Year: 2009

An unexpectedly quick answer came from Sun after the virtualization.info article titled Sun xVM Server may be indefinitely postponed now published last week.

On his corporate blog, Steve Wilson, the Sun Vice President of xVM, wrote a long post detailing how the company has decided to reconsider many aspects of the hypervisor design after the feedbacks received during the Early Availability program.

• Participants requested a “hands off” installation process that could be used to deploy the hypervisor to many servers quickly. The single-system install was “klunky” and not suited to an enterprise data-center.
• Participants requested migration capability for guests between hypervisor instances. Multi-host management was not an add-on option — it was a requirement for serious use.
• Participants requested more access to the underlying OpenSolaris instance to allow for more customization. While people appreciated having a wrapper “appliance” around the core Solaris instance, it was a problem having a totally custom OpenSolaris distro for xVM Server.
• Customers are now for more interested in larger “cloud” type deployments than smaller consolidation projects

Read more

Microsoft continues to tease about the upcoming server-side App-V product that is developing since a long time now.
The company hinted at it for the first time in September 2008, and then again in March 2009, but so far there are no official details about the product features or its roadmap.

Despite that the company showed a 5 minutes demo of it at MMS 2009 last week.

This may be the first application virtualization product ever used for server workloads so it’s clear that Microsoft wants to be extra careful about it.
At the same time it’s clear that the company may want to release it as soon as possible, attacking VMware on an unexpected front.

Read more

The long awaited virtual switch for VMware, the Cisco Nexus 1000V, is finally available for the broad public.
In the past months virtualization.info published details of its architecture, its features and its implementation. Now it’s time to try it with the free 60-days trial that is available here.

Cisco priced the virtual switch at $695 per CPU, which has to be added to the vSphere 4.0 license.
To plug into the new VMware platform, Nexus 1000V in fact needs the vNetwork Distributed Switch feature that it’s only available in the new vSphere Enterprise Plus license.
Some VMware customers are arguing that the current packaging and price may negatively impact the sales of Nexus 1000V, which becomes now much less attractive.

Starting May 21, we’ll see if the customers will really consider the Cisco virtual switch a must-have and will gladly pay the premium price to replace the basic VMware virtual switch they used for so many years now.
As usual in virtualization, it really depends on who’s your interlocutor inside the corporate. The guys at the security department may have a slightly different opinion on this product than the virtualization guys.

At its Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) conference last month Microsoft unveiled the roadmap for the System Center family.

First of all the company announced that Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 is expected 60 days after the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, and we know that Microsoft now is confident to release its OSes in October.

After this late 2009 launch Microsoft doesn’t plan to release a new version of SCVMM before 2011, as exposed in this chart provided by Techlog:

Read more

At the end of the last week Citrix announced its Q1 2009 earnings. The company suffered a 2% revenue decrease, moving from $377 million in Q1 2008 to $369 million.
In details the company lost 24% fot new licenses revenue but gained in renewed licenses (11%), online services (16%) and technical services (8%).
EMEA is where Citrix is losing the most (11% decrease in revenue) compared to Americas (1% decrease) and APAC (9% decrease).

Interestingly, while the application virtualization business lost 10% (year-on-year decline), the hardware virtualization business (XenServer, XenDesktop) gained over 150%.
Citrix now scores over 5000 customers for those products, and Essentials sales are just started.

For the next quarter, pretty much like VMware, the company expects no growth or a further decline.
Despite that, the price of VMware vSphere 4.0, the features that will appear in XenServer and Essentials 5.5, and the new things that will be announced at the Synergy conference tomorrow, may help Citrix to surprise the financial analysts.

VMware is working on a major evolution of its virtual appliance marketplace.
The ambition of the virtualization vendor now goes well beyond providing a catalog of ready-to-install applications for its vSphere platform: together with IT Structures, VMware is working to allow the streaming of the virtual appliances directly inside a customers’ web browser.

To do so IT Structures is rolling out a feature called App on Demand for some existing VAs in the marketplace as part of a beta phase. Over time the feature will be applied to the other VAs.

IT Structures believes that its technology will make easier to evaluate virtual appliances without the hassle to download and deploy them.

Maybe. Maybe instead an enterprise customer wants to spend a long time analyzing the enterprise application that plans to deploy in production. If so the need for a quick access to the VA doesn’t exist (in any case an average VA starts from 300MB and any enterprise in the world can download such a big file in a matter of minutes).

Read more

It took almost two months to finally unveil the software layer that manages the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system, but Cisco finally made it.

On its corporate Data Center Networks blog Cisco shows the GUI details and workflow in two parts videos.

UCS Manager seems very complex and granular, it exposes the full hardware for each blade, it exposes the logical servers that you want to create aggregating multiple blades in the system, it exposes the networking and the storage layer, and of course it exposes the virtual machines inside each blade.

Each of these layers can be restricted by a role-base access control system.

Read more

After trying for years to impose its high-performance remote desktop, Remote Graphics Software (RGS), the company has finally given up and will phase it out by the end of this year.

virtualization.info has learned from very trusted sources that HP will not only drop RGS but it will also exit the VDI market completely, stopping the development of its connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM).

Starting 2010 the company will rely on third party offerings provided by Citrix, VMware and Microsoft. HP is especially looking at two protocols: the Citrix Prism/HDX and the software implementation of the PCoIP protocol that VMware and Teradici are developing.
Same story for the connection broker: HP is working to adopt Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.
Of course HP will continue to develop thin clients/blade workstations for SBC/VDI environments where it has a serious profit.

Read more

At the beginning of last week VMware announced the pricing and availability of its vSphere 4.0 platform, replacing the popular VMware Infrastructure 3.x starting May 21.

Much before that announcement VMware unveiled a long list of new products that will be released over the next months, covering pretty much every possible need that a virtual infrastructure administrator may have.
One of them is especially interesting: the vCenter Orchestrator.

The technology behind this product comes from the acquisition of the European startup Dunes Technology in September 2007.
Orchestrator is extremely interesting as it’s the building block of any highly complex automated infrastructure.

Read more

It’s not a secret that Google is not crazy about hardware virtualization. They made it clear in June 2007, when the engineer André Barroso said:

“I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.”…

Having Google to endorse your technology is a big thing but so far virtualization vendors survived even without the search engine support.
But at the end of 2008 VMware decided to enter a domain where Google is a recognized leader, cloud computing, and this was enough to trigger a still very polite contrast between the two companies.

At VMworld Europe 2009, the VMware CEO Paul Maritz addressed the Google approach to cloud computing saying that virtualization is the only viable way.
Specifically he said:

they don’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware

Read more