Year: 2009

In March 2008 Microsoft acquired an interesting startup called Kidaro, which was focused on the corporate virtual machine security segment (something we call “platform wrappers” in the Virtualization Industry Radar).

The original product, Managed Workspace, was renamed in Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), and relaunched as a beta in January 2009.

Microsoft plans release the product in H2 2009 as part of the much hated software bundle called Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which means that no potential customer will ever see it unless it has an enterprise license agreement with the Software Assurance.

The company insists to claim MDOP a smart and successful product but the reality is that an endless number of customers have complains about the bundle and can’t access both MED-V and App-V because of it.

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Microsoft is currently publishing multi-part webcast to introduce and deep dive the capabilities of its hypervisor Hyper-V.

So far the company published seven parts:

• Part 1 – Server Virtualization (42:09 min)
• Part 2 – Installing, Configuring, Managing Hyper-V (17:35 min)
• Part 3 – Understanding Integration Services (7:43 min)
• Part 4 – Exports & Snapshots (5:33 min) 
• Part 5 – PowerShell Management (11:03 min)
• Part 6 – Configuring Failover Cluster (16:46 min)
• Part 7 – Failover & Migration of VMs (14:04 min)

If you never saw Hyper-V in action this is probably the best thing after a classroom course.

Skytap (known as Illumita during its stealth mode) is a US startup that entered the (almost empty) virtual lab automation market segment in April 2008 (see virtualization.info coverage).

While one of the leaders in this space, Surgient, was moving away from the hosted infrastructure approach, Skytap was offering its technology as Software as a Service (or virtual lab automation in a cloud if you like).
The only other virtual lab automation firm that is pursuing this business model is StackSafe, another startup launched in January 2008.

In over one year nor Skytap neither StackSafe have impacted the development & testing market in a significant way.
In part this depends on the ubiquitous presence of the worst possible competitor, VMware, and in part on the fact that the cloud computing excitement doesn’t equally apply to every aspect of the IT.

Anyway now Skytap has secured an additional $7 Million round of funds from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation.
Of course investing this money despite the tough economy makes sense as Skytap, more than others, has a chance to get some serious exposure at the peak of the cloud computing hype.

VMware continues to reshape its leadership outside North America, choosing key figures with a certain background and culture.

In December 2008 the company appointed its new General Manager for EMEA, Maurizio Carli, who opened the VMworld Europe 2009.
Carl was the Managing Director of the Enterprise division at Google EMEA, but more importantly he was, for a long time, Vice President of the EMEA Software Group at IBM.

Yesterday the company appointed the new General Manager for APAC: Andrew Dutton.

Dutton comes from Computer Associates where he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of International Business.
Before CA, Dutton covered positions at BEA System, IBM and Visa.

If there’s a path here, it seems that the new CEO Paul Maritz, the former top executive at Microsoft, is bringing inside VMware all the knowledge needed to compete with the big four infrastructure management behemoths.

The startup Pano Logic continues to extend its executive team with experienced leaders in the IT industry.

The first one was John Kish, the former President and CEO of Wyse Technologies, that joined the company in October 2008 for the same role.

Then, in February 2009, Pano Logic secured Brian Cox, the former Vice President of Sales Operations at EqualLogic, that covered the role of Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations.
Before his job at EqualLogic, Cox was the Vice President of Worldwide Sales Strategy and Field Programs at VMware.

And now the company hires Jeffrey Page, the former Vice President of Finance and Operations at Firetide, a provider of multi-service mesh networks for industrial and municipal applications.
Before that job, Page was the Director of Sales at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.

Finally, after more than three months since virtualization.info broke the news, Cisco is ready to unveils its much rumored blade system codenamed California, dubbed as Unified Computing System (UCS).

The announcement was made a few minutes ago by John Chambers, Cisco CEO, and top notch executives from Intel (Paul Otellini, CEO), VMware (Paul Maritz, President and CEO), EMC (Joe Tucci, CEO), BMC Software (Bob Beauchamp, CEO) and Microsoft (Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business).

For Cisco “unified computing” means data center networking, unified fabric as well as private and extranet-intranet clouds (Cisco calls this “inter-cloud).

To deliver this architecture the company is calling a number of partners, not just the ones above: Accenture, BMC Software, CSC, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, Net App, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, SAP, Tata, VMware and Wipro.

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At the end of January Citrix and Intel announced a major partnership to jointly develop a client hypervisor based on Xen (codename Project Independence).
The news definitively had an impact on competitors as VMware felt the need to remark that its partnership with Intel is stronger.

The two companies plan to release the new product somewhere in H2 2009 (likely immediately before or during VMworld 2009) so nobody really expected any additional information going public for a while (at least nothing before the upcoming Synergy conference in May).

Unexpectedly, last week Gabrie van Zanten, a well-known virtualization blogger, published an early preview of the Citrix client hypervisor, highlighting interesting features:

…After the primary partition is loaded, the other partitions (virtual machines) can be managed through a web interface in the primary partition. This interface integrates with XenDesktop (VDI) and XenApp (Presentation Server), which gives the user great control over what technique to use, depending on the device he or she is or the location. The user will also be given the option to check out a VM to take it on the road…

as well as some concerning design approaches:

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Microsoft and Citrix agreed on who’s the guru in town when managing Hyper-V and XenServer hosts (tip: it’s Citrix) but this doesn’t seem to slow down the development of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Just two months after opening the public beta of Hyper-V 2.0, Microsoft is now launching the public beta of SCVMM 2008 R2.
This first beta build introduces the following features:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Hyper-V host management
• Enhanced support for Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) and SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts (including support for multiple virtual machines per LUN by using CSV)
• Support for multiple LUNs per iSCSI target
• Support for host’s “Maintenance Mode”
• Support of disjoint domains
• Use of defined port groups with VMware vCenter 

Enroll for the beta program here.

For the release of its vSphere 4.0 platform (formerly VMware Infrastructure), VMware will drop the label “experimental” from one of the most interesting features released with VI3.5: Distributed Power Management (DPM).

It’s not yet clear how much DPM will impact the data center operations today, but CPU power management certainly is a feature that is influencing the roadmaps of several vendors:

• Intel will release a Dynamic Power Node Manager with its upcoming Nehalem CPU
• Microsoft will release Core Parking and CPU power consumption controls as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 which Hyper-V 2.0 will leverage

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Microsoft just opened a new beta program for the Hyper-v Management Pack for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2.

The management pack is incomplete for now as it only allows to  monitor the health of Hyper-V hosts that are part of Windows Server 2008 full (Standard / Enterprise / Datacenter).

No support at the moment for Windows Server 2008 Core Server versions or for the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008.

The program is not directly available on the Connect website. To access it you have to email Microsoft.