Year: 2008

With a series of announcement published since this January (and wrongly reporting the year 2007), the US company INSYSTEK announces that its management suite, TotalView, extends its support to some virtualization platforms, VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenServer, and to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. The support is in beta.

Unfortunately this is not the first time INSYSTEK publishes such kind of announcements:

• The first one was in September 2006 (at that time the suite was still called Virtualize IT) when INSYSTEK announced VirtualCenter beta support availability within a couple of months.
• The second time was in March 2007 when the company re-announced beta support for VMware ESX Server.

Assuming Virtualize IT and TotalView Suite are the same product (it’s hard to believe that the company started to develop from scratch a new technology after announcing a beta), virtualization.info has to report that the solution has been announced three times but never left the beta, after 1,5 years.

On top of that the entire company website, including the part which should host the beta program, doesn’t show any update since Spring 2007.

Quoting from the NetEx official announcement:

NetEx, the leader in high speed data transport over TCP, today announced its award winning HyperIP software for VMware ESX Server, making NetEx the first WAN optimization vendor to support wide-area data acceleration on the VMware platform.

HyperIP is NetEx’s award-winning business continuity and disaster recovery optimization solution for backup, recovery and data replication applications. It provides unmatched performance for moving TCP data efficiently using patent-pending technology that accelerates and optimizes the industry-leading data replication and file transfer applications by aggregating multiple data replication applications over a shared connection while mitigating the inherent network latency and network disruption for long-distance remote TCP/IP data transmissions. HyperIP WAN optimization appliances support long-distance data transfers at rates above OC-12, the highest performance of any optimization appliance on the market, and 25 – 100 percent faster than competitive products. Transfer speed is optimized for a wide range of data management applications, including backup & remote replication and business continuance/disaster recovery (BC/DR).

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HyperIP for VMware will be available in the first quarter of 2008 with entry-level pricing starting between $6K to $8K…

Quoting from Enterprise Storage Forum:

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Centralized management of the entire data center is certainly something that VMware wants to make possible, according to Lionel Cavalliere, senior product marketing at VMware. “One of the goals of VMware is optimizing the management of storage in a virtualized environment,” he said.

But he categorically rules out the possibility of VMware moving into the storage space to create a total virtual environment. “We certainly want to give Virtual Center vision of storage so it can manage storage resources, but there will be no integration into a single product,” he said. “What we intend to do is this: rather than being integrated, we will provide SDKs to enable our VI3 (Virtual Infrastructure 3) to report on storage. We will allow (storage) management tools to plug in.”

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Cavalliere said a complete management solution using plug-in storage management tools may be the long-term goal of VMware’s strategy, but it is still a long way off. “Clearly VMware will have a big impact on storage practices, but we are only really just starting to speak about it,” he said…

Read the whole article at the source.

Saugatuck Technologies just released a study which pushes some odd predictions:

• Through 2010, all facets of IT Virtualization will see substantial enhancements in functionality and performance; however the most significant enhancements will be in microprocessor, hypervisor and operating system function for Server Virtualization.
• Through 2010, Server Virtualization will have the single largest impact on budgets for IT hardware and support. The second largest impact will be network virtualization.
• Through 2010, three vendors — Cisco, VMware and XenSource (now Citrix) — will dominate IT Virtualization, accounting for 60 percent of all new virtualization deployments.

While the first one is pretty generic (it includes every part of the computing stack) and definitively expected (it’s unlikely there will be no technical improvements in the next 3 years), the last one is pretty hard to decode.

Saugatuck’s analysts put on the same level two companies busy in the hardware virtualization market (VMware and Citrix) and one working in the today-called network virtualization (Cisco). So there are two chances: or this report is suggesting that Cisco will become a hardware virtualization player very soon (and succeed within 3 years), or this report is using a very arguable categorization model.

On top of that Microsoft is not present. Redmond guys may be wondering if the presence of Hyper-V in every single copy of Windows Server 2008 on the planet has been considered or not.

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

This year Europe will finally get a taste of the worldwide famous VMworld conference, usually held in US only. This February in fact the Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) will become VMworld Europe, welcoming attendees in Cannes, France.

virtualization.info will be there once again, live blogging the keynotes and reporting any major news from the stage (check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco).

Probably the biggest value of attending the VMworld Europe is getting finally in touch with US product managers in charge of those products and features we use every day. Here one of them, Carter Shanklin, introducing his own session:

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‘autoplay’, ‘false’,
’emb#bgcolor’, ‘black’,
‘align’, ‘middle’);

Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

Warren Ponder, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at VMware, just wrote a very interesting post about which design approach to adopt in VDI scenarios:

There are several approaches or strategies in attacking your VMware VDI desktop deployment from a design standpoint. Most organizations enter their architecture with hesitation and reserve using a very static approach. They plan to map desktop users 1:1 each desktop user will be given a dedicated virtual desktop and some division or swag is made regarding how many desktops they can concurrently run on each VDI server.

