data center which virtualization.info usually calls liquid computing.
At this point Microsoft only misses one layer between these two: the OS virtualization one provided by SWsoft. But Redmont giant may be working on this as well.
Among the many virtualization news included in yesterday announcement one is particularly important: Microsoft now officially supports Office when virtualized through Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid).
This is major and welcome move from Microsoft: just like for hardware virtualization, customers find a major challenge in application virtualization adoption because of the severe lack of support from ISVs (virtualization.info ranks lack of support as first challenge in today’s market).
The fact that Microsoft is finally supporting the ubiquitous Office suite in this scenario may persuade other vendors to do the same, leading to the same acceleration we are seeing in hardware virtualization market today.
With such announcement Microsoft also made clear that it’s finally ready to push for application virtualization: the company acquired the technology from Softricity in May 2006 and in almost two years never released similar support statements.
A reason for this unexpected change depend on VMware, which just acquired Thinstall.
Through a lock-in support strategy Microsoft may want to avoid a further growth of VMware in the application virtualization space: it will be hard for vendor’s customers to adopt its new product if Redmond giant doesn’t offer support for the scenario (kust like Oracle is doing right now with its database).
Despite the step in the right direction there is something that Microsoft is not ready to do: changing Office licensing to reflect the virtualized option.
In the last two years some early adopters raised concerns about the price a virtualized application should have: since SoftGrid technology allows to stream Office components just when they are needed by the end-user, this means that an application is not really always installed on a desktop like in traditional computing or in hardware virtualization. So customers wonder why they should still pay for everyday use when they don’t.
In other words companies are looking for a new pay-per-use licensing scheme. But it would imply a radical impact on the entire Microsoft business model and it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
So far Microsoft had a controversy position about Vista virtualization, changing its mind several times: only the Business, Ultimate and Enterprise editions of the client OS could be virtualized, generating much complains among students and many home users.
The announcement of Microsoft extended strategy for virtualization (now finally official after yesterday’s leaks) unveils a change of direction: both Home Basic and Home Premium editions can be finally virtualized.
This turn-around may depend on an upcoming major initiative in the VDI space, which just started with Calista Technologies acquisition and Hyper-V integration with Citrix XenDesktop.
If Microsoft wants to expedite the adoption of its client OS in different VDI environments (from corporate VDI infrastructures in SMBs to hosted VDI infrastructure for non-business uses) it has to offer the entire product line and not just the most expensive editions, which would negatively impact on costs.
Another possible explaination may be related to the wild success obtained by Apple and Parallels/VMware in spreading virtualization among the masses (and in many cases facilitating the migration to Mac OS X).
Until November 2007 Apple didn’t permit virtualization of its operating system, but with a sudden licensing change the company now allows Mac OS X Server in a VM (as soon as it stays on any Apple physical hardware).
This may be the first step before extending the same change to the client version of the OS, allowing Leopard to become the only platform where to run every virtualized OS. And just in case this happens Microsoft wants to be there with all its Vista editions.
At this point it’s worth to consider if Microsoft is regretting to have dismissed its Virtual PC for Mac.