Year: 2010

At the recently ended VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) VMware announced its management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms: vCloud Director (formerly project Redwood).

A number of sources confirmed to virtualization.info that the product development started from the engine of Lab Manager, the virtual lab automation solution that VMware acquired from Akimbi in June 2006 for $59M.
Now that vCloud Director is out it will be interesting to see what happens to Lab Manager, mostly now that Citrix just acquired a competitive technology from VMLogix.

Jason Boche, a well-known virtualization expert in the VMware community, focused on the topic on his personal blog, recognizing a significant lack of development effort for this product:

…4.0 was released in July 2009 which provided compatibility with the recent launch of vSphere, that’s really it.

…

Development efforts are being put forth merely to keep up compatibility with the vSphere releases.  Lab Manager documentation hasn’t been updated since the 4.0 release.  The 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 versions both point back to the 4.0 documentation.  Lab Manager documentation hasn’t been updated in over a year even considering two Lab Manager code releases since then.  Further evidence there has been no recent feature development in the Lab Manager product itself…

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At the end of July a new startup called Pancetera entered the virtualization market with a solution, Unite, to manage and optimize virtual storage in VMware virtual infrastructures.

The storage management component is called SmartView.
SmartView aggregates all the storage resources available inside the virtual infrastructure as a hierarchy, under the P: virtual drive.

The storage optimization component is called SmartRead.
This piece of the solution cuts unnecessary I/O operations by marking which parts of the virtual machine disk file are redundant or no longer in use. SmartRead recreates a normalized VM that is ready to boot while consolidating active data and synthesizing a dedupe optimized VMDK file.

Pancetera recently updated Unite to version 1.2.1, introducing a few new features:

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In July virtualization.info reported about the roadmap of SPICE, the high-performance remote protocol that Red Hat acquired from Qumranet in September 2008 and turned into an open source project in December 2009: apparently, SPICE won’t hit its first production-ready version before H2 2011 even.

The new stable release, 0.6, which is not compatible with 0.4 clients, has been released at the end of August.
It introduces a few new features:

• Surfaces
  The older spice protocol drew directly on the frame buffer. The surfaces work lets the driver draw on an offscreen surface, and then use that surface as a source when drawing.
  This is a requirement for an efficient implementation of an X driver, as offscreen pixmaps are a very common thing in X. It is also very useful for Windows 7, as it lets Windows use a surface for every toplevel window which leads to much reduced redrawing and thus bandwidth use.
• WAN optimization
  Photo-like bitmaps compression with a lossy algorithm, addition of an entropy-based compression layer over GLZ.
• Support for ARM7 (the one used by the iPhone 3GS and 4, for example)
  SPICE is being ported on ARM architectures and recently landed on a Nokia N900

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The recently ended VMware VMworld 2010 conference has been a great show in many ways. 17,000 attendees, a clear and articulated vision, a number of interesting new products, and highly popular hands-on labs, at least looking at the statistics that Yellow Bricks recently published.

Interestingly, View 4.5 and vCloud Director 1.0, both new products, attracted most people:

1. VMware View 4.5 Install and Config (1515)
2. VMware vSphere Perf & Tuning (1229)
3. VMware ESX 4.1 new features (1112)
4. VMware vCloud Director Install & Config (1019)
5. Basic VMware vSphere Install & Config (829)
6. VMware View 4.5 Advanced (811)
7. VMware vSphere Troubleshooting (791)
8. VMware vCenter SRM Install & Config (789)
9. VMware vDS & Cisco Nexus 1KV (761)
10. VMware vShield (734)

In total VMware server 30 different labs in 15,344 sessions.

At the beginning of last week Citrix announced that both its hypervisor, XenServer 5.6, and its VDI platform XenDesktop 4.0 achieved the Common Criteria certification Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2.

While this is good start, Citrix has to work harder to match the level achieved by other virtualization platforms:

• VMware VI 3.5 (ESX 3.5 + VirtualCenter 2.5) is rated EAL4+ since February 2010 (with vSphere 4.0 certification underway for EAL4+ level too)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is rated EAL4+ since August 2009
• VMware VI 3 (ESX 2.5 + VirtualCenter 1.2) is rated EAL4+ since June 2008
• IBM POWER Virtualization Engine is rated EAL4+ since July 2006

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Between 2008 and 2009 VMware announced two ambitious projects: the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) and the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

The former is a client hypervisor that should be part of the VDI product View. It has been postponed multiple times to the point that rumors suggest it is indefinitely postponed.

The latter is a hypervisor for mobile phones, powered by the technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors. 
Differently from CVP, the status of MVP has been completely unknown so far: VMware suggested that it wont’ appear before the second half of 2010 but it didn’t talk about it at all in the last few months.

During the VMworld 2010 conference (read live coverage) virtualization.info had the opportunity to receive an update about both projects, which are still actively developed.

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In March Elliott Associates made an unsolicited offer to buy Novell for $2B. The $16B hedge fund already held 8.5% of Novell’s stock.
Expecting a better offer, the board rejected the takeover and put the company up for sale.

Nobody acquired the company so far, but today the New York Post reports that Novell has reached a deal to divide and sell its assets in two parts: the first one, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) business, will go to a strategic buyer, while the other, that includes everything else, will go to a private equity firm.
Assuming this rumor is true, it will be interesting to see exactly which parts go to who.

VMware just closed a deal with Novell to OEM SLES and distribute it as part of vSphere 4.1, and to leverage the Linux operating system as the platform of choice for all its virtual appliances. 
The new owner of the SLES assets may be turn this deal into an uncomfortable partnership (unless VMware is the “strategy buyer” mentioned by the New York Post). Imagine what happens, for example, if the buyer is Oracle.

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As Citrix announced a couple of weeks ago, the first version of its client hypervisor XenClient (read virtualization.info report about it) will be available at the end of September.

In the Release Candidate 2 published at the end of August the company added a boatload of additional features:

• support for Microsoft Windows 7 64bit virtual machines
• USB support for Apple iPod/iPhone/iPad, Google Android phones, Microsoft Windows Mobile phones, fingerprint readers, webcams, smart card readers, 3G data modems, etc
• support for Bluetooh devices
• support for mouse pointer trails
• automatic slipstream of Intel Graphics drivers in Windows virtual machines
• support for Intel MT KVM Remote Control (a VNC server embedded in the vPro chipset in Core i5 and i7 CPUs)
• support for Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT)
• support for manual and automatic locking of the environment
• new alerting system

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NTPRO.NL reports about a new application that VMware previewed during the VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) called Storage Tester:

VMware Storage Tester automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle to reduce the diagnosis time from days to hours. It provides an automated framework for configuring and launching storage diagnostic test in large-scale virtual deployments. In future releases it will feature a rule-based diagnostic engine running a decision tree algorithm to provide diagnostic information based on a knowledge base and the stored performance database.

There are some screenshots too. Here’s one:

During the recent VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) VMware previewed a new vCenter Client for vSphere. This one is not for Windows or Linux but for the Apple iOS operating system, specifically tailored for the iPad tablet.

The product has been demonstrated on a YouTube video recorded by the VMworld TV staff:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5aAYOy2RPE[/youtube]

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