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In most enterprise and office environments, as you walk around you will find large populations of empty cubes and idle desktops. Business is constantly changing and in order to stay competitive companies are being forced to change the workplace. More people are teleworking, using flexible work schedules and becoming more mobile. When users are in two hour long meetings or on conference calls several times a day, typically they are not using their desktops. When three out four people are not working on an exact 9-5 schedule the number of concurrent users is reduced. All of this combined results in an opportunity to revisit going beyond static VDI architectures making them more dynamic and oversubscribing the servers. With this approach mileage may vary in different cases. For example, a contact center environment where users are heads down, might not realize the same benefits…

Read the whole article at the source.

CIO.com published an interesting survey conducted among nearly 300 CIOs, which reveals some interesting data.

For example while virtualization is still mainly used for servers (85%), there’s an impressive number of companies using it for disaster recovery (63%).

Another interesting finding is that workloads management is the top issue (64%): virtualization.info recognizes this (under the name of Capacity Planning) as the third biggest challenge in virtualization adoption today.

The survey also exposes the limited acceptance of desktop virtualization, which several companies don’t plan to adopt at all (37%), despite most of them are looking for reducing administration and support cost (62%). Maybe vendors should recosider the way they propose the technology.

Last valuable information is that companies are mostly looking for develop in-house virtualization experts (73%), rather than hiring consultant firms. It’s yet to be demonstrated if these companies recognize that a virtualization professional deserves special training and higher salary.

Unfortunately CIO.com didn’t publish some critical informations about the survey to understand if it applies to US or EMEA market, or to SMB or Enteprise one. virtualization.info found out some details:

• The survey was conducted from September to November 2007
• 281 magazine’s readers answered
• 30% of them work in a company with less than $100 Million annual revenue
• 24% of them work in a company with an annual revenue between $101 and $999 Million
• 34% of them work in a company with more than $1 Billion annual revenue

After the unexpected launch of Hyper-V beta 1 in December, Microsoft is starting to produce massive amount of documentation to introduce its new hypervisor, with a peek expected in time for the Windows Server 2008 RTM launch in February.

An interesting resource is a free 2-hours online course, unfortunately still updated to the Hyper-V version included with Windows Server 2008 RC0.

The course includes following lessons:

• Introduction to Virtualization and Server Consolidation in Windows Server 2008
• Overview of Virtualization in Windows Server 2008
• Introduction to Server Consolidation on Windows Server 2008
• Virtualization Architecture and Management in Windows Server 2008
• Virtualization Architecture in Windows Server 2008
• Computer Migration with Windows Server Virtualization
• Managing the Virtual Environment
• Continuity and Availability Enhancements with Windows Server 2008
• Building Dynamic IT Environments
• Clustering and Backup in Virtual Environments

Enroll it here.

From the corporate blog Benjamin Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications at SWsoft, announces that the long awaited Parallels Server finally entered beta 1 stage.

SWsoft provided few informations about this product in the last few months, showing the first, very early Alpha at Apple WWDC 2007 conference last June, and publishing a short tentative features list:

• Enhanced virtual SMP (multi-core virtual machines)
• Binary and web-based management tools (with capability to manage physical and virtual machines at the same time)
• Open APIs
• Support for SWsoft management console (Virtuozzo and Parallels Server can be managed by the same tool)

The product was originally supposed to be a so called type-1 VMM (aka hypervisor), comparable with VMware ESX Server, Xen and upcoming Microsoft Hyper-V, but virtualization.info retrieved different informations at VMworld 2007 conference.

Another expected feature of Parallels Server is a Mac OS X 10.5 Server version, which raised high interest because of Apple recent changs to its licensing policy for virtualization environments.

Unfortunately this first phase is private so the large majority of users will have to wait for a second, public beta, before discovering the real feature-set and supported platforms.

Parallels Server will be a part of the new virtualization strategy unveiled last month by SWsoft, that will soon change name in Parallels.

Quoting from Chennai Online IT:

IT research firm IDC (India) Limited has predicted that the domestic IT/ITeS market revenue will touch Rs. 1,10,000 crore in 2008 while sustaining the growth of 27 per cent recorded in 2007.

This would result into the market growing at 24 per cent in 2008 over 2007. The year 2008 is set to mark the beginning of Growth Phase 2.0 to be characterised by opportunities arising out of the leveraging of the IT infrastructure built up so far.

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IDC India expects India revenues to grow the fastest during 2006-2011 amongst all BRIC nations even if the focus moves beyond the BRIC countries. India, currently contributes to about one fifth of the total BRIC revenues.

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IDC India estimated the share of virtualized servers to double from the present 22 per cent to 45 per cent by 2008-end. Riding on the success of server virtualization, storage virtualization is also coming of age in India…

Read the whole article at the source.

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