Year: 2009

Last week Citrix announced the public beta of its premium management solution for the Microsoft hypervisor: Essentials for Hyper-V 5.5.

The main new feature of this version is the support for Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 (plus Windows 7, for the OEM’ed VMLogix Lab Manager), but it also introduces the StorageLink Site Recovery technology for Hyper-V.

StorageLink Site Recovery allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays offer without using multiple consoles, and allows to test the recovery process by restoring the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The technology may become the foundation of a new product able to compete with VMware Site Recovery Manager, and now Citrix is in the position to offer it to its customers and the Microsoft ones.

Usually virtualization.info doesn’t post stories about industry events (except the major ones related to virtualization like the VMware VMworld) and for sure it doesn’t publish stories about the vendors’ presence at a specific trade show (unless it’s our own Virtualization Congress).

In this particular case we’ll make an exception: VMware just informed its partners that it will exhibit at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009.

This is not the first time that VMware shows up at that event, but it certainly is the first time that VMware and Oracle are in harsh, direct competition.

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While finalizing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0 and ACE 2.6, VMware is also working on the next generation of Fusion.

The product is becoming increasingly important for VMware, as Apple continues to attract new potential customers (mainly because of the iPhone) and gains market share.
The more Windows and Linux users consider switching to Mac OS X, the more Fusion (and its competitors) becomes the must-have gateway to the new environment.

The new Fusion 3.0, which will be available October 27, includes some new, welcome features:

• new 64bit engine optimized for Snow Leopard
• support for Windows 7 and its Aero interface
• support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3
• a P2V migration tool called Switching Made Easy that works over Ethernet or wireless

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In June the Russian website OpenNET unveiled the new features introduced in the first beta of VMware Workstation 7.0.

VMware kept the entire beta phase private, but last Friday decided to announce the public availability of the Release Candidate (build 197124) which also includes Player 3.0 and ACE 2.6.

The most remarkable new features of Workstation 7.0 RC are the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver that supports Vista and 7 Aero interface, and the support as guest OS for ESX and its VMotion (only on processors that support Intel EM64T with VT-x or on the AMD64 Family 10H and later processors with AMD-V).

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At the end of last week, with a short announcement on the corporate blog, Microsoft announced the RTM of its Windows XP Mode, a pre-configured virtual machine with Windows XP SP3 as guest OS that will run on the Virtual PC version included in Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise.

virtualization.info already covered the last-minute features included in the August release candidate build.

Every Microsoft customer will be able to download the virtual machine for free by October 22, the official launch day for Windows 7.
Everybody but the Sony customers that purchased a VAIO laptop.

Thanks to the absurd strategy that Sony adopted, its customers cannot run Windows XP Mode or any virtual machine, because Windows Virtual PC needs Intel VT, and the Intel VT capability has been intentionally disabled and hidden inside every VAIO BIOS.

Just a couple of days ago virtualization.info published a piece about the Oracle potential in the virtualization space and its current behavior, specifically focusing on the company support to competing virtualization platform like the VMware one.

We questioned the Oracle credibility and Oracle promptly answered.

Adam Hawley, Director of Product Management for Oracle VM, left a comment on our previous article, but because of the importance of the statements that it contains (and because the defense deserves as much exposure as the attack), we republish it here.

We added emphasis to some parts we consider particularly important:

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Cloud computing means a lot of different things. As virtualization.info mostly focuses on virtual data centers technologies, our interest for cloud computing is, at the moment, limited to those architectures known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where a hypervisor meets an orchestration framework and generates a scalable, pay-per-use, on-demand virtual infrastructure.

Our attention of course also focuses on the many shapes that IaaS clouds can have, like the Server-as-a-Service (nobody every used this term so far, but the industry may do it at a point) or the imminent Desktop-as-a-Service architectures (DaaS).
Thus virtualization.info closely monitors both IaaS service providers (like Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, tuCloud, etc.) and IaaS technology providers (like Citrix, Desktone, Skytap, VMware, etc.).

Soon enough we are going to cover Microsoft as well.

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As virtualization.info reported multiple times, VMware recently decided to appoint a second CTO to focus exclusively on desktop virtualization.
His business unit should include:

• the VDI connection broker View (acquired from Propero in 2007)
• the technologies OEM’ed from ThinPrint in 2007 (for remote printing), Wyse Technology in 2008 (for RDP acceleration) and RTO Software in 2009 (for persona management)
• the application virtualization platform ThinApp (acquired from Thinstall in 2008)
• the upcoming high-performance remote desktop protocol PCoIP (co-developed with Teradici since 2008)
• the upcoming hypervisor for embedded devices Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP, acquired from Trango in 2008)
• the upcoming client hypervisor Client Virtualization Platform (CVP, which will probably include the technologies acquired from Tungsten Graphics in 2008)

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In the virtualization market, right now, Oracle is the company that has the biggest potential.

One of the most important values in virtualization is the capability to cut the dependency on a specific hardware vendor, switching the servers, the storage or the network gears at will, without most of the pain that such change would imply in the “physical” world.
Yet, while everybody desires an open and competitive market, a number of customers prefer to deal with the least amount of vendors whenever possible.

Dealing with a single vendor means (or should mean) less moving parts, less complexity in licensing, a piece-of-mind support agreement that covers the computing stack end to end (which implies a shorter resolution time), a smoother standardization process, and more.

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So far VMware didn’t do a good job in explaining the reasons behind the SpringSource acquisition and how it fits the long term vision.

The ones that attended the VMworld 2009 conference in San Francisco last month, witnessed how many in the audience left the opening keynote as soon as the SpringSource CEO took the stage.
That was something never happened before (except for the sponsored sections at the end of the VMworld Europe 2009 first keynote).

Now that the acquisition is completed, hopefully VMware will say something more and more concrete to engage its audience.

Meanwhile, somebody totally unexpected took the time to explain this acquisition much better than what the VMware marketing did till now: Simon Crosby, the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management Division.

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