Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
At the end of August, Citrix announced a new major effort around Xen and cloud computing to counter the release of VMware vCloud Express.
The details of this project were scarce at that time and beyond the name, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), and the intent to integrate new and existing technologies, Citrix didn’t disclose much more.
Now the things are getting cleaver, with the Xen.org entity detailing the list of proposed components for XCP 1.0 and makes available the platform for download:
Last week, at its TechEd Conference in Berlin, Microsoft published updated roadmaps for most of its products.
The most interesting one from a virtualization perspective is the one about System Center family.
It seems that Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will not receive any major update before 2011:
Five months after the first beta, Microsoft is ready to push out the beta 2 of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, a special version of the popular IDE that interacts with Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to provide a fully featured virtual lab automation platform.
There’s not really much to say about this new beta, expect reporting a few improvements in the setup and administrative GUI, along with support for network fencing with virtual machines that are acting as domain controllers (this last one is a very welcome addition).
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Last week Lanamark, another startup that, like VKernel, could be impacted by the launch of VMware CapacityIQ, released Suite 2009 R2.
And like VKernel, Lanamark is looking around, introducing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, along with refreshed support for VMware (now up to vSphere 4.0) and Citrix (now up to XenServer 5.5).
Suite 2009 R2 also introduces enhancements to its online dashboard, but the most important thing is that the product can now collect data from up to 50,000 systems.
At the moment the company only offers a hosted version of its platform, but if VMware CapacityIQ will start to get some traction, Lanamark may be obliged to reconsider its go-to-market strategy and give the product on-premises.
Just a few weeks after the release of VMware Fusion 3.0, Parallels answers with Desktop for Mac 5.0.
The company released the previous edition of this hosted virtualization platform exactly one year ago.
The new version 5.0 focuses on performance, claiming a 300% improvement on virtual machines operations (like start/stop a virtual machine) and up to 22% faster performance compared to Fusion (the study was conducted by Crimson Consulting Group but there’s no documentation for that).
Beyond that, the product ships features that seem on par with the ones provided by Fusion 3.0, with some advantages here and there:
At the end of October VMware released its first capacity planning tool: CapacityIQ.
As always happens when a market leader expands into a new segment, its previous partners suddenly turn into competitors.
Some of them are able to keep the pace and deliver value on top of the new product, but this requires a number of resources that not every startup has, and a cooperation between the two companies that the newcomer may be uninterested in.
VMware is in the capacity planning space since ever with its hosted and free service Capacity Planner. But so far the product has been accessible only to the Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), which granted enough room to the partners to sell their on-premises products.
Yesterday, finally, Red Hat announced the availability of its new virtualization offering, which includes a platform based on KVM and an enterprise virtualization manager.
The company already released Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 in mid September, which features KVM in the same way (despite technical differences in the architecture) Microsoft Windows Server 2008 features Hyper-V.
The problem is that RHEL 5.4 plus KVM may be not enough to compete against lightweight, dedicated platforms like VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer. Additionally, RHEL 5.4 lacks of enterprise management tools that customers can use to control large scale virtual data centers.
This gap is filled today with the release of Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) and Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers (REVMS).
REVH is a stripped down version of RHEL 5.4, with the following characteristics (partial list):
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As expected, today VMware, Cisco and EMC announced a special alliance, a coalition as they call it, dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE).
This entity will share investments to sell the components, training and consulting for a number of bundle packages called Vblocks.
The VCE will also count on a partners ecosystem, which already counts on six system integrators: Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.
The Vbocks can be deployed at customers data centers or hosted online.
To design them, operate them on behalf of the customers, or just transfer them from the hosting facility to the customers data centers, Cisco and EMC created a special joint venture called Acadia
VMware and Intel invested in Acadia too, and the company will start operating in 2010.
It’s not clear why the system integrators above cannot do that instead of Acadia.
At its launch VCE will offer three Vblocks:
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At the end of the last week Reuters broke the news about an upcoming joint venture between EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco.
The three should announce a new product portfolio this week, called vBlock, probably gluing together Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus, EMC V-Max and VMware vSphere, which the joint venture will sell as a hosted service.
And if the customer wants it, the vBlock gear can be moved inside the company’s boundaries.
At the end of September virtualization.info published an article about the strong alliance that these three companies are building and how it’s going to impact the VMware partnership with the other OEMs and how it’s going to influence the perception that customers have of the VMware position in the market.
We expect the official announcement before publishing further comments, but it’s clear that this joint venture is going to modify the landscape in some serious way.
