Year: 2010

Yesterday Oracle, during its OpenWorld conference, announced the availability of a virtualization platform called Oracle VM for SPARC 2.0. In reality this is the new version of the Logical Domains (LDoms) technology, which Sun originally launched in April 2007.

The product should not be confused with Oracle VM for x86, which reached version 2.x in the first half of 2008 and that is heading towards version 3.0.
While LDoms is hardware virtualization platform like the original Oracle VM is has a completely different architecture and capabilities.

LDOMs leverages the capabilities of UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T3 processors, which ship with a built-in hypervisor. 
It allows to create up to 128 virtual machines per physical server, and each can boot a restricted selection of guest operating systems, including Solaris 10 and 11, OpenSolaris (which Oracle recently dropped), Ubuntu Linux Server Edition and OpenBSD.

Despite the great confusion generated by this new naming policy, the new version introduces a few notable features:

Read more

In March VMware launched a new online facility called Labs. It seems a sort of R&D website that exposes company’s engineers pet projects before they turn into real products.

In March Labs was hosting 10 projects but over time the company added more. The last one is called Auto Deploy:

VMware Auto Deploy supports automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems. Auto Deploy allows rapid deployment and configuration of a large number of ESXi hosts. After a DHCP server has been set up, Auto Deploy PXE boots machines that are turned on with an ESXi image. Auto Deploy then customizes the ESXi systems using host profiles and other information stored on the managing vCenter Server system. You can set up the environment to use different images and different host profiles for different hosts.

Like other projects, Auto Deploy is a released as Technology Preview, without any support and without any indication about future inclusion in the VMware product portfolio, anyway an interesting comment from Duco Jaspars hints at the VMware projects about it:

Is this based on the auto deploy appliance that did not make it in to the 4.1 release?

Last week Parallels announced that John Zanni joined the company as its new Vice President of Alliances.

Zanni spent 16 years at Microsoft. His most recent position was as General Manager for Worldwide Consulting Services Software + Services Industry.
Zanni was responsible of the Microsoft offering through service providers for a wide number of products and initiatives, including:

• Unmanged Hosting
• Managed Hosting
• SAAS ISVs
• MSOnline
• Unified Communications
• Subscription Computing
• Live offerings though service providers

Parallels’ well-known strategy is to dominate the profitable hosting industry, and Zanni is probably one the most significant help that the company could get aboard.

Citrix recently lost a well-known professional in the virtualization community: Stephen Spector, its Community Manager for Xen.org.

Spector was at Citrix since 1997, in charge of corporate development with a specific focus on the Alliances and Developer program. After Citrix acquired XenSource, he became the Senior Program Manager for Xen.org, in charge of engaging the open source community around Xen for almost three years.

Spector landed at Rackspace where he’s the new Community Manager for the OpenStack project.

The desktop virtualization organization at VMware continues to morph. After the departure of Jocelyn Goldfein, Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop Business Unit, in June, the company renamed the BU in End-User Computing and hired as its new head Christopher Young, former Senior Vice President of RSA Products at EMC.

Another member of the unit recently left: Richard Flanders, the former Business Development Manager for View.
Flanders held this role at VMware for more than four years. Before that he was the Senior Business Development Manager for Server Solutions at Fujitsu-Siemens.

He landed at MTI, a system integrator focused on virtualization and the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition fabric computing portfolio, as Product Marketing Director.

MTI has been able to close the first European sale of VMware-Cisco-EMC VBlock 1 product, and it’s aggressively expanding its offering across the Europe, especially in UK, Germany and France.

At the end of August, during its VMworld conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) VMware announced the creation of a new End-User Computing business unit.

The company hired Christopher Young, the former Senior Vice President of RSA Products at EMC, as new head for the BU.
Young has been in that position for almost 6 years. Before that he was the Vice President of Safety and Security Premium Services at AOL.

With this move VMware probably wants to send out a strong message, suggesting that security is going to become a key part of its desktop virtualization offering.
A first step in this direction comes from the new vShield products recently announced: the security framework provided by vShield Endpoint is already integrated with View 4.5.
Additionally, the company just acquired TriCipher, a startup providing a single sign-on (SSO) solution for hybrid cloud computing infrastructures, which supports an impressive number of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) public clouds.

In August virtualization.info reported about the departure of Roger Baskerville from Quest.
Baskerville was the XenSource’s EMEA Sales Director before the Citrix acquisition. He then moved to Quest as Vice President of Sales of the EMEA region.

Quest has replaced him with Paul Roberts, former Software Director for the Northern Europe at Sun for more than three years.
Before that, Roberts was the Sales Director of Novell in the UK.
He’s now the new VP of EMEA Sales for the whole Server Virtualization Management Group, formerly known as Vizioncore.

In July the VDI startup Desktone lost its Vice President of Strategy, Jeff Fisher, who took a position at RES Software as Vice President of Business Development. 
At the end of August the company had another change in the executive ranks: its CEO Harry Ruda has been replaced by Peter McKay.

McKay served as executive in the board of directors of many companies for short period of time (no more than 3 years): Apperian, Automated QA, Lagan Technologies and Application Security. He even joined Insight Venture Partners as partner for an even shorter period of time.
The most significant mark of its career anyway is his position as President and CEO of Watchfire, a firm focused on application security testing and compliance management that IBM acquired in mid 2007.

Ruda, who founded Softricity and sold it to Microsoft in 2006, remains in the board of directors as Chairman.

A couple of weeks ago the startup RingCube announced a new addition to its advisory board: Julie Casteel, the former Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at Sitel Corporation, a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) call center provider.

Casteel spent 11 years at Sitel. Before that she has been a Senior Vice President of Sales at the EDS Group for 8 years.

RingCube wants to leverage the Casteel knowledge and position to increase its market share in the BPO and Call Center markets, choosing to focus on specific industries rather than trying to compete with other virtualization vendors on every opportunity.
This strategy has been adopted by at least a competitor of RingCube in the past, Sentillion, which focused its marketing effort on the healthcare industry. Microsoft acquired Sentillion in December 2009 for an undisclosed sum.

The rumors of a two-parts deal reached by Novell to sell its assets continues to be the top discussion of the week.
Apparently, the deal will be finalized within 3-4 weeks. Most analysts suggest that Novell’s strategic buyers may be VMware, Oracle, Red Hat and CA.

A new article published yesterday by the Wall Street Journal confirms that VMware is indeed interested in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) business unit:

Novell Inc. is in advanced talks with at least two buyers, including VMware Inc., to sell the software company in separate pieces, people familiar with the matter said.

Gartner Vice President of Research Chris Wolf weighs in, suggesting why the SUSE acquisition would make sense for VMware:

Read more