Year: 2009

Citrix is not the only company listening to customers feedbacks. After much debate around the decision to kill the vSphere Enterprise Edition by December 15, VMware decided to keep it, as confirmed by Computerworld.

Those customers coming from VI3.5 were entitled to keep their existing Enterprise license while moving to the new vSphere 4.0 platform. But VMware originally planned to kill this upgrade option by the end of the year.
This way the company probably hoped to accelerate the adoption of vSphere or drive slow customers towards the more expensive (and future rich) Enteprise Plus Edition.

VMware reconsidered its strategy after receiving negative feedbacks (here’s an example).
For sure the decision was made well before the Citrix attempt to lure away VMware customers with the Open Door program as virtualization.info has learned.

virtualization.info has learned that Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services at Dell, left the company last week.

Oglesby is one of the most popular names in the virtualization industry, author of the bestsellers VMware ESX Server 2.5 Advanced Technical Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide.
He was one of the premiere speakers at our Virtualization Congress 2009 and he appears on virtualization.info from time to time as guest columnist (see his last article here: Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?).

Rumors report Oglesby as the new Chief Solution Architect at Unidesk (still unconfirmed).

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The article virtualization.info published just last week about Citrix joining the The Linux Foundation generated a lot of interest and comments.
Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, personally answered a few readers about the reasons behind the value of a free XenServer and the strategy behind it.

In doing so Crosby disclosed very interesting information. First he claimed that XenServer costs to VMware $300MM per year in lost revenue, probably a Citrix internal projection considering its current market share.

Much more important than that, today Crosby candidly unveiled that Citrix is about to fully open source XenServer.
You read right: the company CTO is not talking about Xen, which is already developed and maintained by the open source community. He’s talking about its commercial implementation, XenServer, where Citrix invested so far, that is offered as a free product since February and that the Burton Group considered as enterprise-ready as VMware ESX.

Here’s his full answer that contains the breaking news:

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A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced the newest version of its XenDesktop. While the product is about to deliver interesting features, many customers complained about the new licensing scheme because Citrix moved a concurrent user model to a named user model.

The product is not out yet (the release is planned for November 16) but Citrix, listening to the feedbacks, already changed its pricing strategy.

With an informal announcement on his corporate blog, Sumit Dhawan, Vice President of Product Marketing, describes the new rules:

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Yesterday VMware released the first version of its new capacity planning product: vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0 (build 199314).

As the name suggests, the product performs capacity planning on virtual infrastructures, applying continuous what-if analysis to figure out the best arrangement for virtual machines in different scenarios.
It offers reporting and recommendations.

CapacityIQ is made of two components: a vCenter plug-in and a virtual appliance that collects data about the virtual infrastructure in a dedicated database.

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Fortisphere is a US startup that launched in November 2007 with a $10M capital provided by venture firms Fairhaven Capital and Globespan Capital Partners.

The company positioned itself as a player in the almost empty VM lifecycle management market segment with the product Virtual Insight 1.0, that was released in January 2008.

In the subsequent months the company has been extremely active in forming alliances, like the one with VMware about VMsafe or the one with RSA, and joining strategic groups, like the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Vendor Alliance.
In terms of product development, it didn’t show a significant progress, changing the product name from Virtual Insight to Virtual Essentials Service Manager in September 2008.

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Eight months after its previous major release, XenoCode is ready to launch its new application virtualization platform: Virtual Application Studio 2010.

This new edition seems more consistent than the previous one, introducing some must-have features and welcome additions:

• Capability to define expiration date (time bomb) on virtual applications
• Capability to create a single virtual application package for multiple target operating systems
• Capability to publish virtual applications online on the XenoCode content deliver network (CDN) Silver Spoon
• Support for Windows 7

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The startup 5nine is back with its third tool.
Launched in June, the company already released a capacity planning solution that includes a P2V migration tool and a firewall for virtual infrastructures.

The third product, currently in beta and scheduled for release later in Q4, is called Optimizer.

While P2V Planner performs what-if analysis and capacity planning on physical server that need to be converted in virtual machines, Optimizer does the same on already virtualized infrastructures.

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A week ago virtualization.info introduces a new comment system powered by Disqus.
It has a number of features we were really keen to offer: it allows our readers to log-in with their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID profile, it allows threaded conversation (and subscription to them by email and RSS), it allows to vote and flag for review comments, etc.
It even exposes a trackback URL so that our readers know which websites are continuing the discussion started here.

There’s no way to know if this new system helped or if it’s just because of the articles we recently published, but for sure the number of comments we are receiving skyrocketed. 
Some of the last ones are very interesting like one coming from Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

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A few weeks ago the well known virtualization expert and author Mike Laverick decided to offer for free its first book about VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0.

The 298-pages book is available online at Lulu (you pay only if you want a printed copy).

While it’s true that VMware just released SRM 4.0 (which should be 2.0), the book is certainly worth a read, at least to have an independent point of view on the product before adopting it.

Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager covers everything about the implementation and has a couple of interesting additional chapters, the first one on the LeftHand Networks Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), that Laverick used for his research, and the last one on how to do site recovery without VMware SRM.