Year: 2008

While Quest moves in the virtualization space have never been too evident, in 2007 the company strategy began to emerge: besides its well-known control on Vizioncore, Quest first acquired Invirtus and then acquired Provision Networks.

Now Quest adds a further step:

Quest Software, Inc. today announced it has completed the acquisition of Vizioncore Inc., a leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management. Initially acquiring a controlling interest in Vizioncore in 2005, Quest broadened its virtualization product portfolio in 2007 with the acquisitions of Invirtus, a provider of virtual machine optimization, conversion and automation products, and Provision Networks, a leader in virtual client and desktop management solutions. As part of the company’s plan to support increasing customer needs for managing their virtual environment, acquiring the remaining equity of Vizioncore marks the latest step in Quest’s effort to strengthen its position as a leader in software that enables companies to manage and enhance their heterogeneous IT infrastructure.

…

Quest also announced that Matt Dircks, recently named General Manager of its virtualization business, will initially focus on the Vizioncore product line as he develops the go-to-market plans for Quest’s growing portfolio of virtualization products.

…

He added that Quest has also added industry visionary Scott Herold to the virtualization business as its Lead Architect…

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

Microsoft acquisition of Calista is not the only news that was leaked today. The entire press announcement describing the renewed Microsoft virtualization strategy was just published by ZDNet and DABCC (with many others following).

Among others, the announcement unveils major interoperability between the Microsoft and Citrix virtualization offering. The partnership between the two on virtualization goes well beyond granting smooth performances for Windows virtual machines and adopting VHD for future products.

Today (tomorrow actually) Microsoft announces that both Citrix platforms, XenServer and Presentation server, will be managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). At the same time Citrix announces that its new connection broker, XenDesktop, will support upcoming Hyper-V as virtualization host. Additionally Citrix announces that it’s working on a V2V migration tool able to seamless move virtual machines between Hyper-V and XenServer.

A major news for Microsoft customers considering that SCVMM will also manage VMware platforms.

Over time it appears evident how the Microsoft strategy is to surround VMware through massive partnerships focused on virtualization: with Novell, with Citrix and recently with Sun. Maybe this is why Oracle CEO says VMware is the next Netscape.

With a terrible gaffe Forbes just broke the news of a new acquisition by Microsoft, to be officially announced tomorrow.

The company is Calista Technologies, a stealth startup focus on what is called today presentation virtualization (aka desktop remoting). Few details about its solution, Calista Virtual Desktop (CVD), are available at today beside the list of supported hypervisors, VMware and Citrix ones, along with Microsoft Terminal Services platform.

On the paper CVD has some real potential, also able to impact the growing market of multimedia thin clients (like NEC VPCC):

CVD provides support for 100% of all file and streaming media types available for a modern Windows desktop experience without the need for dedicated hardware or software on the client. Specifically, CVD eliminates the need for media player software and software codecs that increase client management costs, and which impact client interfaces when media codecs are not available for a particular application or client platform.

CVD optimizes the RDP protocol to drastically reduce network bandwidth requirements and improve the user experience in bandwidth-constrained and high-latency environments. For example, CVD’s patent pending, visually lossless compression algorithm achieves data accelerations of as much as 20x supporting a high quality standard business desktop usage, including rich media, at 1Mbit/s per user…

So while VMware acquires Thinstall, invading a space, application virtualization, where Microsoft is dominant, Microsoft acquires Calista, preparing to invade a space, VDI, where VMware is traditionally the leader.

But there’s another interesting perspective: while Microsoft is implictly admitting that its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is not optimized for multimedia streaming, with the acquisition and future integration of Calista CVD the company is going to overlap Citrix ICA more than ever.

Startup founder, Neal Margulis, provides some additional insight about its technology:

…

Well, think of us as the people that have set out to create technology which, when IT departments deploy centralized desktops and applications, ensures that users will enjoy the same rich user experience as with a locally executing desktop: Full 3D graphics with support for DirectX, Vista Aero and WPF applications, full frame rate video with 100% coverage for all media types, and fully synchronized audio. Except that “their” desktop is actually running in the data center, and they are accessing it remotely using Microsoft’s remote desktop protocol (RDP)…

Is Microsoft turning its partnership with Citrix on virtualization in a competition? It doesn’t seem so: the two just announced full interoperability between hypervisors, management tools and connection brokers.

