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Finally, after a long time under the scenes, ManageIQ gives a sign of its presence and updates Enterprise Virtualization Manager (EVM) Suite.
The startup had more than one year to extend the already very good EVM Suite 2.0. The new 2.3 version introduce support for VMware vSphere 4.0:
In June VMLogix announced the upcoming availability of a special version of its virtual lab automation product that could support Amazon EC2.
The product, dubbed LabManager Cloud Edition (CE), was released two weeks ago at VMworld 2009.
While the privacy and security concerns expressed in our previous coverage remain, it is true that VMLogix may be one of the first vendors to set the trend for the coming months: those customers that decide to embrace cloud computing may easily recognize the need for management consoles that extend the 3rd party IaaS architectures to achieve specific tasks such as virtual lab automation.
There are evident benefits:
After no less than 2 years, Parallels finally updates its hosted virtualization platform for Windows and Linux.
Formerly known as Parallels Workstation, the product is now called Desktop for Windows & Linux and jumps from version 2.2 to 4.0.
The amount of new features introduced is remarkable and of course come from the Desktop for Mac product where Parallels focused most of its R&D effort in the last years.
Here’s a list of the most significant improvements:
The VMworld 2009 conference ended yesterday, an amazing experience as usual.
virtualization.info already covered the two opening keynotes (day 1 and day 2) plus a special closed-doors keynote about cloud computing.
Like every year will publish a long wrap-up with the impressions about the show in one week or so.
Before leaving San Francisco anyway, in a pure Steve Jobs style, there’s one more thing.
Second day keynote here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009.
The yesterday keynote, performed by the VMware CEO Paul Maritz and the COO Tod Nielsen, was mostly focused on the company vision.
Today the CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod is expected to deliver, as usual, a more concrete, technology-wise keynote, dedicating more time to the new products that VMware is delivering or developing for a future release.
Stephen Herrod is on stage.
He starts recapping the three initiatives that make the VMware strategy and how there’s a major refocus on the desktop virtualization area and View. View enables Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS).
Deeply hidden in the VMworld 2009 opening keynote the VMware CEO Paul Maritz introduced three new key concepts that define the new message of VMware:
VMware is now hosting a second, closed-doors keynote just about cloud computing, where hopefully the three concepts above will be further defined.
In less than one hour Paul Maritz, the VMware CEO, will be on stage to start the VMworld 2009.
This year there are 12,500 attendees, slightly less than last year, but definitively an amazing result considering the economic conditions.
A number of demos are highly expected from the audience. One for sure is the software implementation of the PCoIP remote protocol that VMware is developing with Teradici.
Another is the client hypervisor that will compete with the Citrix Xen Client expected later this year.
Tod Nielsen is on stage.
Nielsen is one of the first Microsoft veteran that joined VMware this year as the new COO.
Every single move, word, joke or smile he has on stage is 100% Microsoft style, which neatly breaks with the usual style of VMware keynotes.
Nielsen’s introduction is about the Fortune 1000 customers that are not using VMware technologies, only 30, and about the company’s goal: energize and save.
Paul Maritz is on stage.
This is the second VMworld keynote for the former Microsoft executive who replaced the VMware founder and CEO Diane Greene in July 2008.
His first keynote last September was entirely dedicated to the new focus that the company has on cloud computing. We’ll see if this year the message will be exactly the same.
This Friday Forbes unveiled the upcoming launch of vCloud Express, a VMware initiative to accelerate the adoption of vSphere a cloud computing platform.
Now it’s the eWEEK’s turn to ruin another VMworld surprise: VMware Go, a free web management service for ESXi.
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The Web-based service automates the installation and configuration of VMware’s freely downloadable ESXi hypervisor, VMware ESXi.VMware Go will enable SMB customers to “fly through the ESXi setup process with just a few mouse clicks,” Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s vice president of product marketing for servers, told eWEEK.
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VMware Go will be made available as a beta offering on Aug. 31, 2009 to customers at a special Web. It is scheduled to become generally available in Q4 2009, Balkansky said.
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Earlier this week Amazon announced its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, a segmented version of its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) that is accessible only through a VPN connection.
There were at least a couple of reasons to launch VPC right now: sure, it is the 3rd anniversary of EC2, but most of all it’s the week before VMworld, the VMware conference that this year is going to have a major focus on cloud computing.
Both Xen.org and VMware will in fact launch two new initiatives called Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and VMware vCloud Express.
XCP will be a set of tools, of course distributed as open source, to extend the capability of the hypervisor as a cloud computing platform. And it will be supported by all the members of the Xen.org advisory board members, including Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle.
So the Xen Cloud Platform will merge together new and existing pieces of software in a single package even if it’s not clear at the moment what will be part of the platform exactly.
When VMware introduced its new cloud computing mantra one year ago, there were at least four reactions: hope, skepticism, irritation and confusion.
Some truly hoped that the data center could become as easy and ubiquitous as the power grid in just a couple of years, as VMware predicted.
Others expressed skepticism (include this site among them) about the chances that such revolution could happen in such short time frame and that it would be of any relevance for the SMBs.
Google got irritated because the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz started his new career by saying that the search giant approach to cloud computing is fundamentally wrong.
And others were just confused by the introduction of public and private clouds.
The public cloud VMware was talking about is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture, where virtual machines are provisioned on demand and the customers are billed on a pay-per-use model (it’s much more than that, but these are the two fundamental aspects that everybody keeps in mind).
But what is a private cloud exactly?
Is it a new way, cooler way to call the already cool enough data-center-in-a-box concept where hardware virtualization still is the fundamental piece?
Or is it a cloud-in-a-cloud solution, where housing meets virtualization?
Or something even different?
