Year: 2009

Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware officially announced the new, much awaited high-availability module for its vCenter Server (formerly VirtualCenter).

VMware took forever to admit that vCenter is the weakest point of failure in its virtual infrastructure, despite its mission critical role:

It’s true that VMware HA can (partially) protect vCenter if it runs inside a virtual machine but 60% of the customers still run it on physical machines.

The lack of any native hot stand-by or clustering capability inside the management tier stimulated the growth of a small but lucrative ecosystem that the company sales engineers further promoted, suggesting several products from trusted partners: Double-Take, Steel Eye, CA, Neverfail Group and of course Microsoft Cluster Service.

Starting last week it’s no more the case: VMware is OEM’ing with an exclusive agreement the Neverfail technology under the name of vCenter Server Heartbeat 1.0.

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VMworld Europe 2009, a great event which has just ended, there is another one is about to start: the virtualization.info’s independent conference Virtualization Congress 2009.

The event is really shaping up.
We have already published the first ten sessions that will make the agenda.
We have two stealth startups that will launch their brand and products during the Call for Startups general session.
And very soon we’ll announce the members of our three hot panels:

• I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream
• Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds)
• The Future of Virtualization

If you plan to attend the Virtualization Congress, you will also be able to attend the Citrix iForum, the Network World Live! and the Geek Speak events as the four conferences will take place at the same time in the same location.

We are offering an All-Inclusive ticket that grants access to every keynote and breakout session. And hopefully the news of XenServer for free is teasing some of you to digg more into the Citrix offering.

Please note that the Early Bird for having $400 off ends tomorrow. Go register today!

Before closing we’d like to clarify the reason behind the choice to arrange the event in Las Vegas during this tough time:

• The MGM Grand room rate is only $174 a night plus 9% tax – one of the lowest tax rates in the US
• Direct flights to Las Vegas from over 140 cities have an average airfare of $240
• The MGM Grand is only one mile from McCarren International Airport, which means an inexpensive taxi fare of only $20-$25 (one-way) and an airport shuttle fare of only $7 per person (one-way)
• For staying at the MGM Grand you get a $25 credit to use at restaurants and bars (Starbucks, Diego, Grand Buffet, Studio 54, Tabu, etc.) within the hotel

This is a table of what would cost to attend the conference in any other major convention city in US:

Yesterday the VMware CEO Paul Maritz opened the VMworld Europe 2009 conference with a more concrete keynote compared to his first one given at VMworld 2008.

Besides a formal announcement of the vSphere 4.0 and the Client Hypervisor Platform (CVP), his speech highlighted a couple of key points:

• VMware is becoming serious and aggressive in its positioning on the cloud computing market: Maritz took a bold position saying that the Google approach to cloud computing is not really scalable without virtualization
• VMware won’t let any other virtualization vendor have a competitive advantage through its current partners: Maritz invited Intel on stage to announce a partnership on client hypervisors that sounds pretty similar to the one Citrix announced just one month ago

On stage today we’ll have Stephen Herrod, the company CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, who should provide a great amount of technical details about vSphere, vCenter Suite and some other technologies that VMware is expected to release during this 2009.

Stephen Herrod is on stage. His presentation is titled The Future of VMware Virtualization.

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This is the conference welcome is opened by Maurizio Carli, the former Google executive that became the new VMware General Manager of EMEA in December 2008.

He starts by saying that compared to last year (4,500 attendees) this year VMworld Europe scored 4,700 attendees despite the economical conditions (early reports were talking about only 3,000 attendees).

Just in case one of those 4,700 doesn’t know VMware, he goes on with some numbers about the company size:

• 6,300+ people worldwide, 1,300+ in EMEA
• 42% of customers choose to standardize their virtual data centers with VMware (were 25% in 2007)

Paul Maritz, the former Microsoft top executive that took the place of VMware’s founder and CEO Diane Greene in July 2008, is on stage.

Maritz starts with a breakdown of the IT budget spending, claiming an overwhelming complexity that slows down or makes fail many projects. VMware is working to transform the IT in a service through three initiatives:

• Virtual Data Center OS (VDC-OS)
• vCloud (private and public clouds along with federation across them)
• vClient (for a desktop as a Service)

So Maritz is probably going to replicate the presentation he performed at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

Now Maritz details how VMware realize its cloud computing vision: standardized hardware, scalable and highly available software (the VMware Infrastructure), security policies to grant compliance and a management layer that can enforce a SLA management model.
On top of this stack the existing applications will be placed, along with next generation applications designed to run and scale inside the cloud.