Update: Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, just clarified that Calista technology will be integrated in Microsoft RDP protocol, serving for both VDI and standard terminal services environments.

In October 2006 virtualization.info broke the news of a new hypervisor, HyperSpace, integrated in upcoming Phoenix BIOS, which was officially confirmed in November.

Now Phoenix is finally ready to unveil its virtualization strategy, which involves HyperSpace as part of a new platform called PC 3.0:

Phoenix Technologies Ltd. , the global leader in core systems firmware, announced today that Rich Arnold, the Company’s COO and CFO, will be presenting to the investment community on January 31, 2008, at the Southwest Securities Small Cap Growth Conference in Dallas, TX, and on February 19, 2008, at the Roth 20th Annual OC Growth Stock Conference in Dana Point, CA.

…

The presentation will also include the Company’s vision for PC 3.0 based on Phoenix HyperSpace(TM), an innovative platform the Company believes will ignite a PC revolution by transforming the personal computing experience. The recently announced HyperSpace platform is enabled by an efficient hypervisor also from Phoenix, called HyperCore(TM), a lightweight Zoned Virtual Machine Monitor (ZVMM) that virtualizes the PC platform to offer specialized services for PC users, side-by-side with Windows…

The presentation will be available here.

As virtualization.info readers know since last week, today VMware opens the beta program of a brand new product called Stage Manager (VSM).

Stage Manager streamlines and rationalizes the deployment process of a new virtual machine in production environment: through well-known manipulation tools like multiple snapshots, clones, VM templates, customers can track their virtualized servers during all pre-production phases, rolling back at any point if something goes wrong.

In details Stage Manager is able to:

• Rapidly create new multi-server software configurations (services)
• Monitor resource usage on a per-service, per-stage and per-instance basis
• Easily perform operations on a complete service (e.g. cloning, deploying, archiving, etc.)
• Marshall changes across the service lifecycle, interacting with external process management/workflow system to ensure compliance with service transition policies
• Maintain an archive of past service configurations supporting compliance and recovery operations
• Maintain an auditable history of software configuration changes
• Manage storage behavior on a per-stage basis to maximize storage efficiency
• Control access to services on a per-service, per-stage and per-instance basis
• Inherit then deploy services to resource pools created within VMware VirtualCenter

An even more detailed list of features is available here.

In many ways Stage Manager seems a VMware Lab Manager applied to production environment instead of development & testing ones. In fact both products often overlap goals and share some features like a VM library and the so called Network Fencing technology.

It’s surprising that VMware didn’t build a unique product merging both approaches. At least a basic integration between Lab Manager and Stage Manager is expected at this point.

In any case the product is very welcome considering the endless possibilities to further simplify some risky and very frequent operations like patching production servers or deploying updated applications.

It’s worth to note how aggressively VMware is approaching the VM lifecycle management space from different angles: first Lab Manager, now this one and in a near future also the Lifecycle Management product acquired from Dunes Technologies.

Newest startups just entered the space (Embotics, Fortisphere, ManageIQ) will have a hard time providing additional benefits for VMware customers. The easiest strategy for them will be offering same products for other virtualization platforms like Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Quoting from Financial Times:

As the boss of the hottest company to emerge from the software industry in 2007, Diane Greene has had to deal recently with a familiar rite of passage: the jibes of Larry Ellison.

…

Mr Ellison has been characteristically dismissive. He recently compared the company to Netscape, and predicted that Microsoft would quickly eclipse it as it did the browser pioneer. For good measure, he added that the base layer of software on which virtualisation depends, called a hypervisor, was so simple that his cat could write it.

Ms Greene’s tart response, delivered during an interview with the Financial Times at VMware’s Silicon Valley headquarters: “If his very smart cat could write it, my very smart tortoise could write his database.”…

Read the whole article at the source.

SAP is one of the latest companies which officially announced support for VMware environments.

