Year: 2009

Even if the amount of technical details about the upcoming Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system are scarce, it’s clear that Cisco has a plan.
And this plan doesn’t contemplate to just sell x86 servers against HP, IBM and Dell.

It doesn’t matter what Cisco believes it can deliver on the market, the hardware part doesn’t seem the most relevant thing.
The biggest question about UCS is how the network vendor is gluing together BMC and VMware products with its UCS Manager.
Whatever is the the method, Cisco has already found it cause UCS is set to be launched this month, very likely the same day of VMware vSphere 4.0, expected for April 21.

So why Cisco has to buy Tidal Software for $105 million in cash and retention-based incentives?

Tidal does job scheduling, application performance management, and automation software products. But these things should already come with BMC and VMware products.

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Who better than a virtualization vendor to show a successful case study to convince prospects to buy?

In May 2008 Microsoft published some details about how it’s using Hyper-V to serve MSDN and TechNet IIS7 web front-ends.

Nor VMware neither Citrix or other vendors ever published any information about their in-house implementations.
Anyway juicy additional details recently emerged about both the Microsoft and the VMware data centers.

How Microsoft is really using Hyper-V

The MSDN and TechNet case studies were interesting but lacked many details. A new document published in January 2009 on the TechNet library now tells a much clever (and in some cases concerning) story:

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In early March virtualization.info broke the news that Citrix was about to release a hosted version (aka type-2 virtual machine monitor) of of XenServer, called XenWorkstation, that could compete with VMware Workstation, Parallels Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox and so on.

There are good reasons for Citrix to do so, and the impressive number of visits we received on that article confirms a great interest about such product.

XenWorkstation was not launched the week of March 9 as we speculated.
While some people (including ones that claim to be Citrix employees) reported that this product doesn’t exist, our sources tells us that Citrix decided to postpone its launch.

True or not (virtualization.info long time readers know that our sources are very reliable), Citrix just released to the Xen community the open source code of a type-2 VMM version of Xen, currently called KXen.

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HyTrust is the latest US startup to enter the virtualization market, specifically invading the access control and configuration management where Catbird, Configuresoft, ManageIQ, Veeam and Tripwire are busy.

The company was co-founded in late 2007 by Eric Chiu, who was Vice President of Sales and Business Development from 2005 to 2007 at Cemaphore Systems.
With Chiu, who works as CEO, there was Boris Strongin, the former Vice President of Engineers at SeeContro and Director of Engineering at Determina (now acquired by VMware).
Strongin is working as Vice President of Engineering.
The third cofounder of the company is Renata Budko, the former Director of Product Management at Cemaphore and former Manager of Solutions and Technical Marketing at VMware. 
Budko now works as Vice President of Marketing.
The leadership team also includes Rober Hammer, the CFO, and Hemma Prafullchandra, the Chief Security Architect.
Prafullchandra was the Vice President of Advanced Products and Research at VeriSign from 2005 to 2007.

On top of this the company advisory board features the VMware Director of R&D, Vikram Makhija, the Symantec Advanced Technology Group member Slava Kritov, and a security expert coming from NSA, Rebecca Bace.

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Earlier this week FastScale Technology, the US startup that launched in Q2 2007 (see virtualization.info coverage), announced a new upcoming product called Stack Manager Workstation Edition.

This new tool, now in public beta, can be considered an appliance builder that uploads on Amazon EC2.
It works on CentOS and Red hat Enterprise Linux (both 4 and 5) and produces virtual machines in AMI format.

The product builds the appliances using its Composer Suite technology, which tracks how an application interacts with its OS and encapsulates in a special package (the DAB) only the relevant libraries, services, etc.
The application inside the DAB doesn’t see a stipped away OS anyway. Composer virtualizes the location of every piece, and if the application needs anything that is not inside the DAB, it will be promptly retrieved from a central repository.

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Less than one month ago The Wall Street Journal broke the news of an ongoing acquisition talk between IBM and Sun.

virtualization.info reported about the early involvement of Cisco in the bid for Sun, a rumor never confirmed by other sources.

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that the discussion between IBM and Sun has ended and that IBM withdrew its $7 billion offering.

If Cisco was really interested in Sun, now it may be a good moment to reopen the negotiations.

As many pointed out, if Cisco really wants to emerge as a leading player in the server market, it needs all the experience, the credibility and the customers that it can have.
Building all the three things from scratch may take several years, even for a giant like the networking vendor.

Sun can provide all and a virtualization portfolio that may become useful if, for any reason, the intimate partnership with VMware gets compromised.

And by the way, after this failed bid, acquiring Sun is probably much cheaper than one month ago.

Update: It seems that the discussion is still open between Sun and IBM.

After VMware announced a technology partnership with Teradici in October 2008 to develop a new generation remote desktop protocol, the interest in the startup has grown more and more.
The climax was reached two months ago when VMware demonstrated the Teradici PCoIP during the VMworld Europe 2009 keynote.

This has possibly led to the new $17 million investment from TELUS Ventures, Alloy Ventures, GrowthWorks Capital, Skypoint Capital, BDC Venture Capital, and Alta Berkeley Venture Partners.

The second round of funding, $18 million, arrived in February 2007 from Alloy Ventures led, Working Opportunity Fund, Skypoint Capital, BDC Venture Capital and Alta Berkeley Venture Partners.

The first one, $8.3 million, arrived  in December 2004 from GrowthWorks Capital, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), and Skypoint Capital Corporation.

After more than one year after the acquisition of Kidaro, Microsoft is finally able to release its version of Managed Workspace, now renamed as Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V).

MED-V is a platform wrapper for Virtual PC that envelops virtual machines in a security layer where the administrator can define granular corporate policies, deciding which physical networks can be accessed, when the VM expires, if the virtual hard drive is encrypted, etc.

The user can’t run more than one virtual machine per time with MED-V. Its image can be updated from a central management console.

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Yesterday Sun released a new minor update of its desktop virtualization product: VirtualBox.

The new build introduces support for the just ratified OVF 1.0 standard.
Additionally, VirtualBox 2.2 introduces new, welcome features like:

• support for 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications using OpenGL
• support for Apple Mac OS X codename Snow Leopard
• support for up to 16GB vRAM per virtual machine
• support for host-interface networking mode

Anyway there are a couple of other things that make the press announcement quite interesting:

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Last week VMware released a minor update for its desktop virtualization product Workstation.

Despite the numbering anyway the new build (156735) introduces the much needed support for the just release Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs (codename Nehalem) and the extended support for a number of guest operating systems: