Year: 2009

The startup Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave) is not ready yet to launch its search engine for virtual infrastructures, but continues to hire talented professionals.

The last one that joined the company is Andrew Kutz, the man that reverse engineered the VMware vCenter plug-in system and released a number of valuable, non-official and non-authorized add-ons like the SVMotion GUI.

Kutz recently announced a multi-hypervisor management tool for mobile devices, the Virtualization  Manager Mobile, and this may be one of the reasons behind the Hyper9 interest.

The company in fact may want to move beyond a search engine after collecting some popularity, and offer a fully-featured management suite. Kutz expertise may be very useful there.

No matter if the stage is in US or in Europe, the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz has the same message for his audience: VMware believes in cloud computing and believes that its virtualization technology is the only way to go there.
So if you already read the VMworld 2008 wrap-up that virtualization.info published at the end of September, you already know pretty much everything.

Anyway, compared to his US keynote, the European version of VMware message sounded a little more concrete, articulated and aggressive.
Paul Maritz already spent six months at VMware and seems now ready to take some risks:

• Google doesn’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware
• Even for Microsoft it’s not trivial to match our level of investment in the virtualization space

Like for VMworld 2008, the second day keynote, performed by the always great Dr. Stephen Herrod (CTO and SVP of R&D), reaffirmed the omnidirectional expansion of VMware.
During his keynote Herrod mentioned almost every new product that will come with vSphere 4.0.
The one-hour long overview painted the company bigger than ever, ready to slam its competitors with a massive product portfolio.
Inside the corporate data center or across solution provider clouds, on mobile phones or business laptops, this company wants to be there.
And it’s doing everything possible to provide all the tools that a customer may ever need so that he doesn’t desire to go back to the physical world.
Because of this, the overall impression is that VMware is a juggernaut that will morph, sooner or later, into the fifth biggest infrastructure management company.

Read more

Ready or not, VMware is morphing into an infrastructure management company where the word “virtual” is an optional.

The number of products released in the last few years is impressive and it’s accelerating, the market segments where VMware is entering are multiplying, the vision that the company has of its role in the IT industry is deeply changing.

All these elements point to a single direction.

Of course VMware denies such ambitious project. Admitting today that within 5-7 years it will become the biggest competitors of its partners BMC, CA, HP and IBM is not a good idea.
But the reality is that the company wants virtualization to be ubiquitous and wants to satisfy every necessity its customers have inside the virtual sphere.

This is why VMware feels the need, for instance, to acquire B-hive and provide a performance analysis tool for the applications running inside its virtual machines.
Or why it feels the need to acquire Determina and Blue Lane Technology to stack up a number of security products.
Or why it has to deliver a patch management solution that does much more than just updating the ESX hosts.
The list may go on and on (and will do in the near future).

Read more

One of the best part of the VMworld Europe 2009 last week (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2) has been an unannanced (and unplugged) Q&A session with VMware leadership: Paul Maritz (President and CEO), Tod Nielsen (COO), Stephen Herrod (CTO) and Maurizio Carli (GM EMEA).

The four executives addressed questions coming from the attendees via email and microphone.

Despite a shy audience, few questions were rather interesting.
The first, and probably most important one was: What VMware is going to do to keep ahead of Microsoft?

In normal circumstances the answer wouldn’t raise exceptional interest. What a VMware executive can publicly say about the topic is well-known. But in this case the answer was given by Paul Maritz, the former Microsoft top executive that replaced the company founder Diane Greene just six months ago.
Nobody inside VMware is more knowledgeable about the competitor and its strategies.

Read more

Last week, while the European customer base of VMware was busy at VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), the company release the forth update for its management console vCenter.

vCenter 2.5 Update 4 (build 147704) extends the OS customization wizard to Windows Server 2008 guests and introduces a new plug-in, Performance Overview, which aggregates performance charts of CPU, memory, disk and networks.

