Year: 2009

The new, much discussed Unified Computing System (UCS) is not here yet, but it’s clear that Cisco is very serious about becoming a major player in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

To further clarify its intention, the company announced that it just hired Christofer Hoff as the new Director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions.

Hoff comes from Unisys were he was the Chief Security Architect, but he’s mostly known because of his tireless evangelism activity on his personal blog, declared a Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info.
We had the pleasure to see him in action as speaker and panelist during the Virtualization Congress 2009 US, the virtualization.info’s independent conference about virtualization technologies.

Cisco has the appeal and the pockets to attract other major talents in the virtualization space, and build the dream team it needs to become a relevant and trusted vendor in a market that is so different from the networking one.

At his annual conference Synergy, Citrix unveiled its plans to release an open source distributed virtual switch that may compete with the just released Cisco Nexus 1000V for VMware vSphere.

A few details were disclosed about it, like the fact that it will be available for both Xen and KVM, and that it will support advanced networking management features (Netflow, SPAN, RSPAN, and ERSPAN) and some needful security features (ACLs and 802.1x).

Anyway we could be very near the full launch of the project as last week Simon Crosby, CTO of Management and Virtualization Division at Citrix, used his Twitter account to calls for beta testers of the “XenServer distributed virtual switch”.

The few vendors busy in the virtual lab automation space (which include VMware, Surgient, VMLogix, Skytap and the almost died StackSafe) may soon have a big, big problem called Microsoft.

After wasting years not leveraging its huge developers community to spread virtualization in every corner of the world, the company is finally moving on.

Announced in November 2008, the integration between Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Hyper-V 1.0/2.0 for virtual lab automation scenarios is now a reality called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

The product just entered the beta 1 phase and has the potential to become a huge hit in the .NET world.

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As virtualization.info readers now know by now, Microsoft will release the Hyper-V 2.0 RTM as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, both expected in late July for partners, and in late October for customers.

So it’s not really surprising to see that System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 hit the Release Candidate status during the weekend.
What is surprising is to see that the new build sports a big number of improvements in the storage area, like the support for Sanbolic and Symantec/Veritas solutions or the all new Quick Storage Migration.

Anyway at this point the product should be feature complete, so this is the list of the new capabilities that we’ll see in the RTM:

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Just last week virtualization.info pointed out the fact that Surgient is exposing some details about its health on the corporate website, unveiling that it has over 70 customers after five years of activity in the virtual lab automation space.

More information is provided now by Stateman Business Blog, which reports a 2007 revenue for the Austin company equal to $1 million per month.
The business publication also reveals that today Surgient had to cut 11 jobs to keep the costs low during the financial crisis.

After securing its second round of funds in May, VKernel is ready to grow and attack the market with a more articulated sales structure.

To do so the startup hired a new Vice President of Product Management and Marketing: Kevin Conklin.

Conklin comes from Mazu Networks, acquired by Riverbed Technology, where he was VP of Marketing as well.

As mentioned in our coverage of the vSphere 4.0 release, the only product of the VMware portfolio that currently supports the new platform is Converter.

VMware upgraded it to version 4.0.1 (build 161434) last month exactly for this purpose.

In details the new product provides support for:

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The long awaited new virtualization platform that Symantec is developing since over one year, Endpoint Virtualization Suite (EVS), is still in Release Candidate phase, but its general availability may be imminent.

The company has in fact released the SDK for one of the suite components: Workspace Streaming, the application streaming technology that Symantec acquired from AppStream in April 2008.

Jacob Hammons, a Technical Writer at Symantec, clarifies some details about the SDK:

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VMware has recently released a new minor version of its free (if you are a VMware partner) capacity planning tool simply called Capacity Planner.

The new 2.7 version (build 32117) includes a long list of new features:

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Today the hardware virtualization subsidiary of Quest, Vizioncore, updates two products of its growing portfolio: vOptimizer Pro and vFoglight.

The first one, a technology that Quest acquired from Invirtus in July 2007, now reaches version 2.2 and introduces:

• Infrastructure Scanning
  Locating and determining the amount of unused virtual storage across the virtual infrastructure enables the customer to see exactly how much storage is being wasted. Furthermore, the product can estimate the total potential savings gained from reclaiming wasted storage and generate a report for use within the business
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0
• Support for Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (32/64bit)

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