Year: 2009

Red Hat embraced hardware virtualization a long time ago by adopting Xen as part of its Enterprise Linux operating system.
Despite that the company never penetrated the market enough to become a serious competitor for VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.
In the attempt to increase its chances to become a key player in the virtualization space, Red Hat is making some courageous choices.

First, it replaced Xen with KVM, becoming the first major vendor to sell and support this relatively new platform inside enterprise (IBM supports KVM too, but just for VDI and just for a very specific software stack).

Now, right before launching its VDI offering, Red Hat has open sourced the SPICE remote desktop protocol, acquired from Qumranet in September 2008. And this is a major step, one of the few that could make a difference.

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Microsoft is definitively preparing to launch Azure as an alternative to Amazon EC2, the RackSpace Cloud, both based on Xen, and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings based on VMware vSphere.

virtualization.info spotted some early signs at the end of September, and the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie briefly confirmed the plan a couple of weeks ago.
NetApp seems to be involved too at some level.

Another hint about what the IaaS cloud strategy will be arrives as an official announcement released a couple of days ago: the Windows Azure group and the Windows Server & Solutions group are now merged into a new Server & Cloud Division (SCD), which is part of the Server & Tools Business organization led by Bob Muglia.

In details:

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On November 23 VMware released the first updated for its vSphere 4.0 platform. The patch is especially important if the customers are implementing or evaluating VDI because it introduces support for View 4.0, and for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 guest OSes.

Update 1 also introduced a Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool to recognize configuration issues and minimize the downtime during the upgrade.
Unfortunately it seems that the patch itself causes downtime and VMware had to re-release it the portion for ESX today:

We’ve released a new version of ESX 4.0 Update 1 that resolves the issue with the ESX 4.0 Update 1 install failing, timing out and resulting in the host entering an usable state.

The new version is called ESX 4.0 Update 1A.

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Yesterday Novell announced the future launch of two new products with the PlateSpin brand.

The first one, codename Atlantic, will be a self-service provisioning portal, while the second, codename Bluestar, will be a configuration management and monitoring solution.

Novell also plans to release another product, part of the ZENworks portfolio (which has been merged with the PlateSpin one twelve months ago), codenamed Workbench, a master repository and change/control system for workloads, from which they can be deployed on-demand to any environment.

With this move Novell is going to have a remarkable number of new competitors, considering the amount of startups and leading players that already saturate these segments.

If your major partner becomes your major competitor then its major competitor becomes your major partner. This is what VKernel must be thinking since the launch of VMware CapacityIQ.

Just two weeks ago the startup first released a free product called Capacity Modeler to attract more potential customers and show them the (claimed) superiority over CapacityIQ.
Now the company announces a new beta for its flagship Capacity Analyzer, stressing that it supports Microsoft Hyper-V. VKernel also clarifies that its other products will support Hyper-V as well.

It is not that the current strategy is turning VMware into a less independent vendor. It is that the current strategy is turning the VMware partners into a less dependent ecosystem.

A couple of months after releasing the whitepaper Designing an Enterprise XenDesktop Solution (for 10,000 VDI seats), which was focused on version 3.0, Citrix is back with another interesting document, this time on version XenDesktop 4.0.

This one, titled High Availability for Desktop Virtualization – Reference Architecture, is an architectural blueprint to build an end-to-end environment that is fault tolerant at several levels: at the virtual desktop hosting platform (aka the hypervisor) one, at the guest operating system delivery one and at the application/user environment delivery one.

The architecture involves the use of technologies like NetScaler, XenDesktop Roaming Users and XenServer Pools and XenMotion.

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In early October VMware released Site Recovery Manager 4.0 (it should be 2.0 actually, but the marketing aligned the numbering to vSphere 4.0).

On this new product the company recently published a 20-pages performance study called VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 Performance and Best Practices for Performance.

The paper details how the recovery time is impacted by different storage backend technologies, network latency, amount of protected VMs, recovery plan configuration and more.

Exactly one year ago IBM and Virtual Bridges announced a partnership to resell an end-to-end desktop virtualization solution based on KVM.
That solution includes VERDE, a subset of the Virtual Bridges VDI connection broker (Win4VDI) that only supports Linux guest OSes.

Eight months later, Virtual Bridges completely replaced Win4VDI with VERDE 2.0, introduced support for Windows guest OSes, and added a lightweight Linux distribution which features KVM which customers can install on clients.

Today the company releases version 3.0, which introduces several new features like:

• Capability to replicate a virtual desktop gold image across WAN links
• Integration of VoIP capabilities (Skype) into the client-side KVM platform
• Support for Microsoft Windows 7 virtual desktops
• Support for Apple Mac hardware

In October Microsoft launched a new product called Windows XP Mode to help its customers to migrate to Windows 7 more easily.
Windows XP Mode is a preconfigured and fully patched copy of Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 that can be downloaded and executed inside the Virtual PC copy that comes with Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

This new version of Virtual PC sports the seamless window capability, allowing to run XP and 7 applications side by side without caring too much about which one is virtualized.
Unfortunately it requires a CPU which has the Intel VT-x extension enabled so not every Microsoft customer can use it. For example the ones that own a Sony VAIO can’t.

A new startup called VMLite is trying to address this issue, allowing Microsoft customers to run the Windows XP Mode VM inside a customized version of the Sun (soon to be Oracle) VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE).

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Not like we didn’t see this coming. Today Microsoft and NetApp announces a three-year alliance on virtualization, cloud computing and storage management.
The pact includes joint product development, technical integration, sales and marketing activities.

Finally the Hyper-V enterprise users will have a solid alternative to Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) for virtual machines live backup when using the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) technology.

The two companies together will release architecture blueprints for disaster recovery with virtualization (like this one), snap-ins to manage the NetApp storage inside the Hyper-V console, management packs for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).
On top of this NetApp will work with the recently formed team that is working on the Microsoft Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, to be the storage partner of choice when Azure customers ask for private clouds solutions.

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