Year: 2009

Update: The article below has been temporary removed after that some VMware distributors and the company itself have indicated how some statements are far from reality.
We removed the article to have time to further investigate and correct our mistakes, if any, without spreading false information.

We can confirm now that it’s not true that a VI 3 Standard license plus a-la-carte vMotion and Storage vMotion can’t be moved to a vSphere 4 Standard license while retaining those features.
VMware clarifies this with a footnote at this URL:

Customers with current Support & Subscription contracts who purchased VMware VMotion as an add-on to VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation or VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard also received VMware Storage VMotion. These customers retain both VMware VMotion and VMware Storage VMotion when they receive VMware vSphere Standard.

But it’s also true that a number of customers were told by VMware sales representatives that their only upgrade choice was to move on the vSphere Enteprise Plus, as reported in the original article below.
We have full details about these customers, that asked to stay anonymous, and yes, they are outraged.

We sincerely apologize for not better checking with VMware before publishing this story.

Never like now VMware has hit a low level of popularity because of its pricing strategy.
The virtualization leader grew steadily in the enterprise market to the point that its products are now adopted in 100% of Fortune 100 and 95% of Fortune 500, but it has been considered out of range by most SMBs so far.
The new licensing upgrade scheme introduced with vSphere 4.0 is further compromising the already delicate relationship.

There are main two problems with that.

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In the last two years pretty much every major vendor in the IT industry rushed to develop a rich VDI portfolio and roadmap. Each of them did its best to acquire promising startups, to announce new and highly efficient remote desktop protocols, to sign partnerships with OEMs for the next generation thin client.

From VMware to Citrix, from Sun to Quest, from HP to Verizon.
Even TV vendors like LG want to be part of the VDI game.
Everyone but Microsoft.

So far Microsoft preferred to stay under the radar as much as possible, even when they acquired Calista Technologies in January 2008, a small startup able to offload the remote client from the task of rendering any sort of multimedia resource; even when they announced some basic desktop brokering capabilities in the imminent Windows Server 2008 R2.

Now some concrete details are finally emerging and the Microsoft VDI strategy seems more interesting than expected:

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Ten days ago Red Hat announced that its new, much awaited, virtualization offering based on KVM was in beta and that the beta program was oversubscribed.

The reality is that, as far as we know, Red Hat never announced the beta program or the details of its implementation of the Qumranet technology (acquired in September 2008), and never gave the opportunity to sign for it to the general public.
Still today there not a single bit of information about what Red Hat did in one year and a half after dropping Xen in favor of KVM.

Red Hat will take another two months to finally tell the world as LeMagIT revealed earlier today: the general availability of the new virtualization platform is in fact planned for September 1, 2009, which means during the VMware VMworld 2009.
Too bad that this year VMware is not particularly happy to have competitors showing their solutions on the exhibit floor.

As part of its renovation plan, in October 2008 PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies) acquired the software division of a popular UK consulting firm, Xtravirt.
The company rebranded the Xtravirt tools and offered part of them for free in March, hoping to attract a large number of prospects that could be also interested in its flagship backup product called esXpress.

After a break to release a long overdue new version of esXpress, PHD is back on its plan to distribute for free the Xtravirt tools and launches Patch Downloader 6.0, a product that automates the download of VMware ESX patches in a file repository of choice.

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Yesterday in a public webinar VMware announced the upcoming release of Studio 2.0, the environment to author OVF packages that the company launched in September 2008.

The new VMware Studio 2.0 is remarkable in terms of new features.

The first most important is that it will support the new generation of virtual appliances (VAs) that VMware calls vApps.
The vApp is a concept that VMware introduced for the first time at VMworld 2008, and it implies a new metadata layer wrapping the virtual appliance what describes the virtual hardware, performance and security requirements to run the virtual machine.

Once created the virtual appliance or the vApp, Studio 2.0 will be able to deliver it on VMware Workstation, Server (both 1.x and 2.x) and of course VI/vSphere.
The most interesting thing about this last interaction is that Studio can push (and update at a later time) the new VA/vApp through VMware Update Manager (VUM).

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With the first post in a new corporate blog, VMware unveiled the existence of Code Central, an online facility where its community can upload and exchange scripts for the various VMware SDKs.

VMware has a special interest in seeing what kind of automation the virtualization professionals want to have now that its vCenter Orchestrator has been released as a free module of vSphere 4.0.

Orchestrator is powered by the technology that VMware acquired by Dunes Technologies in September 2007.
The Dunes framework is powerful and flexible enough to become the foundation for new products, from a VDI connection broker to a virtual lab automation manager.
In most cases the customers will use it to automate specific aspects of their environments, but once in a while a Code Central public script become popular enough to give the input to VMware for a new, non-free product.

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While opening the beta program of the next Fusion major release, VMware also keeps updating the current product which now reaches version 2.0.5 (build 173382).

Fusion 2.0.5 is mainly for bug fixes but it also extends the support to the following host and guest operating systems:

• Host OSes
  Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit only, experimental)
• Guest OSes
  Mac OS X 10.5 (on new Intel Xeon 5500 and 3500 Series)
  Ubuntu 9.04
  Mac OS X 10.6 Server codename Snow Leopard (32bit only experimental)

Citrix just release the first minor update for its P2V/V2V migration tool XenConvert 2.0.

This version introduces the support for OVF contents created with VMware vSphere 4, plus it enhances support for OVF and VMDK files created with other VMware products, including VI 3.x, Workstation 6.5.2, Studio 1.0, OVF Tool 0.9, Converter 3.0.3 and 4.0.

The product is free and available here.

Citrix is working to raise the interest around its commercial offer called Essentials now that XenServer is free of charge.

As part of the effort the company is releasing a free 6-hours training online course (CEX-100-1W).

The course includes the following topics:

Read more

The Xen.org community and Citrix are arranging an interesting event for late June in Berlin called Xen Direction Europe 2009.

Compared to the well-known Xen Summits, this seems easier to understand for somebody that is not a Xen hacker (read: it contains more marketing material) but no less interesting as the agenda includes some presentations that are probably worth the visit like:

• Virtualization – it’s not just for servers anymore Intel
• Highly available virtual infrastructures based on Xen Lufthansa Systems
• HXEN: Hosted Xen Hypervisor Project Citrix

Of course the last one is especially interesting as it will cover the progress of the new hosted VMM architecture that will power a Citrix product called XenWorkstation, at least accordingly to the virtualization.info sources.

One session promises to be very funny (underline is ours):
Virtualization of mission-critical deployments Oracle with Xen: Oracle users choose Oracle VM
Like the Oracle users have a real chance.