Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
The formal launch of the new Red Hat virtualization offering based on KVM is just a few days away.
Excluding the products names, so far most Red Hat didn’t disclose any detail about the platform that will replace its previous implementation of Xen.
For the impatient ones, Mark Wilson published some concrete information about this product that are worth a check (our emphasis):
At the end of April, a Russian business magazine reported about a $11M investment that Parallels secured from Almaz Fund, and unveiled how the company contemplated an IPO one or two years ago.
Now Bloomberg further confirms the interest to launch an IPO, reporting the words of Serguei Beloussov, the Parallels founder and CEO:
Parallels Chief Executive Officer Serguei Beloussov says he wants to take the software maker public in about two years, striving to stay independent.
More interestingly, Beloussov reveals how IBM and Microsoft started a discussion to acquire his company:
Companies including Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. have “casually” approached him about an acquisition, Beloussov said in an interview last week.
VMLogix is a US startup that entered the virtual lab automation market in October 2006.
Its segment is reasonably empty, with just a bunch of competitors. Unfortunately among those competitors there is VMware and its vCenter Lab Manager.
Despite that, VMLogix always managed to provide valuable features in a timely fashion, like the support for Linux, the support for heterogeneous virtual environments (something that VMware killed as soon as it acquired Akimbi in 2006) or the support for the Amazon Xen-based cloud infrastructure EC2.
Embotics is a Canadian startup that entered the VM lifecycle management market exactly two years ago.
The alliance programs that the company joined over time, with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, clarify the intention to become the product of choice in heterogeneous virtual environments.
The acquisition of the former Vice President of Global Alliances at PlateSpin, further confirms that Embotics doesn’t want to stick with VMware only, and this makes perfectly sense considering that VMware has its own products in this market segment.
Earlier this week the company released version 3.0 of its flagship product V-Commander.
The product is now rearranged in a new modular architecture, with three modules that customers can license individually to incrementally upgrade the platform:
In December 2007 PlateSpin launched Forge, a hardware appliance which embeds VMware VI 3.x and uses the company’s P2V migration technology to simplify the way customers do disaster recovery.
The company updated the platform to version 2.0 exactly one year ago, months after being acquired by Novell.
Earlier this month Forge reached version 2.5, introducing the following features:
Leostream just released a new version of its Connection Broker.
In version 6.0 the company introduced the full support for Citrix XenServer. With this new 6.2, Leostream completely focus on Microsoft technologies.
Connection Broker 6.2 in fact fully supports Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as backend hypervisors, plus Windows 7 as virtual desktop guest OS and RDP 7.0 as remote protocol.
On top of that the new version of this product adds a number of interesting new features:
Warning: the following post is not related to any product release, vendors alliances, or any other industry news that we normally cover on virtualization.info.
It’s just a commentary on the (bad) public relation and marketing practices that are so common before the big trade show that VMworld is.
Last year VMworld 2008 broke any attendance record in the history of VMware, surpassing 14,000 attendees and over 200 vendors sponsoring and exhibiting at the event.
It was a huge exposure opportunity even for the smallest startup in the market and so all the PR firms that were involved literally overflooded with news the influencers (analysts, journalists, bloggers, independent technical evangelists, etc.) that were supposed to attend the conference or at least cover the event on their websites.
Of course this activity also implied firing the PR announcements online, bombarding every poor customer that subscribes Google News or other news alert systems for specific keywords about virtualization.
This is a common practice before a big trade show, but it doesn’t mean that it is a good one.
In May, during its main conference Synergy, Citrix announced the existence of an open source virtual switch that may compete with the Nexus 1000V that Cisco made available for VMware vSphere.
In early June, the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby shared a very few details about it, but so far most of the virtualization community doesn’t know much about it. But the official website about the project quietly appeared online now: the product is called Open vSwitch and is released under the Apache 2 open source license.
The first release (which is almost complete and available online as well) is designed to support distributed networking (like the Cisco Nexus 1000V) and includes the following features:
In June Xen reached version 3.4 introducing out-of-the-box support for Hyper-V and a series of enhancements that will make the platform a good client hypervisor.
At the beginning of this month Xen further progressed to version 3.4.1, which is just a maintenance release, but the truly interesting things are in the Xen 4.0 roadmap (with our emphasis):
The conference VMworld is just one week away and this year VMware’s competitors seem to have additional reasons to start a controversy and disturb the event.
The topic of the day is the size of the hypervisor footprint, which equals to a certain attack surface and has a relevance when you try to estimate the overall security level of a platform.
This is an area where VMware always claimed a neat superiority over Microsoft because the primary version of Hyper-V comes with a full copy of Windows Server 2008 as its parent partition.
VMware believes this is a major selling point at the point that it is highlighted on the corporate website.
Microsoft never addressed the critique before a couple of weeks ago, when it published an interesting analysis (part 1, part 2 and part 3) of what happens to the hypervisors footprint after a round of patches.
On its website, VMware compares its lightweight ESXi, the hypervisor version without the Console Operating System (COS), against the full version of Hyper-V. For Microsoft a more fair comparison should be between ESXi and its lightweight Hyper-V Server.
Nonetheless the company prepared three different analysis (only including critical and security patches):