Year: 2009

In the endless war for the best performance, VMware releases today a new, interesting analysis.

The company run the SPECweb2005 benchmark on a single HP ProLiant DL 585 G5 system with 16 cores and ESX 3.5 Update 3.

The industry standard platform simulates three typical workloads:

• a number of customers accessing accounts at a given time via HTTPS
• a number of customers accessing an e-commerce retail store via HTTP and HTTPS
• a number of users acquiring patches and downloads from a support website via HTTP

In the first scenario ESX 3.5 could support as much as 80,000 concurrent accesses (equal to 143,000 HTTP operations per second), in the second one almost 70,000 and in the last one 33,000.

The aggregated and normalized metric is equal 44,000, which is the highest score ever recorded with a 16 cores system.

It’s more than clear that Microsoft is betting on hosting providers to demonstrate how well Hyper-V can perform on large scale virtual infrastructures.

The company is so committed to win the hosting market (something that Parallels should carefully watch) that just released a (much needed) licensing guide: Hyper-V Hosting Guidance: Using and Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Hyper-V Virtual Hosting Scenarios

The 28-pages guide covers every scenario, including:

• Unmanaged dedicated server with Hyper-V
• Virtual dedicated server (VDS) for Web scenarios (using Windows Server guests in anonymous mode)
• Virtual dedicated server with line-of-business (LOB) scenarios (using Windows Server guests in authenticated mode)
• Use of virtualization in shared hosting scenarios
• Desktops as Hyper-V guests
• End customers running Microsoft products using the customers own licenses on the guest OS

As the Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) is not exactly an easy reading this additional help is recommended.

The security vendor Altor Networks released yesterday version 2.0 of its Virtual Firewall (VF).

This new version is able to write the security policies using the virtual machines UUIDs rather then their ever-changing IP addresses.

Additionally VF 2.0 monitors traffic to/from the weakest par of any VMware Infrastructure: the ESX COS.

Overall the company is doing a good job in the integration with the VMware platform (the new installation wizard is really easy to use) but the key part of this integration is still missing: the support for the VMsafe APIs.

VMware is taking forever (so far it’s one year) to release the long-awaited security interface so Altor Networks and its competitors can’t do much more than what they already do to differentiate themselves from a traditional security vendor that distributes and supports its products inside a virtual machine.

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VKernel released yesterday a couple of minor updates for its performance monitor Capacity Analyzer and its chargeback tracker Chargeback.

Capacity Analyzer 3.1 doesn’t include any relevant new feature while Chargeback 1.4 adds the capability to track unexpected runtime errors in the UI and additional currencies for the reports.

The US startup Desktone launched in April 2008 signing impressive partnerships with Verizon, with SoftBank Telecom, with HP and with IBM.

Then the company returned to silent mode until yesterday when it announced a new technology partnership with vmSight.

vmSight offers a performance monitor focused on applications response time in a virtual environment which may be particularly useful in a VDI environment.
DABCC.com published a detailed review of the product that is worth a read.

Desktone will offer the vmSight Center console to its hosted VDI (or Desktop as a Service, DaaS, as they like to call it) providers so to understand which customers are abusing the system and which ones are having a poor experience.

vmSight has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

The young application virtualization startup InstallFree (launched in April 2008) must be really interesting if it was able to hire away a former Thinstall executive from VMware and a former Kidaro executive from Microsoft.

The first one is Jean Morain, who served as Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Thinstall before the VMware acquisition in January 2008.
Prior to Thinstall, Morain was at BMC Software, Inc., where she was senior manager of the Configuration Automation Products Group.
Morain will cover the role of Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances at InstallFree.

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While virtualization professionals are still trying to figure out how the renewed alliance between Microsoft and EMC will work on virtualization, another major event happens: Red Hat joins the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

Pretty much like Cisco (why Cisco is here?), Citrix, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Unisys (why Unisys is here?), Virtual Iron and VMware did in the last few months (the SVVP was launched in June 2008) now also Red Hat had to accept the Microsoft conditions to offer concrete Windows support to its virtualized customers.
As side benefit, the Microsoft customers finally will be able to run Red Hat guest OSes on their Hyper-V hosts.

The agreement implies that:

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For the forth time in few days that benchmarks about Citrix and VMware desktop virtualization (VDI, presentation virtualization and application virtualization) solutions take the central stage.
Is it a sign that somebody is getting nervous?

The first (non-sponsored) analysis came out from two independent enterprise architects, Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp, which evaluated how XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V perform in VDI scenarios.

After an immediate reaction from VMware, a XenDesktop 2.1 Scalability Analysis popped up from Citrix (to be fair this document was released on Jan 12, days before the Spruijt/van de Kamp work, and further updated on Jan 27).

Then an independent performance comparison (committed by VMware) between Microsoft App-V, Symantec/Altiris SVS, VMware ThinApp and Citrix XenApp was released by the Exo Performance Network team.

The last episode of this saga come out last week from the Tolly Group.

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So far Symantec has been almost non-existent in the virtualization market.

The company acquired Altiris in January 2007 and AppStream in April 2008.
In more than two years the application virtualization suite SVS was updated a single time, reaching version 2.1 in June 2007.

In this timeframe not a single word was spent to detail the long-term vision and strategy for the virtualization market, despite the company made additional moves like the acquisition of a VDI connection broker provider called nSuite in August 2008.

Towards the end of last year anyway, some details about a renewed commitment emerged: Symantec renamed Altiris SVS in Workspace Virtualization (SWV), unofficially launching version 6.1 beta program.

Today, finally, we know where all of this will end out.

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After less than seven months since the launch of Backup 2.0, Veeam is ready to fire out a new major release.

Despite the company entered this segment very in late (March 2008) compared to some well-known competitors like Vizioncore, it worked really fast to fill any technology gap and establish itself as a market leader.

To demonstrate it, today Backup 3.0 introduces some remarkable new features (the first three of them are industry first):

• the capability to backup ESX and ESXi (including the free edition) hypervisors without the need of VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
• the capability to offer file-level restore from Linux/Unix/BSD/Mac OS virtual machines backup images
• the support for Windows Server 2008 Volume Shadow Service
• The capability to backup virtual machine templates