Year: 2009

VMware smashes the Google approach on cloud computing

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In February 2009, during his first VMworld Europe conference, the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz decided to provoke Google on a terrain where the search giant is specially sensitive: cloud computing.
By saying that “…they don’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware” he ignited a serious reaction.

Considering the audience that Google can reach and the credibility it deserves, it’s safe to say that now VMware has an issue.
Now that cloud computing is the new mantra in Palo Alto, there’s no chance for VMware to let Google pass on this one.

So today Dan Chu, Vice President, Emerging Products and Markets, published a long answer to Google on the VMware executive blog, covertly suggesting that the search giant should do a reality check instead of trying to establish a monopoly (emphasis is ours):

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Citrix will offer an open source virtual switch for Xen and KVM

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At the end of April, Citrix announced the upcoming features of XenServer 5.5 and Essentials for XenServer / Hyper-V 5.5, opening the public beta program.

Last week during the Synergy conference, the company clarified which features will be included in the free XenServer and which ones will be part of Essentials:

XenServer (free) Essentials (non free, for XenServer and Hyper-V)
Consolidated Backup
(pluggable architecture that allows 3rd party vendors to perform incremental, in-guest, file and image backups of virtual machines)		 Workload balancing
(star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance)
New XenConvert
(V2V migration from VMware VMDK to Microsoft VHD format and support for OVF format)		 StorageLink integration
(native standards-based support for several storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel)
Active Directory integration Support for 3rd party hypervisors in Virtual Lab Management component
(the OEM’ed VMLogix LabManager)
Enhanced Search inside GUI  

Citrix also announced the general availability date, June 16, and the recommended price for Essentials: $2,500 per server, regardless of the number of processors.

But the less the most interesting feature has yet to come: a pluggable, open source virtual switch for Xen

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How long before Amazon moves from Xen to XenServer on EC2?

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It doesn’t matter if you are a loyal customer of VMware, Citrix or Microsoft. Anytime one of these three vendors (or any other in the market) mentions its effort in the cloud computing space using virtualization the comparison term is Amazon.

Amazon has been the first to develop a general purpose cloud computing infrastructure and offer it to the general public. The company launched the (beta) service in August 2006, adopting the open source hypervisor Xen as virtualization engine of choice.
So far their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is the biggest and most mature Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture existing on the market.

During the last three years Citrix acquired XenSource, the leading company for the Xen project, and released the commercial implementation of Xen, XenServer, free of charge.
Amazon doesn’t reveal anything about its Xen implementation, but it’s same to assume that the company engineers had to develop a lot of tools and features on top of Xen.
Now the company can have for free enterprise management, virtual machines live migration, resource sharing, integrated storage management and, at the same time, can count on the enterprise support that Citrix now offers.
This must be a tempting proposition to lower the EC2 maintenance costs.

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Why Cisco is using KVM and not just VMware

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In the past months virtualization.info highlighted several times how Cisco is silently using KVM as an alternative virtualization platform to VMware.
We always wondered why, considering the investment that Cisco made on VMware.

Now, finally we have an answer to give: Cisco invested in Qumranet too.

Qumranet is the startup that developed and maintained KVM up to the moment it was acquired by Red Hat.
And that’s why Red Hat had a minor but very relevant position during the launch of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) despite its virtualization offering is pretty weak now.

The fact that Cisco invested in Qumranet is not widely known and we had to admit that even virtualization.info overlooked this key information so far.
How the investment links Cisco to Red Hat is not clear but it’s easy to guess that the upcoming Red Hat new virtualization portfolio based on KVM will have an early chance to be bundled with UCS.

Now VirtualLogix, the mobile virtualization startup where Cisco invested along with Intel, is the next most interesting company to watch.

Oracle is not happy enough with Sun, now buys Virtual Iron

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Less than one month ago Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, closing one of the most strategic deal of the last ten years.
With Java, Solaris, MySQL, Oracle also inherited the entire Sun xVM virtualization portfolio.

