Year: 2009

Today we’ve closed the voting session for the Virtualization Congress 2009 US Call for Papers.
As many of you probably read in the past weeks, the initiative was very successful as we collected 98 submissions (and more are coming in these hours).

It’s amazing the time that our readers took to review them and vote.
Unfortunately, somebody tried to abuse the chance to vote anonymously (something we did to not bother people with yet another registration system) and cheated in a shameless way. But we have the proper tools to discover which votes are inflated.
Besides that your feedback has helped us a lot to understand how the agenda should be. Thanks!

Now it’s time for another call: the Call for Startups.
On stage we don’t want just the best speakers talking about the real-world challenges in planning, designing, implementing and maintaining virtual data center.

The Virtualization Congress wants to be also a place where new virtualization firms can launch and show revolutionary new technologies.

This year we’ll offer the stage, at no cost, to maximum six early-stage startups.
Each of them will have at least 10 minutes to demo their product, for the first time, in front of the Virtualization Congress audience.

At the end of the show the attendees will be able to vote for the most interesting company and the winner will get an entire year of advertising on virtualization.info.
That’s correct: the winner will be able to place a banner on virtualization.info for 12 months, completely free.

The list of virtualization vendors that have advertised with us so far speaks by itself, and with the tough economy we have these days we believe that this is a valuable prize.

Read the rules and apply here.

As most virtualization.info readers know, Microsoft offers two flavors of its hypervisor: the first is part of the Windows operating system, no matter if it’s the Server Core version or the fully-featured one, the second is a stand-alone product.

There are some remarkable differences between the two: the former places Windows Server 2008 in its parent partition, using its driver model and licensing terms, while the latter comes with a minimal version of Windows (even smaller than Server Core) and thus can offer just a subset of features. Additionally, this second version can’t use the licensing term of its parent partition OS, so the customers must use it with existing licenses (for example the ones of Windows Server 2003 guests) or buy new ones.

Just one week after releasing Hyper-V 2.0 as part of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 beta 1, Microsoft is also releasing the stand-alone version of the beta.

There is welcome surprise: the two R2 versions are fundamentally the same, and even this stand-alone product ships with both Quick and Live Migration:

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The expansion of Quest in the virtualization space isn’t finished yet: after acquiring Invirtus in June 2007 (which was merged with Vizioncore), Provision Networks in November 2007 (which is now Quest Desktop Virtualization Group) and the remaining part of Vizioncore in January 2008 (which will be Quest Server Virtualization Group sooner or later), the company wants an abstraction layer for the storage and announces today the acquisition of MonoSphere.

MonoSphere is a storage vendor that approached the world of virtualization in early 2008, introducing the idea of dark storage: the storage space wasted by inefficient capacity allocation.

The company states that customers waste on average 30% of storage despite the yearly spending raises of 10% to 15% every year.

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With 2009 it seems that Quest finally decided to leave the shadows and roll out its new go-to-market strategy for the virtualization industry.

The first place where the company is pushing its brand is Provision Networks, the startup focused on VDI and presentation virtualization that Quest acquired in November 2007.

The subsidiary launches today the version 6.0 of its Virtual Access Suite (VAS) but the original brand disappeared (replaced by a Quest Desktop Virtualization Group logo) and the product is now called vWorkspace.

Besides the brand and name, vWorkspace 6.0 introduces some important features:

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The US startup ToutVirtual is slowly trying to reemerge from the oblivion where two years of almost zero progresses put it.

In October 2008 the company announced the support for Microsoft Hyper-V, now it announces the availability of VirtualIQ Pro 3.0.

It’s not exactly clear when the product reached version 2.0, but this new 3.0 at least has some interesting features:

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Sun continues to be terribly in late with the release of its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server 1.0, and the related enterprise management platform, xVM Ops Center 2.0.

Nonetheless the company continues to tease with bits of information. Today part of the documentation for the two products appeared online.

The corporate wiki reveals some useful information, like the amount of virtual CPUs supported per virtual machine (two at maximum), the availability of Live Migration and resource pools, or the list of supported guest operating systems:

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It really seems that the wave of executive departures that Virtual Iron suffered in 2008 didn’t impact the business.
The company in fact reports a healthy growth for the second quarter in a row with a 65% increase in revenues from the fourth quarter of 2007 as compared to revenues in the same period in 2008.

In Q4 2008 Virtual Iron reported a 130% growth.

In the last few years Virtual Iron never reported such high numbers: so or the company is really improving its communication capabilities (maybe the just hired Susan Roberts is the key here), or the leadership change is bringing some positive effects, or it’s just a coincidence.

The frenetic activity of VKernel in the last months seems to have repaid the US startup.

Today the company reports the results of its first year of activity:

• 164% revenue increase in Q4 2008
• 100 paying customers
• 8,000 products downloads

It’s certainly a good result considering the current economy, but VKernel may find a hard time to keep these results in 2009, as VMware is entering the chargeback and performance analysis segments where the startup is focusing.

The second version of Hyper-V is much awaited as Microsoft promised to introduce with it a virtual machine live migration technology that could rival with VMware VMotion and Citrix XenMotion.

As it seems that customers can’t live without this capability, the news that Microsoft won’t deliver Hyper-V 2.0 before 2010 immediately put the company out of competition for another year.

But Microsoft learned from the errors of the past and it’s trying to announce less and deliver more. So, with much surprise the new version of the hypervisor came out last week, as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta.

This first build, available for download to the general public, includes all the features already announced in a whitepaper in November 2008 plus some more:

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Putting aside the much criticized emphasis about cloud computing, the biggest announcement of VMworld 2008 was that VMware is going to broaden its scope and product portfolio in 2009, invading pretty much every market segment and creating a lot of concerns for some of its partners.

VMware isn’t ready yet to show the new vCenter modules and stand-alone products mentioned on stage, but it’s teasing the customers with their names and core features:

• VMware Fault Tolerance
• VMware VMSafe
• VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch
• VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
• VMware vCenter Data Recovery
• VMware vCenter ConfigControl
• VMware vCenter Orchestrator
• VMware vCenter Chargeback
• VMware vCenter AppSpeed (formerly B-hive Conductor)

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