Year: 2010

To pitch its upcoming conference, the analysis firm Gartner just published a new forecast about virtualization: only 25% of all server workloads will be in a virtual machine by year-end 2010.

The Vice President of Research Philip Dawson also added:

Virtualization will continue as the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015, changing how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge…

Even more interestingly, Gartner reports that licensing still is a key challenge in virtualization adoption:

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In mid July Citrix hired the SAP Chief Virtualization Evangelist Roland Wartenberg. As virtualization.info already wrote at that time: in 2006 he developed the virtualization strategy for the SAP Labs division, actively pushing the company’s marketing message about virtualization through the many SAP Virtualization Week events arranged around the world in the following years.

The investment returned almost immediately, as Citrix recently announced SAP full support and certification to run its applications on a Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) virtual machine hosted by XenServer:

SAP customers can now take advantage of a full certified and supported end-to-end process, including XenServer as an underlying platform in the data center for SAP application execution or for XenApp delivered SAP end-user interfaces, NetScaler for secure employee or customer access to SAP applications via the network, and Citrix Receiver for delivery of the application to the SAP end-user’s virtual desktop.

Microsoft just released version 3.0 of their free Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST). This version is the follow-up of version 2.1 which was released in December 2009 and is the result of the beta which started in May this year.

The VMST is a patch management solution which can be used to update stopped or saved state VM’s on a Hyper-V or Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 host . And also VM Templates, offline VM’s and offline Virtual Hard Disks(VHD) stored in the VM Library of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). In order to achieve this, the tool applies updates to the VHD using so called Servicing Jobs.

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Kaviza announced the release of version 3.1. of their VDI-in-a-box connection broker Software. Version 3.1 is the follow up of version 3.0 which was released in July 2010.

Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require a shared storage and dedicated, load balanced connection brokers.
The customer just has to deploy the vendor’s virtual appliance on its hypervisor of choice and he’s ready to go.

Version 3.1. introduces the following enhancements:

• Support for Citrix Receiver as a remote desktop software client
• Smart Card Support including the Department of Defense (DoD) Common Access Card (CAC) cards
• Support for 64-bit virtual desktops

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Forbes recently published an interview with Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center & Cloud division at Citrix, about a number of topics.

The title, Oracle Needs To Step Up Or Shut Up!, doesn’t seem to reflect the current relationship between Citrix and Oracle, as Crosby performed a part of the keynote at the just ended Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference. But this is not the interesting part.

What’s really interesting is Crosby revealing the Citrix goals for the virtualization market:

…Now, admittedly we have less enterprise share than VMware, but our projected run rate for XenServer goes up year after year and we are now expecting 18 to 20% market share, dominated by SME, some large enterprise and some monster cloud providers…

At the end of June Microsoft published a new paper against VMware titled: Operational Efficiency – Hyper-V versus VMware ESX & vSphere Operations & Management Cost Analysis.

The 17-pages report, released by a new War on Cost team at Microsoft, includes a research conducted in late 2009 and early 2010 by HANSA/GCR, which delivered a web-based survey to enterprises with 500 PCs or greater and collected the results.

The goal was to determine which platform, between Hyper-V and ESX, is less expensive in IT labor to operate on an on-going basis, and try to understand if the systems management products used to manage the environment impact the cost of managing either or both platforms.

The claimed results are quite interesting:

• the average costs were $10,357 per guest when hosted on Hyper-V versus $13,629 per guest when hosted on VMware, a 24% savings for Hyper-V versus VMware (but Microsoft admits that the IT labor costs varied widely based on the customer maturity)
• the average customer would spend $6,828,142 in IT Labor to run 501 Windows Server guests on VMware versus $5,189,233 in IT labor to run the same 501 guests on Hyper-V, an annual labor savings of $1,638,909 when using Hyper-V

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Starting 1995, the analysis firm Gartner started using a graph called Hype Cycle to represent the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.
virtualization.info missed the 2010 edition of the Hype Cycle for the virtualization market, released in June.

The 33-pages research that describes where different virtualization technologies are in the cycle, is available free of charge courtesy of Intel.
The mapping is really interesting for a number of reasons:

• Workspace virtualization (a technology that virtualization.info usually calls platform wrapper referring to products like Microsoft MED-V or VMware ACE) is placed at the very bottom of the curve, in the Technology Trigger section, and Gartner suggests that it will require another 5 to 10 years before mainstream adoption
• Smartphone hypervisors (like the upcoming VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform) are in the same section with the same timeline for mainstream adoption
• Virtual machine introspection technology (enabled by security frameworks like VMware VMsafe for example) is almost in the Peak of Inflated Expectations section, and its mainstream adoption is expected within 2-5 years

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VKernel recently published a new paper titled The Top 20 VMware Performance Metrics You Should Care About.

It’s a pretty interesting document not just because of the topic, but also because it goes straight to the point, solely focusing on the metrics that VKernel considers critical to reveal virtual machines performance issues. It provides a short description for each of them with, explaining why they are important, without trying to promote the VKernel products at all (not directly at least).

The 20 metrics are divided as follow:

CPU metrics

• cpu.extra.summation
• cpu.ready.summation
• cpu.usagemhz.average

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Ruben Spruijt, of Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) fame, CTO at PQR, just released version Application Virtualization Smackdown 3.0, a free research that compares all the major platform available on the market.

Released for the first time in April 2007, over time the paper has become richer and more comprehensive. This version 3.0 is a must-read independent resource for any company interested in adopting application virtualization technologies.

The 56-pages document compares products from Endeavors Technologies, Citrix, InstallFree, Microsoft, Spoon (formerly XenoCode), Symantec and VMware:

As part of new, smart marketing move, Veeam just started to give away a free book: The Expert Guide to VMware Data Protection and Disaster Recovery written by the well known virtualization expert and prolific writer Eric Siebert.

The company didn’t publish a full table of contents for it, so potential readers will have to be content with the promise of: the key virtualization concepts, comparison of virtual and traditional backup, best practices for VMware data protection and real-life examples.

Veeam is giving away a chapter at a time and of course you have to register to have it. The first one is available now.

And if this one is not enough, just remember that virtualization.info has a nice list of titles on its Bookstore, including others from Siebert.