Year: 2009

Last week mainstream news magazines Network World and Business Journal suggested that two major IT vendors, Novell and Dell, are ready to make some acquisitions in the virtualization space.

Network World is reporting the Novell President and CEO’s words:

…Novell is now planning to extend the technology to provide tools to users that will enable them to move workloads from virtual environments to a cloud computing model…

Business Journal instead is speculating that Dell may want to acquire Egenera, countering the HP’s acquisition of Opsware:

Dell officials have suggested that it’s time for the company to do more deals to expand its revenue base to compete with rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
The question is: Will it gamble on large acquisitions or continue with a track record of relatively conservative deals?

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Yesterday Quest held its Q4 2008 earning call and its new President and CEO Douglas Garn reported a couple of interesting details talking about the virtualization subsidiaries:

• On the service side of our virtualization, Vizioncore continues to deliver very strong results. We had record revenue in Q4, despite the economic conditions. We closed out the year of 2008 with over 15,000 clients within Vizioncore, which is absolutely remarkable. Certainly we’re hoping that they more than double that this year.
• On the desktop side, again we continue to see strong traction on the desktop virtualization area. Customers are highly interested and we’re engaged in many, many positive opportunities. We’ve signed a significant OEM deal with one of the top tier one hardware vendors and it’s a nice size opportunity for us, but cannot give you any more detail.

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One of the missions of virtualization.info is to report about new vendors entering the virtualization market with valuable, innovative products.

We believe so much that promoting the virtualization startups is the right thing to do that we decided to use the Virtualization Congress 2009, to do so.

Less than one month ago we launched a contest, calling for all the early-stage companies that want to launch for the first time at our conference in Las Vegas in May.
Six of them will be selected to present their brands and products on stage (for free) and one of them will get a year of advertising on virtualization.info (for free).

Today we are happy to announce that we have the first submission.
Of course we’ll not unveil the name of the submitting companies, but in April we’ll announce those selected to present on stage.

Some of the leading architects in the virtualization community will be at the Virtualization Congress to speak.
Some of these guys, along with many potential customers and partners (and buyers), will attend the Call for Startups general session, so this will be a great exposure opportunity.

Remember: for the Virtualization Congress 2009 US we accept submissions up to March 31, and we’ll select just six startups. So be sure to apply as soon as possible.

In October 2008 Christopher Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys (and virtualization.info Top Blogger for 2008) denounced how the PCI Standard Council didn’t demonstrate much interest for virtualization.

Just one month later VMware was joining the Council.

Now, magically, a Special Interest Group (SIG) for virtualization is coming, as reported by Troy Leach, Technical Director of the PCI SSC:

A SIG for virtualization is coming this year but we don’t have any firm dates or objectives as of yet.  Only those 500-600 companies (which include VMware, Microsoft, Dell, etc) that are participating organizations or the 1,800+ security assessors can contribute. As you can imagine with those numbers, we already receive thousands of pages of feedback and are obligated to read all comments and suggestions.

Thanks to Christopher Hoff for the news.

The last week discussion about XenServer vs ESX (vs Hyper-V) for VDI scenarios, ignited by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and followed up by VMware, is still hot.
So maybe it’s worth to further discuss the topic by highlighting a recent paper published by Citrix: XenDesktop 2.1 Scalability Analysis.

The first part of the 29-pages document describes how a Citrix XenDesktop infrastructure (including XenServer, XenApp, the Desktop Delivery Controller connection broker) was tested against Provisioning Server for Desktops (to deliver new virtual desktops) and EdgeSight (to simulate application workloads) to measure its scaling capability.

The analysis was summarized in the following XenDesktop Environment Sizing Guide:

Microsoft is preparing a new key document for its virtualization customers: the Hyper-V Security Guide.

Considering the mission-critical role of any hypervisor, this guide should be available since day one (but Microsoft is not the only virtualization vendor to blame for the lack of security guidance).

The document is divided in three chapters:

• Hardening Hyper-V
• Virtual machine management and delegation
• Protecting virtual machines

So far it doesn’t seem particularly rich and Microsoft will have to greatly enhance the first chapter to make it a valuable resource, but it already offers some little jewels like the Hyper-V Attack Surface Reference Workbook.

The Hyper-V Security Guide is now in (public) beta testing so anybody can enroll for the program and download it right now.

These days Microsoft Powershell seems the driving force behind all attempts to automate virtual infrastructures:

• Citrix released an orchestration platform, Workflow Studio, built on Powershell
• VMware released version 1.5 of its VI Tookit (aka Powershell SDK)
• Quest released its PowerGUI PowerPack 2.0 for VMware (aka VMware multi-host management through Powershell)
• icomasoft, a Swiss startup, released its VI PowerScripter Professional (aka VMware vCenter plug-in to execute Powershell scripts)

Last week Citrix validated Powershell once again by releasing its Powershell SnapIn for XenServer.

Ewan Mellor, Principal Software Engineer at Citrix, posted some basic examples (here and here) of what can be done with the Microsoft scripting language on XenServer.

The US company Leostream is slowly awaking from the long sleep: after securing $3 Million in May 2008, the company appointed a new Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, secured a couple of partners (through a reseller agreement with IBM and a technology partnership with eG Innovations), and even redesigned its website.

The company also dropped its P2V migration tool, P > V Direct, to fully focus on its current flagship product, a VDI connection broker.

Despite all of that, the Leostream progress really seems slow: Connection Broker 5.0 was released in September 2007 and last week, after almost one year and a half, the product reached version 5.3.

This minor update introduced support for Citrix XenApp 4.5 and the capability to remotely upgrade the Leostream Connect client.

Virtual machines live migration capabilities offered by technologies like VMware VMotion, Citrix XenMotion or Virtual Iron LiveMigration are one of the wonders of virtualization. But it’s not a secret that these protocols require dedicated, high-performance networks.

So it’s good to know that BreakingPoint, a leader in the network equipment testing space, is now offering an appliance able to simulate VMware VMotion traffic.

Two weeks ago the company announced this new feature on top of their NFS/SMB/CIFS simulators.
Their appliance can reproduce the traffic above up to 40GBps.

It would be nice to know if the upcoming vCenter 4.0 will change the characteristics of VMotion, and if so when BreakingPoint will support the new protocol.

Idealstor is a a US vendor focused on disk to disk backup solutions. Their flagship product, iBac, offers a continuous data protection (CDP) approach and it’s available for Windows only.

In December 2008 the company extended the iBac capabilities to support VMware Infrastructure.

The new iBac Virtual Infrastructure Proxy (VIP) interacts with vCenter through the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework to backup virtual machines.

The original iBac licensing mode was based on the number of ESX hosts involved in the backup/recovery operation.
Two weeks ago Idealstor added a second licensing mode based just on the number of vCenters.