Year: 2009

In May Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron. Just five weeks later the database giant fired most of the employees, terminated the partner program and stopped selling new licenses (with a few exceptions).
The only option offered to Virtual Iron customers is to drop their suddenly-in-end-of-live hypervisor and jump on Oracle VM, which is free but certainly has different capabilities and not a single tool to simplify the migration.

Virtual Iron never detailed how many customers they have, but it’s safe to assume that most of them, if not all, are in the SMB segment. And considering that Virtual Iron had a $3.4 million revenue in 2008, it’s likely that its customers are no more than 3000 as The Register is suggesting (more probably much less than that).

For some reasons these customers must be special if VMware decided to announce a notable 40% discount to those ones that will move to vSphere.
The initiative sounds good but uncommon for VMware, which never took too much care of the SMB market in its history.

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It’s not a secret that virtual machines live migration is perceived by most virtualization professionals as a must-have feature.
After trying to dismiss its value for months, even Microsoft is putting a major effort in promoting it now that its upcoming Hyper-V R2 finally offers it.

The problem with VM live migration is that it doesn’t work beyond a single network segment where two or more virtualization hosts share the same SAN space.
The first vendor that will be able to offer such feature over a WAN link will change forever the way we think disaster recovery.

VMware is working on long-distance VMotion since a while now, but the last time we checked (at the VMworld 2008 analyst briefing) the company was skeptical about delivering the technology in a short timeframe (like 12-18 months) because of complex technical issues.
Nonetheless a long-distance VMotion was demonstrated just last week with the help of Cisco.

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This is not exactly the best possible week for VMware which is receiving “negative attention” from technical and financial analysts.

David Cappuccio, Managing Vice President at Gartner, wrote on his corporate blog how the current VMware market position reminds the Novell leadership of the early ‘90., and if VMware, like Novell, is doomed to be smashed by the Microsoft techno-commodities. 
It’s not a new speculation: plenty of others pictured this scenario years ago, as soon as Microsoft announced its plan to deliver a free hypervisor as part of the operating system.
Nonetheless, the fact that a Gartner VP is wondering about the topic out aloud is remarkable.

Elsewhere, Reuters is reporting how only 2 of 31 Wall Street analysts who follow VMware stock advise investors to buy it at current prices, as the shares are expected to drop much as soon as Microsoft will start distributing the RTM of Hyper-V R2 next week.
Analysts project revenue growth of 2 percent to $1.9 billion this year, with per-share profit excluding items falling to 91 cents from $1.05, according to Reuters Estimates.

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A couple of weeks ago VMware published a benchmark analysis titled Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 4.

It assesses the performance of a SQL Server 2008 OLTP database hosted by a vSphere 4.0 virtual machine with 8 vCPUs and 58GB vRAM, and compares it against the performance of a physical system:

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VMware, Cisco and EMC are really putting a massive effort in promoting the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform that Cisco unveiled in March.

One of the most interesting things produced in this effort is the whitepaper that Cisco just published on his website: Scalability Study for Deploying VMware View on Cisco UCS and EMC V-Max Systems.

The triad managed to setup and document a VDI environment based on VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 4 with 640 virtual desktops (Windows XP with 512MB vRAM and 8GB vHD), served by four UCS blades (160 seats per blade), each with 96GB RAM and the new Intel Xeon 5500 Quad Core CPUs.
Which is four times what was achieved on Dell M600 blades.

The description of the environment is extremely detailed and goes deep into the configuration setup and the performance analysis. It’s really worth a read.

Thanks to Virtual Geek for the news.

Now we are talking. Today Altor Networks releases today the third generation of its Virtual Firewall (VF) which features a brand new kernel that fully leverages the new VMware VMsafe APIs.

The choice to rewrite the core part of the product will probably raise concerns about its stability, but there was a good reason to do so.

VMware offers two modes to use the VMsafe network APIs, called Slow-Path and Fast-Path.
By using the Slow-Path, a security vendor asks for a copy of the virtual traffic inside a dedicated VMsafe virtual appliance, plugging into the virtual switches that connect the protected VMs.
This approach is slow (it obliges to perform context switching) and implies some potential risks  as the VMsafe virtual appliance itself could be targeted for an attack.
By using the Fast-Path instead, a security vendor can process the virtual traffic from inside the ESX vKernel, in a truly transparent mode.
Unfortunately the Fast-Path integration is harder to implement but pays off in terms of performance, flexibility and security, so different vendors are using both modes to deliver a hybrid solution.

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We still don’t know anything about the new Red Hat virtualization portfolio based on KVM and Qumranet VDI technologies, despite a (claimed) oversubscribed beta program that nobody was able to access.

A key piece of this offering of course is Red Hat Enterprise Linux which was expected to drop Xen in favor of KVM as the default virtualization engine.
The release notes of the just announced beta of RHEL 5.4 confirm this.

The KVM version included in RHEL 5.4 will support RHEL 3.x, 4.x and 5.x guest OSes along with Windows XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008.
All of them are supported in 32 and 64bits, and each OS will be able to run without installing any para-virtualized (PV) driver, despite these components will be available as part of the distribution. 
No mention of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 which will hit the RTM next week.

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The early stage startup Virtual Computer entered the virtualization market in September 2008 but didn’t unveil anything about its new product before December.

The fact that the company was founded by Alex Vasilevsky, the Virtual Iron founder and former CTO, and the fact that it’s trying to revolutionize the desktop management using a client hypervisor based on Xen, is enough to mark Virtual Computer as interesting.
Citrix must have the same opinion as it partially funded the startup round B ($15 million).

The first version of their flagship product NxTop went out in April, featuring some high performance 3D graphic inside a virtual machine.
The new NxTop 1.1 entered in beta last week and featuring a new thing called System Workbench.

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Last week Sun released the third generation of its hosted virtual machine monitor (VMM) called VirtualBox, acquired from the German company innotek in February 2008.

Sun put a serious effort on this product, launching two major updates in less than 18 months, plus several minor releases.
Sometimes the company strategy is concerning as it seems to suggest that its hosted VMM can compete with a bare-metal VMM like ESX, XenServer or Hyper-V, or that its product can run a virtual desktop infrastructure. Nonetheless Sun has executed very well on the engineering side of this project.

The new version 3.0 introduces the following new features:

• support for up to 32 vCPUs (as long as you have an Intel VT or AMD-V powered CPU)
• support for OpenGL 2.0 on all guest OSes (Windows, Linux and Solaris)
• experimental support for Direct3D 8 and 9 for Windows guest OSes

For now VirtualBox remains open source and free of charge for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X. The customers are still wondering if this will continue after Oracle will have completed the Sun acquisition.

5nine is a brand new startup that entered the virtualization market less than one month ago.
It launched a capacity planning tool for Hyper-V that goes beyond the planning phase, actually executing the P2V migration.

Rather than trying to capitalize the attention obtained with its first product, 5nine launches a second one, called Virtual Firewall, once again for Hyper-V.

So basically this startup goes solo in the Microsoft territory, while most security firms are competing to release an innovative product for VMware environments that could use the VMsafe APIs.

The heavy critics expressed to those vendors before they started to leverage VMsafe, applies to 5nine as well: delivering a software firewall inside a virtual machine doesn’t make it a virtual firewall by any mean. At the best, the performance of such product become “virtual” as it’s totally unpredictable how many virtual machines will compete to access the physical resources of the host. 
And this of course applies to 5nine, to Microsoft (which supports its ISA Server inside a Hyper-V VM) and to any other vendor, until Hyper-V will provide a VMsafe-like approach to transparently interact with the hypervisor kernel without interacting with the virtual networking and the guest operating systems.

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