Year: 2009

While a new startup works to unofficially open source the VMware VMFS, Citrix has officially open sourced its implementation of the Microsoft VHD format.

Citrix and Microsoft adopt the same virtual hard drive format since September 2007, when they closed a deal to adopt VHD in all the upcoming products.

In over two years Citrix has developed an optimized implementation of the product and it’s now giving it back to the open source world by submitting its code to the Xen community for inclusion in the hypervisor code base under the BSD license.

If approved, Citrix partners and competitors that adopt Xen (like Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun, etc.) will be able to use it side by side with QEMU Copy-On-Write (QCOW).

A couple of weeks ago a new company called fluid Operations raised some attention in the virtualization community because of their new open source VMFS driver.

The driver, which is actively developed and hosted at Google Code, allows to mount and read (no writing capabilities for now) partitions formatted with the VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) version 3.
The VMFSv3 partitions can be accessed from a Linux, Windows or Mac OS host using a WebDAV client.

VMware doesn’t provide the VMFS specification so fluid Operations reverse engineered the on-disk format.
In the near future, unless VMware stops them, the driver will have the capability to modify the existing data inside the VMFS partition, but writing new files and folders is much more complex and this is why the company is calling for some help.

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By now it should be clear that Citrix will do everything possible to keep its leadership in the application virtualization space and increase its relevance in the hardware virtualization space.

The first step was giving away XenServer (with Live Migration, Resource Pools and much more) for free.

The second step will be releasing a free virtualization platform for the desktops: XenWorkstation.

Please note that this has nothing to do with the client hypervisor that Citrix is developing with Intel.
This is a type-2 version (or hosted VMM) of Xen that will run on consumer hardware, exactly like VMware Player/Workstation/Fusion, Parallels Workstation/Desktop, Sun VirtualBox or Microsoft Virtual PC.
And Citrix may release it as soon as next week according to virtualization.info sources.

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A big part of the Veeam success depends on its winning early-days strategy, when the company became popular thanks to several free, efficient tools solving daily administration duties.

Veeam is no more a startup but continues to give away quality tools for free.

Today the company announces the third version of its FastSCP, the free file management tool that released as second product in October 2006.

FastSCP 3.0 introduce support for ESXi (both commercial and free edition) and can perform ESXi-to-ESXi copies.

Available for free here.

At the end of December virtualization.info highlighted how Vizioncore, the most loyal VMware partner, is taking a new direction.

Its opening to other virtualization vendors in part depends on Quest, which is a management company close to Microsoft, Oracle and others, in part depends on the VMware behavior, in part depends on the new opportunities that Hyper-V and XenServer can offer (there’s a reason if Quest hired the Citrix VP of Product Development).

Besides the evidence we collected anyway, Vizioncore never offered a clear indication of where it’s going. Something that was probably expected by many customers after Quest completed its acquisition in January 2008.

Last week the company finally made its new strategy clear announcing a couple of upcoming products: vControl and VESI.

vControl is an enterprise management product that will support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
It will provide a self-service provisioning portal for end-users and task-based automation tools for administrators.

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In December 2008 Novell announced its plan to rebrand ZENworks Orchestrator as PlateSpin Orchestrate.
It was a good move considering the potential that ZENworks has in the virtualization space and the brand awareness that PlateSpin was able to build before the Novell acquisition.

Three months after, the first version of the rebranded product comes out: PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0.

Novell is marking as new features things like:

• Support for VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Xen
• Native VMware ESX support (no need for VMware vCetner)
• LDAP support
• Automation based on user-defined events and triggers

but as far as we remember pretty much everything was already included in ZENworks Orchestrator.

More concrete is instead the release of ZENworks Application Virtualization 7, the application virtualization platform that Novell  is OEM’ing from XenoCode.

The new version, which is probably based on the recently released XenoCode Virtual Application Studio 2009, offers the integration with ZENworks Configuration Manager.

Now virtualized applications can be packaged and published in a specific Configuration Manager zone directly from inside Application Virtualization.
At the same time administrators can restrict virtualized applications from running on devices that are not registered with Configuration Manager.

With the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008 Red Hat raised a lot of interest.
The customers that trusted the company when it was promoting its Xen implementation all over the place want to know what will happen to them.
The potential customers that are interested in an open source hypervisor but  dislike the idea of Citrix indirectly controlling how Xen, want to know how serious Red Hat is about KVM.

Last week, finally, the company announced its commitment:

• Next versions of Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will feature KVM.
  The exiting versions featuring Xen will be supported for the full lifetime of RHEL 5.
• Red Hat will release a brand new Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (a minimal version of RHEL only supporting KVM and a selected number of drivers).
• Red Hat will release a brand new Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting.
  This product will be able to manage both RHEL and RHEVH.
• Red hat will rebrand the Qumranet connection broker and management console SolidICE as Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops.

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After a long period of stealth activity around its hypervisor Oracle VM Server, Oracle seems getting ready to articulate its strategy and make it more competitive.

The latest version of its enterprise management platform, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5, can now use a new Oracle VM Management Pack, which includes all the features of Oracle VM Manager.

In this way those customers using Enterprise Manager will be able to manage physical and virtual servers as well as the application inside them from a single console.

The Management Pack brings in the following features:

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The application virtualization startup Trigence doesn’t exist anymore. Starting this month the company is called AppZero and has a completely new market strategy.

At launch time, Trigence was the only vendor in its market segment to offer an application virtualization solution for Linux and not for Windows.
To fill the gap, in just one month the company hired two former Softricity executives, as Vice President of US Sales and Chief Operating Officer.
The latter remained at Trigence for just one year and after just three months the company also lost its President and CEO.

In over one year (from June 2007 to September 2008) Trigence could only release a single, minor update for its platform, which didn’t help to make it more relevant.

Now the company, or what is left of it, announces a new corporate identity (AppZero), a new product name (Virtual Application Appliance or VAA) and a new CEO (Greg O’Connor, who was previously the founder of Sonic Software and pioneer of the Enterprise Service Bus, the foundation of Service-Oriented Architecture).

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Dell doesn’t seem interested in becoming a major virtualization player on its own but continues to stack up 3rd party solutions to build its product portfolio.

In September 2008 the company signed an OEM agreement with both PlateSpin (a Novell subsidiary) and Vizioncore (a Quest subsidiary), in December 2008 signed a similar deal with Egenera.

Now it’s the time of Reflex Systems, the US startup that changed its name (formerly known as Reflex Security) and go-to-market strategy at the end of last year. 
The OEM agreement only covers the new multi-hypervisor management tool that Reflex unveiled in November: Virtualization Management Center (VMC).

Definitively a good restart for a company that struggled to find success in the virtualization security market.