Year: 2009

A couple of weeks ago the VMware Performance Team released a new interesting paper about a virtual deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on vSphere 4.0 Release Candidate (build 140815).

The 16,000 mailboxes environment was distributed across 8 virtual machines (Windows Server 2003 R2, 14GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 20GB vHD and 2000 users each) served by a HP ProLiant DL 580 G5 server with 4 Quad-Core Intel Xeon X7350 @ 2.93GHz and 128GB RAM.

The backend storage was served by a NetApp FAS6030 array with 114 disks split into four aggregates (the data on was made of 40 disks).

VMware tested the same environment with Microsoft Exchange Load Generator (8-hours workday simulation) using a 4GB Fibre Channel connection, a 1GbE iSCSI connection and a 1GbE NFS connection.
Despite this major difference in the available bandwidth the three protocols performance are very similar:

Read more

Exactly two years ago Citrix announced the acquisition of XenSource, officially entering the server virtualization (with XenServer) and desktop virtualization (with XenDesktop) markets, in direct competition with the former partner VMware.

Citrix invested $500 million in this operation but spent the minimum possible effort to spread the word about its existence in the hardware virtualization universe.
Of course the relevance of XenSource in the open source world, the implications on the Xen project and the price paid for the startup, engaged the community for a while, but beyond that the company did almost nothing to change its image of terminal services / application delivery company into something different, that could attract a large number of competitors’ customers.

It is safe to say that for the first 18 months after the acquisition, the Citrix marketing didn’t take any major step in reposition the company as a real player in a market that was completely new before the arrival of XenSource folks.
So it doesn’t surprise much that most customers didn’t perceive (and still do not) XenServer as a serious alternative to VMware ESX.

Read more

After Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0, VMware launched yesterday another private beta, this time for its VDI solution View.

The new View 4.0 finally introduces the software-only implementation of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol.

VMware is working on a way to replace Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) since late 2007, when it joined the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) to work on a new standard called Net2Display that never came out.

Once clear that Net2Display couldn’t replace RDP anytime soon, VMware developed a two-phases plan to deliver a more efficient protocol for its VDI platform.
In phase one, the company signed an OEM agreement with the thin client vendor WYSE Technology, to use its TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) technologies.
In phase two, VMware started a co-development program with Teradici, to create a software-only version of its high-performance PCoIP protocol.

Read more

VMware is preparing to release a new version of its Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

When the company announced the product for the first time in September 2007, it was immediately clear how virtualization technologies have the potential to revolutionize the disaster recovery industry.
Then, after the SRM 1.0 release more than one year ago, the product raised a lot of interest among the customers and a strong support from the storage vendors.

At the beginning of July VMware started the private beta of the second release, dubbed Site Recovery Manager 4.0, as Mike Laverick revealed on the VMTN forums.
The new version was originally numbered 1.5 but VMware recently decided to rename it as 4.0, probably to sync with the vSphere version (and to gain some extra maturity points).

A public beta may be announced in time for VMworld 2009, or VMware may decide to keep it private until General Availability.
We’ll try to provide additional information about the new features that are included in SRM 4.0.

The biggest challenge when a customer embraces any form of virtualization is verifying that the ISVs support their products inside the virtual machines, the OS containers or the virtual layers of choice.
Without an official support statement, the ISVs may require to reproduce any technical issue experienced inside the virtualization platform also on a physical machine. And this is a costly and time-consuming process that is often impossible to complete.

The lack of ISVs support is pretty common when dealing with virtualization platform that are brand new or not widely adopted, like Oracle VM or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (which is based on KVM).
Compared to VMware ESX, Hyper-V still has a limited diffusion and the ISVs that official support the Microsoft hypervisor are not so many. But things may dramatically change very soon.

With a move that almost passed under the radar, Microsoft just reshaped its Windows Logo specifications in a way that ISVs are now obliged to support Hyper-V:

Read more

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft did something unique in its history: released some of its technology as open source, under the GPLv2 license.
Specifically, the company released as open source the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components, a set of para-virtualization drivers that improves the Linux guest OSes performance.

The official reason that Microsoft provided to justify this unprecedented behavior was the desire to improve the interoperability and the performance of Linux virtual machines. But immediately after the launch some behind-the-scene details emerged and revealed a completely different story.

Read more

Last week the authoritative news service of Dow Jones launched a bomb by reporting that Microsoft Hyper-V now has 24% of the virtualization market share.

The claims comes from Microsoft itself, specifically from Kevin Turner, the company COO, that said:

We launched our first product in October of this past year. From then till now, we gained 24 points of market share against a very, very formidable competitor.

VMware didn’t provide an official reply to Dow Jones, but answered to the virtualization.info inquiry by saying that there’s no evidence they are aware of to support this statement.

Read more

During his last earnings call the VMware CEO Paul Maritz didn’t just announce a 38% drop in profits and the hiring of several new executives, but also the company forecast for the VDI adoption.

It’s not a secret that VMware is pushing hard on VDI since April 2007, when it acquired the startup Propero and decided to compete against its former best partner Citrix and all the rest of the ecosystem that itself created in 2006.

So it’s surprising to hear Maritz saying that a serious adoption of VDI won’t happen before another one or two years.

The question was submitted by a Citi analyst during the earnings call, who asked to separate the hype from the reality. Maritz answered:

Read more

For a few months now virtualization.info has reported how VMware is accelerating the replacement of its executives in almost every department and in every region where it is present.

The last news about this topic is about the research of a second CTO, dedicated to the application and desktop virtualization business unit, but apparently there’s much more than that.

During the last earnings call, the VMware CEO Paul Maritz announced a few new remarkable hires:

Read more

At the end of July Citrix announced the financial results for Q2 2009.
Like VMware, also this company is managing well the worldwide financial crisis, keeping a flat revenue and a nice profit growth, but it’s still unclear how positive has been the release of XenServer for free. In details:

Citrix Q2 revenue is flat compared to Q2 2008, staying at $369M.
The new licenses revenue is down 15% while the license renewal revenue is up 9% along with technology services revenue (+3%) and the online services revenue (+18%).
In Americas Citrix gains 3% while in EMEA it loses 12% in revenue.

The company reports a 23% profits increase, up to $42.5M compared to $34.6M in Q2 2008.

Read more