Year: 2009

At the end of September virtualization.info published an article suggesting that Microsoft would soon extend the capabilities of Azure to become an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, able to compete against Amazon EC2, the Rackspace Cloud and others.

Last week, during the PCD 2009 conference, the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie confirmed it’s the case, mentioning the capability to move a virtual machine in the cloud.

The same day, in an interview to CNET News, Ozzie further acknowledged that Azure will work as PaaS and IaaS cloud:

Read more

At the end of last week CRN published an interesting piece quoting Chris Akerberg, President and COO of Vizioncore.

Akerberg says that VMware may be soon change its per-CPU pricing scheme to adopt something that is more profitable. And that Vizioncore will have to follow the new strategy.

VMware denied the claim and maybe Akerberg is wrong. But it’s worth to remember that Vizioncore is one of the oldest (and once one of the best) partners VMware has.

At the beginning of November virtualization.info covered an old news about the upcoming launch of Office 2010 powered by App-V.

The product, called Office 2010 Click To Run, will be virtualized and streamed to customers’ desktops on demand. Bink.nu just published some screenshots of it:

Read more

During the weekend VMware released the first Update pack for its vSphere platform.

Update 1 (build 208156) is extremely important as it introduces support for the just released View 4.0.
It also introduces support for:

• up to 160 virtual machines per host (only in HA clusters with 8 hosts or less)
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (both 32/64bit) as guest OSes (and as platform for the vSphere Client)
• IBM DB2 as backend database for vCenter Server 4.0

The Update 1 also introduces a new Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool, which can be executed on the ESX hosts to find out issues that may prevent the upgrade.

The startup Hyper9 (in a previous life InovaWave) released last week the second version of its flagship product.

The company can’t stop to rename it: from VI Search and Analytics (before launch) to just Hyper9 to Virtualization Optimization Suite (VOS) to, now, Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO).

Along with the name, also the product focus seems to be changing. 
Version 1.0 was launched in March as the definitive on-premises search engine for virtual infrastructures, showing many similarities with the well respected Splunk.
Version 2.0, launched last week, is extending in many areas, from performance tracking to capacity planning to configuration management:

Read more

Can HP just stay and look at Cisco that merges-without-merging with EMC and VMware slipping into the customers data centers that it dominates today? Of course not.

So it buys 3Com. So it starts to push a little more the partnership with Microsoft and the value of Hyper-V on its hardware.

Part of this effort includes the release of a new reference architecture for customers that are interested in installing a Hyper-V virtual infrastructure inside a BladeSystem c7000 and c3000, with ProCurve networking and EVA storage.

To be honest the 23-pages paper seems much more a marketing brochure than a reference architecture.
HP has to do much more than this to compete with comprehensive documentation that VMware/Cisco/EMC are releasing.

Last week VMware released an interesting new benchmark study about the thin provisioning feature launched with vSphere 4.0.

The 14-pages paper compares the performance of traditionally pre-allocated VMDK virtual disks (called thick) with the one of new thin provisioned VMDK virtual disks (called thin) in a Fibre Channel SAN.

Compared to thick VMDKs, the thin disks’ space is created and zeroed at the very moment the capacity is needed, so this may have an impact on performance for disk intensive guest applications. 
Besides that, the study suggests that the thick and thin disks perform in very similar ways, during the zeroing phase and after that:

Last week Leostream and Ericom announced a partnership to support the new Ericom accelerator for Microsoft RDP launched in September, Blaze, inside the Leostream Connection Broker.

It is an uncommon move considering that the two vendors compete in the VDI space with a multi-hypervisor connection broker.
Anyway both have to face the competition coming from the platform providers Citrix and VMware, plus the one coming from third parties like Quest/Provision Networks.

Assuming the market will receipt well this combined offering, this effort may lead to further collaboration and even a merge, to stay competitive in the VDI market which is considered by many as ready to explode next year.

So far we have dedicated a lot of space to Oracle, in terms of what virtualization offering it could provide and what mistakes may compromise its presence as a relevant player.

The Sun acquisition has not closed yet, so the company cannot disclose any specific plan. Without concrete information about that, what we have published so far, and what follows below, is pure speculation.
Nonetheless it’s worth spending some more time evaluating the strategy that Oracle may put in place and how it may impact the current players.

As already said many times, now the company is in the unique position to offer an entire computing stack, including servers, storage, the hypervisor, the operating system, the middleware, some of the most used business applications, thin clients, a VDI connection broker and an enterprise management software to coordinate all of the above.
Leveraged in the right way, and assuming Oracle may become a credible virtualization player, it represents a remarkable competitive advantage for some customers (while others can clearly see it as a painful way to lock themselves in).

Read more

In the last two years Cisco made at least two long-term key investments in the server market: invested over $150 million in VMware and became a player with its own blade system Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco wants to sell and interconnect next generation data centers. To do so it needs servers, storage, networking, software abstraction and software management.
EMC is helping with storage and software management, VMware is helping with software abstraction.

The three worked together for some months and then announced a formal coalition, that will sell these integrated data centers through channels and direct relationship with customers (through a company called Acadia).

Read more