Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Microsoft just release the first beta of its long awaited help desk software called System Center Service Manager.
This first usable build was expected much earlier but the feedbacks received from the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) testers convinced the company to reconsider the features.
The new development of Service Manager brought in some enhanced capabilities in different areas.
A key one is the change management.
Just two weeks ago VMware announced the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, a startup focused on the so called embedded virtualization.
VMware announced that the Trango technology will be used to power a new Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) without adding further details.
Now something about the timeline emerges: Reseller News published an article quoting Srinivas Krishnamurti, Director of Product Management and Market Development at VMware, who said:
Immediately after the replacement its CEO (the former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz took the place of Diane Greene), VMware risked to lose a number of high-profile executives and software engineers loyal to the fired co-founder.
The mass exodus never happened (also thanks to some aggressive workforce retaining programs) but VMware lost a bunch of key figures nonetheless:
The list of executives leaving Virtual Iron gets longer and longer.
In May the company lost its public face, the Chief Marketing Officer Mike Grandinetti.
In November it also lost the one that was supposed to reshape the go-to-market strategy: the Chief Security Officer Tony Asaro. Asaro left the company after just
And now Virtual Iron loses its Director of Corporate Marketing Tim Walsh.
In realty Walsh left before Asaro, in October, to found, like its former colleague, his own consulting company.
Walsh left Virtual Iron after more than 3 years (and $65 million funding).
Now, or the CEO Ed Walsh is working to completely renew its leadership team or the high-level profiles are leaving a sinking boat.
Just one month after the 6.5 release, VMware is ready to refresh again its Workstation.
Besides a bunch of bug fixes, the minor update 6.5.1 (build 126130) introduces a couple of interesting new features, both experimental:
Download a trial here.
At the end of the last week VMware launched the public beta program for the newest version of its free P2V migration tool: Converter 4.0.
Converter 4.0 is already embedded into VMware Infrastructure 3.5 but the users that don’t buy the flagship platform can just use the stand-alone Converter 3.0.2, which is one year old.
It’s not clear why VMware is taking so long to synchronize the two versions.
The first beta build (122441) of the new version introduces key features that can be used with any VMware product besides VI 3.5:
Since months now a serious number of companies and open source contributors is looking at Red Hat to understand its new virtualization strategy.
The company took a major step in June when it thrown out of window years of efforts on Xen to fully replace it with KVM.
Just two months after, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, the company that started KVM, that maintains it, that managed to inject it into the Linux kernel, and that sells a very interesting VDI solution.
What Red Hat wants to do now with KVM and Qumranet (somebody hopes that their highly performing VDI protocol SPICE will be open sourced) is critical to understand what chances has Linux to impose itself as a valuable virtualization platforms against the popular hypervisors ESX (offered by VMware) and Xen (offered by every other vendor except Microsoft).
Some hints of the new strategy surface in a recent interview that InformationWeek arranged with Jim Whitehurst, the Red Hat CEO:
So far the CA activity in the virtualization space has been more than silent.
Yes, the company issued many press announcements stating that it’s reworking many of its products to support virtualization, but the software giant never took major steps to become a virtualization leader like almost every other major IT player did in the last two years.
Hiring the former co-founder of Virtugo (a virtualization startup that mysteriously disappeared shortly after its merge with uXcomm), Chris Dickson, as Vice President didn’t seem to help much.
Now things may change as CA just made a joint announcement with VMware, revealing that its Data Center Automation Manager is integrated with VMware vCenter and will interoperate with Stage Manager.
Additionally, VMware vCenter capabilities are integrated into the CA Advanced Systems Management (ASM), where the VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology can merge with the CA’s Dynamic Resource Brokering (DRB), and together they can possibly start a fantastic virtualization management sprawl.
The announcement seems to imply that these are just the first steps of a much more tighten relationship. We’ll see for how long CA will be happy to play this role in the virtualization industry.
In September 2007 AMD was the first on the market to introduce an implementation of the much awaited nested page tables technology that promises unprecedented performance for virtualization platforms: the Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI).
As every virtualization professional knows, even the most enhanced CPU extension it’s useless without a virtualization vendor that supports it in its hypervisor.
VMware introduced support for AMD-V RVI almost one year ago with the release of VI 3.5.
Today most hypervisors support it (to see which ones you may want to check the brand new virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide) but we still didn’t have much details about the performance boost that this technology provides in a virtual infrastructure.
This week VMware released a very interesting 9-pages whitepaper answering the question:
In January 2007 Symantec started its slow entrance in the virtualization market acquiring Altiris, a company mostly known for its enterprise management products than for its brand new application virtualization product SVS (Software Virtualization Solution).
After the acquisition Symantec released just a minor update of SVS (that became the acronym of Symantec Virtualization Solution), still using the Altiris brand, in June 2007 and then nothing else.
For a long time the security giant strategy for the application virtualization market has been totally obscure, until March 2008 when a dedicated Endpoint Virtualization Business Unit was created. Then Symantec went silent again.
Now, maybe, the company is ready to move forward and tell the world its plan to compete with Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Novell and the plethora of startups that populate this market segment.