Year: 2009

In mid-March the Wall Street Journal broke the news about an ongoing acquisition discussion between IBM and Sun. The deal never happened and IBM walked away retiring a $7 billion offering.
At this point Oracle jumped in and acquired Sun for $7.4 billion.

For the virtualization industry this is a very interesting move.

Sun is finalizing an entire virtualization portfolio, the xVM family, that includes a much delayed hypervisor based on Xen (Server), an enterprise management solution (Ops Center), a connection broker (VDI) and even a desktop virtualization solution (VirtualBox).
On its end, Oracle announced its own virtual infrastructure in November 2007, which includes a Xen-based hypervisor (VM Server) available free of charge and an enterprise management solution (VM Manager).

So far Oracle kept a low profile and didn’t seriously push its presence in the virtualization market, at the point that most people believe that Oracle VM is just for Oracle workloads. But the company strategy is very different: the database vendor wants to become a fully accredited virtualization vendor and compete with its former partner VMware.

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One month ago Cisco announced its plan to enter the x86 market with a blade system (Unified Computing System or UCS) that is specifically tailored for virtualization and fabric computing.

Trying to clarify that this is not just marketing hype the company also unveiled its key partners: BMC (for the automation layer), VMware (for the virtualization layer) and EMC (of course for the storage layer).

Despite that after one hour and a half the company didn’t disclose a single technical detail about how the platform works and how the technologies above blend together.
Additionally, the network vendor acquired last week Tidal Software, a company that focus on job scheduling, application performance management, and automation software, but didn’t say if it will be or not part of the UCS strategy.

The only concrete information emerged so far about UCS come from the blogosphere and are mostly about the hardware specifications.

Today finally Cisco talks about some more features of the blade system.

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One week ago virtualization.info broke the news about the departure of Karthik Rau, Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing, and a key member of the original leadership team that led VMware in the early days.

An anonymous source sent us a tip on that news suggesting to double-check the employment status of some key members of the View (formerly Virtual Desktop Manager or VDM) team, arrived at VMware after the 2007 acquisition of Propero.

Two of them left the company to start a consulting firm:

• Steve Peskin – Senior Director of VDI OEM Alliances
• Tommy Armstrong – Senior Product Marketing Manager for VDM/View and ThinApp

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Earlier this week SDTimes published a brief coverage of the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Francisco last week.

A very brief note in the article highlights a remarkable information:

For the virtualization crowd, Zemlin [Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation] said that, moving forward, the Linux Foundation is encouraging vendors and developers to standardize on KVM, not Xen.

If true this may be the confirmation that the Citrix acquisition of XenServer has compromised the relation with the open source community, despite Citrix is giving back.

It’s interesting to note that the Red Hat acquisition of Qumranet, which developed and maintains KVM, didn’t have the same impact.

In January 2008 virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft indirectly announced the plan to bring its application virtualization technology (App-V, formerly SoftGrid) on servers.

At that time no mainstream news source recognized the groundbreaking news but a recent job announcement appeared on the Microsoft Career portal catalyzed the attention of CodenameWindows and Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Do you want to be part of a great, growing team that will deliver technology that will change the way Microsoft and the industry deploy and execute software on the Windows platform? Join the Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) team and work on a new v1 product to bring the revolutionary Application Virtualization technology to a new market – the datacenter. Server Application Virtualization will effectively let any application be repackaged as an xcopyable application, making deployment vastly simpler and more reliable…

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After one year and a half of work behind the scene, Oracle must have decided that it’s time to highlight its presence in the virtualization space.
To do so the team started a corporate blog covering Oracle VM and the industry at large.

The company didn’t waste time and immediately started to smash the competition, starting from the once-best-friend VMware:

The industry has talked of the power of “virtual appliances” for some time but despite the promise of being able to just download, start-up and use software, virtual appliances have not been widely deployed in the enterprise, so why is that? First and foremost has been the lack of availability of anything other than toy appliances to use. If you look at VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace, you will see about 1,100 appliances. Spend some time clicking through there…go ahead …I’ll wait. What do you think? See anything you want to use in your production enterprise as-is? No? Me either.

…

For the production enterprise, you need an enterprise server operating system (not a workstation OS), that is supported by a real company (not just forums), and you need real enterprise applications (not “crippleware”) that are officially supported and licensed for production. Go ahead, go back and look at the Operating System Appliances category on VMware’s Marketplace: how many of these appliances contain server- (not workstation-) operating systems backed by a commercial company? What about the “Certified Production Ready*” appliances…surely that’s better, right? Er…well…some good software for sure, but again the included OS is almost always a workstation version and/or forum supported: not production-ready…

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Last week VMware released a minor update for its desktop virtualization product Workstation, introducing the support for the new Intel Xeon 5500 CPU family and a bunch of additional guest operating systems.

A round of new guests are now supported on VMware Server as well, which was upgraded to version 2.0.1 (build 156745) at the end of March:

• Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
• CentoOS 4.7 / 5.2
• Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) / Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Service Pack 2 / 2008
• Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Citrix is working to release as much as possible in time for its Synergy conference in May.
While waiting for the beta of XenServer 5.1 (or whatever it will be called) the customers can now download the just announced XenConvert 2.0 technical preview.

XenConvert is the XenServer physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tool.

This new version will import VMware virtual machines in VMDK format and OVF packages (it doesn’t matter which virtualization product generated them). 
Citrix is a member of the DMFT so it implemented the support for the new OVF 1.0 standard as soon as possible.

As most readers know by now Citrix decided to give XenServer away for free so the P2V/V2V migration tool becomes a fundamental part of the strategy to move customers away from VMware.
It’s easy to guess that the final version of XenConvert 2.0 will be free as well and that the company will invest on this product much more in future.

Enroll for the beta here.

In June 2007 a couple of brave virtualization experts published one of the most wanted trick for VMware: how to run VMware ESX 3.x on a VMware Workstation 6.0 virtual machine.

Now Xtravirt, the consulting company that sold its tools to PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies), is back on the topic and releases new paper to run VMware ESX 3.5 or ESXi on a VMware Server 2.0 installation.

The trick is to change some settings in the virtual BIOS of the Server VM along with adding the usual configuration parameters in the VM configuration.

Considering that both Server 2.0 and ESXi are free this is going to be an instant classic.

Despite its low profile (which is maintained on purpose) Veeam is getting bigger and bigger.

In 2008 virtualization.info already reported on its healthy growth in US and its expansion in Europe, all without venture capital money.

Now Veeam just hired a CFO, William H. Largent, who comes from Applied Innvation, a public company that he led as CEO.

This may mean nothing in particular but may also mean that Veeam is getting ready to make some large acquisitions or to get acquired for a big amount of money.