Year: 2009

VMware starts the new year hiring away the Borland CEO Tod Nielsen.

Prior to Borland, Nielsen served as senior vice president, marketing and global sales support for Oracle Corporation. Prior to Oracle, Nielsen was the chief marketing officer and executive vice president of engineering at BEA Systems, where he had overall responsibility for BEA’s worldwide marketing strategy and operations, as well as all research and development operations. Nielsen joined BEA after the acquisition of his private company, Crossgain Inc., where he served as its chief executive officer.

Anyway the most interesting news is that Nielsen worked for twelve years at Microsoft where he possibly met Paul Maritz, the new VMware CEO.

Nielsen, who will work as COO and will report directly to Maritz, is the second Microsoft executive that VMware hires.

It’s more than clear that Sun doesn’t want to be a secondary player in the emerging markets, most of all in the virtualization and cloud computing ones.

In the virtualization space the company is developing its own hypervisor, based on Xen, and an enterprise management system that could rival with VMware vCenter.
Unfortunately both xVM Server 1.0 and Ops Center 2.0 are terribly in late and the customers’ hopes to have an open source hypervisor with enterprise-grade support within a reasonable amount of time are fading away.

Sun is also moving to build a concrete presence in the cloud computing space: its general purpose grid computing facility Network.com is being upgraded, probably to mimic the wildly popular Amazon EC2.

And now the company announces the acquisition of Q-layer, a European company offering a management platform, called NephOS, that simplifies the on-demand provisioning of discrete servers, as well as networks and storage resources, and offers per-user chargeback capabilities.

It seems very likely that the next version of Network.com may feature NephOS to further compete with Amazon.

After more than one year of development, Phoenix Technologies is finally ready to sell it client hypervisor: HyperCore.

The company formally announced the consumer version of the product last week at CES 2009, where HyperCore, based on Xen, was launched in two editions:

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Thanks to its fault-tolerance engine, everRun FT, Marathon Technologies became one of the key partner of Citrix in the last year at a point that parts of its product were included in the new XenServer 5.0.

Now Marathon is ready to rock Microsoft Hyper-V as well: last week the company announced a new agreement with Microsoft to develop a future version of the hypervisor which uses everRun as fault-tolerance mechanism.

Once again Citrix and Microsoft are sharing technologies and partners, making their two hypervisors more and more similar in approach and features.
Over time the difference between the two will be in a small set of cutting-edge capabilities that Citrix will implement 18 months before Microsoft, and will sell to enterprises that don’t want to go with VMware anymore for any reason.

After a long beta, the popular (at least in Europe) Login Consultants last week released the first version of their Virtual Session Indexer (VSI).

VSI 1.0 is a free benchmark platform to measure the remote desktop performance in a Terminal Server  farm or in a VDI environment.

To run the tool it’s required to have a 4 tiers infrastructure: a domain controller for the authentication a file server for logging user sessions, a server to host the TS/XenApp/VDI service and a workstation to launch the user sessions.

Here a video of the product in action:

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The first week of 2009 Vizioncore released vRanger Pro 3.2.8.1

Despite the numbering this release introduces a major new feature that many customers were waiting: the full support for VMware ESXi.

Unfortunately, while vRanger Pro is the first solution to offer full and differential backups for the free VMware hypervisor, it can’t be used out-of-the-box: the product can complete the task only with the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) component, which is part of the VMware Infrastructure.

Today Vizioncore announces a name change for its vOptimizer, the product acquired from Invirtus and once known as VM Optimizer.

Just like vRanger Pro the product is now vOptimizer Pro.

The move is a bit strange: over one year ago Vizioncore renamed VM Optimizer in vOptimizer 4.0, saving the version numbering that Invirtus was using.
Now the company is axing that product name and going back to 2.0.

Along with the new name Vizioncore announces a new feature: now vOptimizer Pro can automatically reclaim the wasted space inside the guest OS (Windows only).

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In June 2006 Parallels launched its desktop virtualization product for the Apple market, Parallels Desktop, winning an impressive number of customers.

At that time Microsoft was retiring its Virtual PC for Mac and VMware was considering the Apple market just a niche.
Another year had to pass before VMware could release a competitive product: Fusion.

At that time, despite the immense popularity of VMware in the Windows and Linux words, Fusion couldn’t move a high number of customers away from Parallels.

Now, two years and a half later, the Parallels advantage may be fading away: ArsTechnica mentions a NPD analysis where VMware Fusion has 53% retail market share in North America against 44% of Parallels.

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The virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009 will take place in May 5-7 at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, co-hosted with other three great events (Citrix iForum, Network World Live! and Geek Speak).

On Dec 1st we launched a Call for Papers to deliver some great contents on stage.
In one month, despite the closing quarter and the holidays, we received an amazing 97 submissions.

As promised, today we publish all of them, title and abstract, so you can vote for the most interesting ones and help us to build the event you’d like to attend.
We just removed any reference to the speaker, so there’s an exclusive focus on the topic.

To simplify the whole process we setup a Digg-like interface where you can anonymously promote (up arrow) or demote (down arrow) each presentation.
You can even comment each abstract (and we encourage you to do so), so the speakers can have some early feedbacks and fine-tune their presentations to match your needs.
Last but not least there’s a search if you are looking for something in particular and don’t want to browse all the 97 submissions.

Here we go: http://cfp.virtualizationcongress.com

Some of the proposals you’ll find there:

• Building a Business Case for your virtualization projects
• Cloud Computing Adoption Model
• Designing a Stable Virtual Infrastructure
• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You
• iPhone Virtualization
• Power and Cooling in the Datacenter
• Security Architecture for VDI
• Virtual Infrastructures: Scale Up or Scale Out? Rack or Blade form factors?
• Virtualized Storage for Virtualized IT: Best Practices for Maximizing Efficiency, Flexibility, and Data Protection
• VM Sprawl Case Study Findings