Year: 2009

Just yesterday virtualization.info covered the amazing work of Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts that lead two separate Citrix and VMware solutions providers.

Their Virtual Reality Check project is a performance analysis of the leading hypervisors (VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V) when running typical Microsoft Terminal Services/Citrix XenApp workloads: a Windows XP virtual desktop loaded with Outlook 2007 and Acrobat Reader 8.

Easy to guess, the post achieved one of the highest page view score in the history of virtualization.info, despite other prominent influencers already covered the project the previous week.

The non-sponsored results published by Spruijt and van de Kamp generated a lot of reactions as their conclusion on Citrix XenApp is:

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At the beginning of December 2008 virtualization.info broke the news about the upcoming entrance of Cisco in the x86 server market, revealing some details about a massive blade system codenamed California that will be powered by VMware technology (and probably by EMC storage).
Only two months later the rest of the worldwide press (including mainstream newspapers like the New York Times) confirmed the information.

Cisco (as well as VMware and EMC) stays mum about this project, besides the company’s CTO, Padmasree Warrior, admitted the future entrance in new markets with something called Unified Computing.
It’s even unclear when the three will announce the partnership (VMworld 2009?).
Despite that, we may have the first pieces of the puzzle. And it’s coming from EMC.

Yesterday in fact, Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC (and Top Blogger 2008 for virtualization.info), published one of his amazing posts highlighting the vision of a private cloud in a box:

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At the beginning of 2006 Parallels (at that time called SWsoft) announced the upcoming availability of its first hypervisor: Server.
The company planned to release the product in mid-2006 but after two years and a half it has yet to happen.

To be fair, in June 2008 Parallels released a server product called Server which doesn’t feature a full bare-metal architecture comparable with other hypervisors like VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V.

Despite the early marketing literature (now corrected), the current Parallels Server has a hybrid architecture that makes it more similar to a hosted product like VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server, and in fact it needs to be installed on Apple Mac OS Server.

Nonetheless the company didn’t change its plans: the hypervisor is still under development and will appear for the first time at the ongoing Summit 2009, held in Las Vegas.

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XenoCode is a US company that switched its core business in June 2008 and suddenly entered the application virtualization market with a product called Virtual Application Studio.

The solution was so interesting that Novell decided to close an OEM agreement with the company in September 2008.

Only six months after the first release XenoCode is ready to release the new version of its application virtualization platform.

Virtual Application Studio 2009 introduces a couple of key features:

• support for Active directory deployment
• dynamic virtual layers

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The US startup featuring an interesting end-to-end VDI solution (which doesn’t require Microsoft RDP anymore) just secured additional $6 million from the venture capital firms that participated the Series B funding: Foundation Capital and Goldman Sachs.

With this operation, the total amount of funds raised in this second round of investments is $18 million.

The interest around VDI is growing more and more every day and this startup will need all the money it can collect to compete against giants like VMware (which just announced an open source VDI client) and Citrix (which recently announced a groundbreaking partnership with Intel).

Last week a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts, Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), launched a remarkable project called Virtual Reality Check.

The non-sponsored joint effort produced a set of valuable benchmark comparisons between VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, when running Windows XP and Vista virtual machines for Terminal Services and VDI environments:

• Bare-Metal Platform Index v1.0
• Hyper-V Platform Index v1.0
• VMware Platform Performance Index v1.0
• XenServer Platform Performance Index v1.0

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It really seems like Sun has serious issues to deliver its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server, in time.

The product, along with the enterprise management console Ops Center 2.0, was initially expected for September 10, 2008 but that day Sun, unable to release in time, just re-announced the product line (the first announcement was published in November 2007).

During the second announcement Sun suggested that its virtualization offering may be released within two months (meaning November 2008) but once again the milestone was missed.

Last week, without any press release, Sun decided to release Ops Center 2.0 anyway, despite xVM Server is clearly unready.

At the same time the French magazine LeMagIT (which usually makes great newsbreaks) confirmed that the hypervisor is in late, and that its release is now postponed to Q2 2009.

LeMagIT also unveils that the first edition of xVM Server will not support SAN and iSCSI storage facilities.
For that, customers will have to wait a subsequent release scheduled for H2 2009.

Last week the public companies busy in the virtualization market (VMware, Citrix and Microsoft) reported their Q4 2008 results. While it’s not possible to make a comparison, as both Citrix and Microsoft businesses are not solely depending on virtualization, it’s yet interesting to have an aggregated view of  how they performed.

VMware

• Revenues for the fourth quarter were $515 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $102 million, an increase of 34% from the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $135 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $111 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, compared to $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $142 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, compared to $103 million, or $0.26 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007. 
• Revenues for the full year 2008 were $1.9 billion, an increase of 42% from 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $313 million, an increase of 33% from 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the year 2008 was $469 million, an increase of 39% from 2007.
• GAAP net income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $290 million, or $0.73 per diluted share, compared to $218 million, or $0.61 per diluted share, for 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the year 2008 was $416 million, or $1.05 per diluted share, compared to $295 million, or $0.82 per diluted share, for 2007. 
• Cash was more than $1.8 billion and deferred revenue was $870 million as of December 31, 2008. Since the beginning of 2008, cash increased 50% and deferred revenue increased 57%.

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As most virtualization.info readers know by now, VMware is preparing to change the name of its flagship product bundle: Virtual Infrastructure.
The new name that emerged at the end of December 2008, during the beta phase, is vSphere.

Despite this plan the company may have some issues in using this name as it’s a copyrighted term, registered by a US company called Surface Optics Corporation.

One of the company employees informally highlighted the possible (and future) copyright violation by commenting a post on the Jason Boche blog, a well-know VMware expert.

It’s unclear if the threat is concrete or not, but possibly vSphere was just the name used during the beta, so there’s no risk of copyright infringement at all.

Cisco isn’t ready yet to call its virtual switch for VMware ESX 4.0, the Nexus 1000V, out of beta, but one of its employees already published a pretty detailed diagram of its architecture.

Besides the diagram, the entire blog post is really interesting as it details how the virtual switch will work:

• The Nexus 1000V software on the physical server acts like a line card of a modular switch, described as a VEM (virtual ethernet module)
• The Nexus 1000V VEM is a direct replacement of the VMWare vSwitch function
• The Nexus 1000V VSM (virtual supervisor module) acts like the supervisor engine of a modular switch
• One Nexus 1000V VSM instance manages a single ESX cluster of up to 64 physical servers
• The form factor of Nexus 1000V VSM can be a physical appliance or a virtual machine
• The network administrator manages the Cisco Nexus 1000V (from the VSM) as a single distributed virtual switch for the entire ESX cluster
• Each virtual machine connects to its own Virtual Ethernet (vEthernet) port on the Nexus 1000V providing the network administrator traffic visibility and policy control on a per virtual machine basis.  Virtual machines can now be managed like physical servers in terms of their network connectivity
• …

Thanks to Scott Lowe for the news.