Please note that VMware didn’t release an Update 4 for ESX 3.5.

How many virtualization.info readers remember Massimiliano Daneri?

Daneri was the brilliant creator of VMKB, the free Perl script able to perform live backup of ESX virtual machines (released in 2004), and VMTSPatchManager, the precursor of VMware Update Manager (released in mid 2007).

VMware hired Daneri in October 2007 and since then only few customers had the opportunity to see him in action.

He reappeared last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), where he presented his new work during a breakout session: PXE Manager for vCenter.

Basically the tool is Windows service that comes with a vCenter management plug-in to:

• automate the provisioning of new ESX and ESXi hosts
• backup and restore the host state
• select the ESX/ESXi build to deploy and its installation mode (diskless, unattended or manual)

Read more

It’s not a secret that VMware is working hard to drop Microsoft RDP as its remote desktop protocol of choice in VDI environments.

At the end of 2007 the company was already part of the VESA committee trying to develop the new standard Net2Display (that never saw the day of light so far).
And then, at VMworld 2008, the company announced a technology partnership with the startup Teradici to develop a software version of their PCoIP protocol (which only works with dedicated graphic cards).

Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware was expected to show an alpha build of that software implementation but instead presented the existing Teradici solution.

Brian Madden and provided a good description of its upcoming features:

Read more

As virtualization.info wrote many times, with VMsafe APIs VMware has the unique chance to shake up the security world.
But as long as VMware has this privileged position in the IT industry to drive innovation across so many market segments, its challenges and responsibilities are much bigger than the ones of many other vendors.

The VMsafe initiative was announced exactly one year ago. In these twelve months the only ones that could really see what can and cannot be done with the new APIs are a restricted number of security partners that VMware recruited.

Now that VMsafe is about to be released as part of the vSphere 4.0 platform, more details emerge and at least a couple of them may raise concerns.

The first concerning point is that the security vendors will not fully unlock the capabilities of VMsafe.

Read more

At the end of January Citrix and Intel made a surprising joint announcement, revealing a major technology partnership to develop a client hypervisor based on Xen (codename Thunder Lake).

The agreement will have an impact on the market as this new platform will be integrated into upcoming Citrix products in H2 2009 and will be distributed through all the major OEMs.

Despite both companies abundantly clarified that the deal is non-exclusive, for some reasons VMware became nervous.

VMware and Intel always collaborated and most customers perfectly know how tight is the relationship between the two: Intel invested $218.5 Million in the virtualization vendor during its IPO, and for a long time there were rumors that the chip maker was contemplating the acquisition of VMware.

But that was not enough: last week at VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2) VMware felt the impellent need to announce its partnership with Intel on the upcoming Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).

Read more

In October 2008 VMware acquired the security vendor Blue Lane Technologies, which offered an interesting inline patching technology for physical and virtual environments.
Rumors say that this was a very opportunistic acquisition considering the economical turmoil and the limited capabilities of Blue Lane to stay profitable.

True or not, the VMware desire to drive virtualization through security and become a leader in that market is evident.
The company already offers a software patching component, Update Manager (OEM’ed from Shavlik Technologies), but will also release a new host intrusion prevention system (HIPS) built on Determina technology, and all its products will benefit the revolutionary point of inspection/prevention that VMsafe APIs will provide.

Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware officially announced that the Blue Lane VirtualShield is now relabeled as vShield Zones.
The product will be available later this year, probably as part of the upcoming vSphere 4.0 platform.

For some reasons VMware is deeply changing the message associated to this product: instead of saying that vShield Zones can act as a proxy, intercepting, blocking and/or correcting several layer 7 attacks, the company is describing it more as a security wrapper (similar to VMware ACE) that can enforce the security compliance on any give virtual machine no matter the virtual network it is deployed into.

In other words VMware seems to suggest that this tool can compete and even replace traditional firewalls, making useless those network architectures that include DMZs. Uh-oh.

Read more