Year: 2009

A few hours ago the Microsoft virtualization management solution System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 hit the RTM.

As expected the RTM arrives just a few weeks after Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 were released to the Microsoft partners.

The most important new capability included in this release is the long awaited virtual machines live migration.
Anyway Microsoft surprised its audience in early June by adding other welcome features to the SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Candidate, like the Quick Storage Motion and the support for VMware port groups.

The Release Candidate should be considered feature complete but the company managed to squeeze a last unexpected thing to the RTM: the (partial) support for VMware vSphere 4.0.
Basically Microsoft supports the new VMware platform only for the same features that were available in VI3.5. Some of the new capabilities that VMware offers will be supported in a future update of SCVMM.

virtualization.info detailed the entire feature-set here.

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For a long time a number of contributors sponsored by Red Hat worked on a virtualization interface that could standardize the way hypervisors are managed, getting rid of the differences between vendors’ implementations.

The API is called libvirt and it’s around since early 2006.

Red Hat has a strong commitment on it, at the point that its imminent KVM-based virtualization offering is based on its, as announced in June 2008.
This is why the API is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) which allows the inclusion in any commercial product.

Through libvirt, a management platform running on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS or even Windows can already control both Xen, KVM, Sun VirtualBox, Parallels OpenVZ, QEMU, LXC and User Mode Linux (UML). But the best has yet to come.

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Red Hat is definitively preparing for the imminent launch of its new enterprise virtualization offering based on KVM and the Qumranet technologies acquired in September 2008.

A very important piece of the puzzle is how Windows guest operating systems will perform on the Red Hat implementation of KVM.
Most virtual machines on the planet runs Windows, so if Red Hat doesn’t shine here it will have nothing concrete to compete against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.

In mid-July the company gave a hint on how it plans to manage this aspect of its strategy: it released version 1.0 of its KVM para-virtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes under the open source GPLv2 license.

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In April Vizioncore launched a free extension for the PowerShell GUI that its parent company Quest offers since a long time: PowerGUI.

Dubbed Virtualization EcoShell, the Vizioncore tool is a powerful environment to develop and execute complex scripts, and leverage the PowerShell support that VMware offers in VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0.

Vizioncore is keen to facilitate the growth of a PowerShell community around virtualization because of its new interest in automation: awesome scripts and smart developers may end up working around its new vControl product.

Just last week the company released the beta of Virtualization EcoShell 1.1 which includes a number of new features:

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In April 2009 a new company called HyTrust entered the virtualization market with primary focus on access control and configuration management.

Earlier this month the startup released the first consistent update for its flagship product: Appliance 1.5.

This new version introduces:

• label-based policy enforcement 
  (each object inside the virtual infrastructure can receive one or more labels, labels are embedded to virtual machines even if they are migrated across multiple hosts, only the objects with same labels can interact with each other)
• two-factor authentication using RSA SecureID
  (for direct-to-host and vCenter management)
• support for VMware vSphere 4.0 (including ESXi 4.0)
• support for Cisco Nexus 1000V

Like for version 1.0, HyTrust offers a free version of its Appliance 1.5 which is capped to 3 ESX hosts.

During this August VMware released a round of minor updates for many products:

• vCenter Server 4.0 Patch 1
  This critical patch has been released for those customers that implemented VMware HA and their Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) utilize Class A addresses (see the related KnowledgeBase article).
• Workstation 6.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.
• ACE 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing and security patching: the version of Apache for Windows used by the ACE Management Server has been upgraded to 2.0.63.
• Player 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.

Exactly one year ago Surgient reported profitability after four years in the virtual lab automation market (the company was founded in 2003 but entered the market only in mid-2004).

A couple of months ago a business blog reported that the company scored $1M per month revenue in 2007.
Just a week before this information leaked, Surgient itself reported over 70 active customers.

The company secured $20M in July 2006, but its not clear if that was the first round of funding or not.
Anyway the company needs more cash as it secured $4.3M (only $3M made available at the moment) in a round led by Goldman Sachs, BlueStream Ventures and Crosslink Capital.

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In the last few weeks Veeam released a couple of updates for its products.

The most important is the nworks Management Pack 5.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007.
Veeam acquired nworks in June 2008 for an undisclosed sum.
Under the new control the nworks management suite received a major update (4.0) in December 2008 and now we have this new one.

This 5.0 release introduces two key things:

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At the beginning of this week VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million ($362M in cash and $58M in unvested stock and options).

The company tried to clarify the deal with a public presentation  hosted for its investors and an article published by Steve Herrod, the company CTO, on his corporate blog:

VMware has traditionally treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be running.

This is the largest acquisition in VMware’s history and the most complex to evaluate as it radically changes the company mission and market position.

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Yesterday Citrix announced that more than 10% of Global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated XenServer for production use in the last four months.

This seems to imply that these companies are actually using the Citrix hypervisor in production side-by-side with ESX, but the sentence may also mean that the product has been activated and there’s a plan to use it in production in future.
It doesn’t really matter: a 3rd party trusted entity has to confirm this market share increase before any conclusion can be drawn.

Anyway, if confirmed, it may be a bomb against the VMware fortress: it is a well-known fact that one of the biggest VI3.x selling points is its massive adoption in Fortune 100 (100%), Fortune 500 (98%) and Global Fortune 500 (95%) companies.

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