Then Maritz sends a message to all the other vendors out there trying to suggest a different cloud computing model: virtualization is the only viable way.
Google is clearly mentioned: they don’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware (it’s worth to remind that in 2007 Google clarified how hardware virtualization is definitively not its way).

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After the first day exclusively dedicated to its partners, tomorrow VMware will officially open the VMworld Europe 2009 to all its customers.
The first day will begin with a keynote from Paul Maritz, the CEO who replaced Diane Greene in July 2008, while the second day will begin with a keynote from Steve Herold, the CTO who replaced the Executive Vice President of R&D in September 2008.

This configuration was tested for the first time in Las Vegas for the VMworld 2008, replacing the historical duo Diane Greene and her husband (and Chief Scientist) Mendel Rosenblum.

As usual, virtualization.info will provide live coverage of both keynotes.

So stay with us as VMware may have a lot of things to tell tomorrow:

• how the cloud computing vision exposed last September will become a reality
• how the company is involved in the upcoming Cisco blade system California
• if and how it will deliver a new strategy for the SMB market
• how it will answer to the looming threat of a free enterprise-grade Citrix virtual infrastructure
• and more

Last week several bloggers and mainstream journalists reported a major news: Citrix is about to release XenServer for free.
Of course the lack of details generated a number of speculations and confusion that today the company clears up with an official announcement.

First of all Citrix is releasing for free the Enterprise Edition of XenServer.
This is not a scaled down, limited version of the hypervisor. From the end of March on, there will be only one edition of XenServer which will be free.

Secondarily, Citrix is giving away for free with XenServer a remarkable number of enterprise features, including the enterprise console to manage multiple hosts (XenCenter), the VM live migration (XenMotion) technology, the resource sharing (Resource Pools) technology and the enterprise storage management technology.

The comparison against VMware ESXi is immediate (and of course unfair):

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At least three things seem true in the virtualization industry:

1. It doesn’t matter how many times a vendor repeats that free stuff doesn’t compete against a feature-rich end-to-end solution, it will end up offering a free hypervisor
2. It doesn’t matter how many surprises a vendor can pack for its premier conference, its competitors will do their best to steal the thunder
3. It doesn’t matter how many NDAs a vendor puts in place to embargo its most amazing announcement, the news will leak out even before hang up the conference call

Today is one of those days when the three rules above are true at the same time: Stephen Vaughn-Nichols unveiled on his personal blog the news that next week (Feb 23), during the VMware VMworld Europe 2009 conference, Citrix will give away for free its XenServer hypervisor.

Vaughn-Nichols doesn’t refer to a scaled down version of XenServer. He’s reporting that the Enterprise Edition with all its features will become free (but not open source).

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In October 2007 Citrix closed a major agreement with HP to resell XenServer Enterprise Edition on ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

In March 2008 the two companies took a step further, launching a special version of Citrix hypervisor called XenServer HP Select Edition which comes pre-installed in selected servers and offers a free management console called ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC). 

In May 2008, when Citrix launched its new end-to-end VDI solution XenDesktop, HP was there once again confirming support for the product on ProLiant and Compaq thin clients.

The love story continues today with HP announcing that its Blade PC systems will be sold with the just released Citrix XenDesktop 3.

At the moment there are no details about the configurations, pricing or availability. It’s likely that HP will unveil the product at the upcoming Synergy 2009.

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So far BMC did very few things to ensure a relevant position in the virtualization market.

Sure, the company supports VMware technologies in many of its products and even acquired BladeLogic in March 2008, but nothing suggests a strong commitment on virtualization beyond that. Till today.

VMware customers shouldn’t be surprised if in the coming weeks and months their resellers start to push the BMC Service Automation solutions like never before. There’s a good reason.

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The first forecast of the year comes from Gartner, which predicted an increase by 43% of virtualization software revenue during this year, moving from $1.9 billion scored in 2008 to $2.7 billion.

In particular the analysis firm expects that revenue from VDI solutions will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009 while revenue from server virtualization management software will increase 42% from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009.
Last but not least, the revenue from server virtualization infrastructure will grow 22.5% from $917 million in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.

Gartner is also saying that VDI solutions already represent 11% of the current virtualization software revenue market.

Even more interesting than that, Garner predicts that Microsoft will challenge the VMware leadership by 2013.

This last one sounds like the most pessimist estimate about Microsoft released so far: in 2007 Forrester predicted that the Redmond giant wouldn’t impact the virtualization market until 2010, while IDC, just two months ago, suggested that Microsoft would turn the hypervisor market upside down this year.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.