Year: 2009

The just announced partnership between Citrix and Intel certainly raised some serious concerns among the many virtualization companies that are developing a client hypervisor.
At least one of the them may be safe anyway: Virtual Computer.

The startup founded by Alex Vasilevski, the founder and CTO of Virtual Iron, launched in September 2008 and its product NxTop, currently in private beta, is really overlapping the Citrix plans to deliver an end-to-end VDI solution.

Despite that, today the company announces Citrix, along with Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, granted a second round of funding for as much as $15 million.

It’s a bold move, considering the investment that Citrix already has in place with Intel, and it may imply a future acquisition.

The news also highlights how active Citrix is becoming in the virtualization market, investing in a number of startups (just ten days ago the company invested in Open Kernel Labs) that may provide innovative products in the next few years.

Without any clamor, last week Citrix released a web version of its virtualization management console XenCenter.

The product, called XenCenterWeb, has limited capabilities as it can’t do much more than list the avialable virtual machines and start/restart/stop them.

Rather than selling the product, Citrix is currently offering it as a Resource Kit component that any partner and customer can download free of charge.
The company doesn’t even support it in an official way.

Nonetheless the product is interesting and may turn into a major feature of future versions of XenServer.

Along with its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server, Sun is preparing to launch the third version of its connection broker: xVM VDI 3.0.
The Early Access program will be open within the end of this month.

The strange thing is that instead of supporting the upcoming bare-metal virtualization platform, Sun decides to introduce support for xVM Virtual Box, the hosted virtualization product for the consumer market that the company acquired from innotek in February 2008.

It’s unclear why a customer may want to use a hosted platform (which is definitively slower compared to a hypervisor) to run a resource-consuming VDI environment.
Hopefully Sun will share some performance comparisons to understand how many virtual desktops can fit inside a VirtualBox host.

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Last week Citrix almost silently released its much awaited orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.

The first news about the product emerged almost one year ago, but the company didn’t provide access to the bits before June 2008.

Workflow Studio is key piece in the Citrix virtual infrastructure vision as it delivers the mandatory automation layer that makes smart any cloud computing or dynamic data center environment.

This market segment is pretty empty: one of the few serious competitors was Dunes Technologies, which was acquired by VMware in September 2008 and that is about to relaunch as vCenter Orchestrator.

At its first version the product, built on Microsoft PowerShell, is able to automate a number of tasks in XenServer/XenCenter, XenDesktop, XenApp and NetScaler, through an intuitive GUI.
As some of these products supports 3rd party solutions (for example XenDesktop supports VMware ESX), Workflow Studio can automate some of their capabilities as well.

Additionally, any Citrix partner can further extend the platform providing its own automation script (as Workflow Templates and Tasks Libraries).

The product is available for any Citrix customer that has a Subscription Advantage.

Replicate Technologies is the latest virtualization startup emerged in 2008. Last November the company launched Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA), a very interesting configuration management tool.

The product obtained some consensus among the virtualization experts and Replicate worked hard to immediately improve RDA as the early feedbacks suggested,

The new 1.2 version released last week includes a new Knowledge Module, as they call it, that indentifies networking miconfiguration (for example around routing and subnetting).
The module can even operate at the virtual machines level, recognizing if a guest operating system has a network issue (like a duplicate IP address).

Besides this module, RDA 1.2 introduces support for VMware ESXi.

While waiting to replace Xen with KVM somewhere in H1 2009, Red Hat continues to improve its current virtualization platform.

In the new Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3, released this week, the company greatly extended the supported Xen limits:

• from 8 to 32 vCPUs
• from 64GB to 80GB vRAM
• from 32 to 126 pCPUs
• from 64GB to 1TB pRAM

Additionally the Xen included in RHEL 5.3 supports the Intel nested paging tables technology EPT featured inside the new Intel Core i7 (codename Nehalem) processors.

Phoenix Technologies doesn’t seem much scared by the recently announced partnership Citrix and Intel to develop a client hypervisor.

In fact, despite both Citrix’s Project Independence and Phoenix Technologies’ HyperCore are client hypervisors based on Xen, the former seems to be part of a complete VDI platform built to satisfy the highest end of the enterprise market, while the latter seems rather targeting the consumer market and the SMBs.

To further demonstrate that its just released HyperCore is not threatened by Project Independence, Phoenix announces a major partnership with ASUS, which will include the hypervisor in its future notebooks.

ASUS certainly has a lot of interest to slip this product into its EEE PCs: Phoenix developed HyperCore hoping that it would serve virtual machines running just a single program (like an Internet browser or a video player) in place of Windows.
And this is exactly what the ASUS customers need to save the short battery life of their netbooks.

It’s clear that Phoenix is trying to partner with every notebook vendor on the market. Besides ASUS, the company already closed a similar deal with NEC in July 2008.

Andrew Kutz, the man who did reverse engineering of the VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 (now vCenter) plug-in system, creating a number of tremendously helpful unofficial plug-ins, is back.

This time Kuts launches a more ambitious project: a management interface for mobile devices (yes, including the iPhone and Google Android phones) that supports multiple hypervisors.

Dubbed Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM) the product is currently in beta and already supports VMware Infrastructure 3.5, Microsoft Hyper-V 2008, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and even VMware Server 2.0.

VMM allows to turn on and off any virtual machine and control its resource consumption (vCPU and vRAM).

To make this possible Kutz developed a Unified Virtualization API (UVAPI) that can even be extended by 3rd party developers.

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PHD Technologies continues to renew itself: in August 2008 the company secured an undisclosed sum that is using to acquire technologies and competency as well as to rebuild its leadership.
After appointing Sridhar Murthy as CEO and Igor Saulsky as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales, now the company appoints Joe Julian as member of the Board of Directors:

Julian formerly worked as Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Global Accounts for Veritas Software. In this role, Julian managed the sales, pre-sales, and support renewal operations for all products in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. In addition, he was responsible for the launch of Veritas’ Global Accounts Program, which included 20 global accounts worldwide and the National Accounts program in the United States. Julian also served as an active board member and strategic consultant to Avamar Technologies, leading up to Avamar’s acquisition by EMC in 2006.

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Surprisingly enough in the last few months Intel sold many of its VMW shares (some of them were acquired by Cisco). There may be a good reason: Intel has some serious business to do with the VMware’s competitor Citrix.

Last Friday the two announced a joint effort (codenamed Thunder Lake) to develop a version of Xen for consumer equipment like desktops and laptops (something the industry is calling a desktop or client hypervisor).

Of course the product is not developed for the consumer market, but for the big enterprises with a large-scale population of clients. For this reason Citrix and Intel will offer the new hypervisor along with a centralized management system to control the hypervisor distribution, a delivery mechanism that works on bare-metal hardware, and a security wrapper around the virtual machines to enforce granular access control policies.
The entire platform will be optimized for Intel vPro technology.

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