Now from his corporate blog Michael Hesse, responsible for the technical side of the SAP Alliance, publishes a useful guideline to install SAP inside ESX Server VMs:

1. Use the latest processor generations due to their enhanced support for virtualization.
2. For optimal results use virtual machines with one or two virtual CPUs. It is possible to use four virtual CPUs if your workload requires more processing power, but performance-wise two virtual machines allocated two vCPUs each will give better throughput.
3. Follow the SAP rules for setting up file systems for your database installation.
4. Don’t over-commit memory! With VMware it is possible to assign more virtual memory to the virtual machines than there is physical memory available in the host. This practice is not recommended at all with SAP solutions. SAP allocates memory permanently and does not release it again. To enforce this policy, we recommend setting the “Memory Reservation” to the amount of memory configured for the virtual machine. This will ensure that the virtual machine with the SAP instance will always have the full amount of memory available. The same can be done for the “CPU Reservation,” but we recommend enabling this only in case of performance problems, since the reserved resources are not available to other virtual machines any more.
5. Install VMware Tools to avoid time conflicts.
6. If you are using SQL Server as the database, use “fixed memory allocation” to avoid the allocation overhead of “dynamic” memory allocation.
7. For CPU-bound systems with sufficient memory resources, use the SAP flat memory model with memory protection (mprotect) switched off.
8. For memory bound systems, use the classical SAP view memory model.

As unveiled by virtualization.info at the beginning of this week, VMware will disclose at least two new products at VMworld Europe 2008: Lifecycle Management and Stage Manager.

Additionally VMware will show another two new products previewed at VMworld US last year but still unavailable, Site Recover Manager (SRM) and VMware Operational Framework (VOF).

A further confirmation comes from some of the first sessions published in the agenda:

• BC01 – VMware Site Recovery Manager
  Learn about VMware’s coming DR automation product, Site Recovery Manager, and how it can lower RTO, improve reliablity, and lower costs by instrumenting the setup, failover and test of your VI-wide DR plan.
• RW04 – VMware, ITIL Service Management and all that
  Many customers have adopted Service Management processes around ITIL to better manage their provision of IT Services. As virtualization matures within the Data Centre, these practices need to be provided on the virtual platforms. Principal areas include Availability, Capacity, Incident, Problem, Configuration and Change Management. Richard will discuss how these processes affect virtualized servers, and how the many ISV players provide solutions to manage them. He will also discuss VMware’s application of ITIL and other processes in the VMware Operational Framework (VOF), and discuss how customers have improved and accelerated their VMware roll-out having adopted best practice.

virtualization.info will be in Cannes to cover the event, live blogging during the keynotes and reporting about these new products (check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco).

At the event several US product managers will perform the sessions. virtualization.info already published the videos of Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement and Ashwin Kotian, Product Manager of Physical Virtualization. This week instead our guest is Bing Tsai:

QT_OnloadWriteOBJECT_XHTML(‘http://www.vi3demo.com/vmworld/Bing1_2.mov’, ‘400’, ‘240’, ”,
‘autoplay’, ‘false’,
’emb#bgcolor’, ‘black’,
‘align’, ‘middle’);

Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

As experienced virtualization professionals know, the most critical tier of a VMware Infrastructure is not the virtualization host, ESX Server, but the management server, VirtualCenter, which provision, coordinates and moves all virtual machines. Despite that VMware offers some high availability capabilities for ESX Server but nothing to protect VirtualCenter.

Luckily VMware made VirtualCenter a cluster-aware application since version 2.0.1 patch 2, which allows customers to use industry standard products to achieve fault tolerance.

Next Monday The Neverfail Group, a VMware Technology Partner, will launch its own solution to the problem: Neverfail for VMware VirtualCenter.

The product is much more sophisticated than Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), monitoring the healt of the hardware, network infrastructure, operating system and the management service as well. As soon as the fault is recognized it fails over VirtualCenter on another physical host, without service interruption.

At the same time it’s less demanding than MSCS, not requiring a shared storage facility to work.

From its corporate blog Roger Klorese, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Citrix, reveals a major feature coming for XenServer:

There’s been a lot of noise recently about the complexities of patch management in a virtualized world — a lot of jockeying for last place, as it were, in the “Whose Patch Tuesday is Biggest” contest.

…

We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.

Pool-wide patch management has been integrated into the product, and, in conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, will allow you to:

• Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
• Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
• Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
• Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
• Apply the patches
• Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

Roger is referring to the virtualization.info post Patch Tuesday for VMware, which raised some concerns about the growing need for a hypervisor patch management strategy.

VMware is already addressing the issue with the launch of Update Manager, included the new VI 3.5.

With this feature Citrix starts to build those features needed to attract big customers and become more competitive on the enterprise market.