Oracle has its own Xen-based hypervisor, Oracle VM Server, and its own management console, Oracle VM Manager, but it’s reasonable to believe that these two products will merge with Sun xVM Server and Ops Center in the coming months.

Any customer at this point would assume that Oracle has enough resources, engineers and developed code to release a strong virtualization product against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.
It seems that this is not the case.

Today the company announced a second, major acquisition in the virtualization space: Virtual Iron, for an undisclosed sum.  
This confirms the rumors that virtualization.info reported in March.

So far Virtual Iron raised $65 million in five rounds of investment, one of the highest sum ever granted to a virtualization vendor.
In the last couple of quarters the company reported a healthy growth: 130% revenue growth in Q4 2008 and 65% growth in Q1 2009.
During the last year anyway, many of the original executives left the company, including the founder and CTO Alex Vasilevsky who is now heading the startup called Virtual Computer.

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Citrix Project Independence is now XenClient and will be free

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Citrix doesn’t seem happy enough to give away a free server hypervisor (XenServer) and its management console (XenCenter). Now the company wants to give away for free also that client hypervisor that will be so important in next generation virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI).

During his opening keynote at the Citrix Synergy 2009, Mark Templeton announced that the much discussed Project Independence (developed in collaboration with Intel) is now called XenClient, and that Citrix will offer it for free.
Duding the second day keynote, Ian Pratt showed XenClient in action on a PC and, with much surprise on an Apple hardware. It’s not clear what kind of agreements exist between Citrix and Apple but so far the Cupertino company never allowed a type-1 VMM (aka hypervisor) to run on its computers.
The complete recording of the demo is available here.

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Virtualization Congress 2009: May 7 sessions and panels

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Tomorrow will be the last day of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress and we have a lot of great sessions and top notch speakers to present.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that you’ll see tomorrow here at the MGM Grand:

9.00am – 9.50am

10.00am – 10.50am

11.00am – 11.50am

1.00pm – 1.50pm

5.00pm – 5.50pm

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Virtualization Congress 2009: May 6 sessions and panels

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The first day of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress is just ended and so we are free to focus on what will come next here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that we’’ll have tomorrow, after the Citrix Synergy keynote:

11.30am – 12.20am

2.00pm – 2.50pm

3.00pm – 3.50pm

4.00pm – 4.50pm

5.00pm – 5.50pm

Be sure to check the rest of the agenda to see the other sessions and panel that will take place on May 7.

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Virtualization Congress 2009: May 5 sessions and panels

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The virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress will begin in just one day here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that we’’ll have tomorrow, after the Citrix Synergy keynote:

2.30pm – 3.20pm

3.30pm – 4.20pm

4.30pm – 5.20pm

Be sure to check the rest of the agenda to see the other sessions and panel that will take place on May 6 and 7.

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

EMC attacks Oracle on its VMware support policy

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More than one year and a half ago Oracle has broken its happy marriage with VMware, announcing its own hypervisor and clarifying that its software is not supported on ESX or any other 3rd party virtualization platform.
As a matter of fact the new support policy that Oracle introduced obliges its customers to adopt Oracle VM Server or give up virtualization (here’s a very recent and deep analysis of the support policy provided by an Oracle professional).

At that time the public reaction of VMware was firm but polite, expressed in a long document that explains why Oracle products run well on ESX.
Probably VMware didn’t react more aggressively in the hope to recover the relationship with the database vendor, knowing how critical is Oracle for its audience. But so far there’s no data about how many customers really followed the VMware suggestion deciding to virtualize anyway.

Now, someone at EMC, the VMware parent company, must have decided that it’s finally time to take a strong position on this topic.

For the first time in public to our knowledge, not one but two high-level executives at EMC decided to comment the Oracle support policy: Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance, and Chuck Hollis, Vice President, Global Marketing CTO, used their personal blogs, the same day, to attack Oracle and incite the customers to rebel:

Chad Sakac:

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