Year: 2009

Since the VMware acquisition at the end of 2003, EMC always said that its new subsidiary had to stay independent to win the market.
A few really trusted those words at the time: nothing like virtualization has driven the storage spending in the history of enterprise IT (and it’s just the beginning, wait for VDI to become mainstream).
It was hard to believe that EMC wouldn’t leverage its relationship with VMware to declass NetApp, HP, IBM, Sun (now Oracle) and others as second choice options when designing virtual data centers.
But over the years the storage giant demonstrated its commitment to keep VMware independent.
For a period of time EMC was even accused of not doing enough, lacking that minimum integration that customers expect between two technologies as complementary and connected as the VMware hypervisor and the EMC storage array.

If EMC ever used its influence on VMware to damage its competitors, virtualization.info is not aware of it and no customer or reader ever complained about that.

Now everything is changing.

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Guest star author: Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, at Dell.

One of the things that has consistently interested me has been the rate at which server virtualization is adopted within customers. The reason this is so interesting is the huge differences I see in different organizations that often have the same goals, and are about the same size. Some organizations have huge implementations with CEOs or CIOs driving everyone to virtualize. While other organizations have a ‘grass roots’ push for virtualization squeaking it in where they think they may get away with it. Sometimes I have even found that the ‘early adopters’ of the technology are only 30% virtualized after 3 or 4 years and their competition that just started their project last year is now 40% virtualized.

All of this led to me wonder if we could ‘grade’ where someone was in their adoption solely based on the % of their environment that is virtualized and the number of years they have been using server virtualization. And if we can grade someone, then we need to define a possible “optimal adoption curve” for server virtualization, again based on pure potential within an environment.

Before we get into some of the numbers behind the optimal adoption curve we have to dispose of a couple items / make a few assumptions.

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Less than 10 months ago, Citrix released its own data center orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.

The future of virtualization (and cloud computing) depends on automation, so products like this are very welcome here at virtualization.info.
Unfortunately, for many customers, it’s not easy to recognize their value at today.
A company has to reach a critical mass of virtual machines before it can finally see the benefits of automating a large part of their lifecycle.

At the same time orchestration is often associated with scripting, which sounds like a complex procedure that only the most technical members of the staff can own, and that can be used only in very circumstantiated scenarios. 
Orchestration is much beyond scripting but virtualization vendors in general are not doing a great job in clarifying so, and so it’s still really hard to get the real potential of the technology.

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At the end of August VMware finally released its authoring product Studio 2.0, which virtualization.info covered at the end of July.

This new Studio introduces the support for vApps, the next incarnation of the VMware Virtual Appliances (VA), and a number of additional, welcome features:

• Support for vSphere 4.0 (including both ESX and ESXi hosts), Server and Workstation as provisioning engines.
• Support for OVF 1.0 and 0.9 formats
• Support for VA/vApp customization (logo, EULA, first-boot script and user management capabilities)
• Support for virtual machines (previously created with Studio) as input
• Support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32/64 bit)
• Periodically publish critical updates to deployed VA/vApps through VMware Update Manager (VUM)
• Authored VA/vApps have an agent built on a Common Information Model (CIM) Broker and CIM Provider for guest OS management

Last week VMware released a bunch of updates for several products in its portfolio. Each build is primarily for bug fixing but View Manager 3.1.2 also introduces a new feature:

Just a couple of days ago virtualization.info wrote about the upcoming launch of Smart Business Desktop, the IBM Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud computing infrastructure powered by VMware, Citrix, Wyse Technology and Desktone products.

We can’t wait October to try what IBM claimed to be an industry first, even if we just spotted a company that seems to have a DaaS offering well before the Big Blue: tuCloud.

The startup promises to deliver on-demand Windows Vista or Windows 7 (with Aero) hosted desktops with up to 4GB RAM within 24 hours maximum (so it’s not in real-time through a self-service provisioning portal as we expect the IBM DaaS to work).

tuCloud offers pay-per-use and pre-pay pricing models, starting at $120 (or 100 Euros) for the first desktop (1GB RAM) plus $65 (or 50 Euros) for additional ones.
A customer can ask up to 100 virtual desktops and, paying an extra, it can have its environment preconfigured with popular commercial products.

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Reflex Systems (formerly Reflex Security) has been very active since its name change and strategy makeover in November 2008.

In March the company signed an OEM agreement with Dell and hired a new Vice President of Sales from ISS (which meanwhile was acquired by IBM), and in April secured its first round of funding for $8.5 million.

Just before the VMworld 2009 a couple of weeks ago, Reflex Systems launched the second release of its (new) flagship product: Virtualization Management Center (VMC).

VMC 2.0 introduces a significant number of new features:

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KACE is the very last company that entered the application virtualization market. It acquired Computers In Motion in September 2008 and released their rebranded technology this March as Virtual Kontainers.

Just before VMworld 2009 the company released Kontainers 2.0, which introduces some interesting features:

• a signature update service (customers can use it to inform KACE about new applications that don’t work properly in the virtual layer)
• the capability to patch/updated a virtual application without repackaging it
• a self-service provisioning web portal
• a command-line interface (CLI)

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The Canadian startup CiRBA recently released a new minor update for its capacity planning tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

The company is trying to simplify the use of its product, so DCI 5.2 ships with a number of new, pre-defined analysis templates tailored for consolidation in VMware infrastructures.
CiRBA will release additional templates during the next quarter to support Hyper-V and Xen hardware virtualization, as well as IBM AIX and Oracle/Sun Solaris OS virtualization solutions.

CiRBA is one of the many companies that revolves around VMware. But the once preferred partner is about to compete with them by releasing CapacityIQ, somewhere next year. 
So no surprises that CiRBA is now looking around for new opportunities.

After a couple of months of beta, Quest released the second minor update for its multi-platform connection broker vWorkspace 6.0.

The new build introduces several enhancements in multi-monitor, USB and graphic support, and a couple of new features:

• the integration with NetApp FlexClone technology (only for VMware VDI environments)
• the integration of vWorkspace Web Access portal with Microsoft SharePoint (experimental)