Year: 2010

Officially announced in September 2007, the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is a format to package one or more virtual machines together with a with a standards-based XML wrapper that contains the metadata necessary to correctly install and configure the virtual hard drives of each VM. 
OVF reached 1.0 status in March 2009, and 1.1 status in March 2010.

A number of leading industry players contributed to it, including: Citrix, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, Sun, Symantec and VMware.
The format is currently supported by Citrix, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware virtual infrastructures, plus by a number of infrastructure management vendors.

At the of August the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced that the OVF specification 1.1 has been ratified as by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standard.

The ANSI code for OVF 1.1 is ANSI INCITS 469 2010.

The next step for the DMTF will be turning OVF into an international standard by submitting it to the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC).

In May virtualization.info reported about the impressive activity of Parallels in contributing to the Linux kernel: at that time the company ranked #9 in the list of top updated for Linux kernel 2.6.32, just behind much bigger players like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Intel and Oracle.
Parallels even joined The Linux Foundation, in the hope to embed its OS virtualization technology (OpenVZ, and the commercial counterpart Virtuozzo Containers) in the kernel, turning the platform into a de facto standard in the hosting industry.

But there are another two virtualization vendors that are contributing a lot to the Linux kernel development: Citrix and VMware.
At the end of August interesting statistics were published by LWN.net: Citrix is ranked #12 and VMware is ranked #20 among top updaters for the new 2.6.34 kernel.

What’s interesting is that VMware is intensifying its activity for the new kernel. Maybe this is related to the planned effort to standardize the guest operating system in its virtual appliances with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

Thanks to Apple, and a weak competitive effort from Intel, ARM is gaining a lot of attention and momentum. Not only the ARM processors power millions of iPods, iPhones, iPads, countless of headsets from all other phone manufacturers, Digital TV set top boxes, wireless routers and more. Rumors even suggest that Facebook may be replacing its x86 servers, powered by Intel and AMD CPUs, with brand new ARM-powered machines.
The Facebook infrastructure has to manage over 500M users worldwide, representing a leading example in how to deal with massive amount of data. If the rumors are true, the rest of the industry may start following the Facebook experiment, granting to ARM an unprecedented position.

So it’s with much interest that the industry followed the announcement of the new Cortex-A15 CPU, launched last week.

The processor is especially interesting as it introduces support for hardware virtualization platforms: the ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension standardizes the architecture for implementation of the hardware acceleration in ARM application processor cores while the Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) technology provides a second level of MMU translation table so that each 32-bit virtual memory address can be mapped within a 40-bit physical memory range.

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Last week Red Bend Software, a mobile software management company, announced the acquisition of the virtualization startup VirtualLogix (formerly Jaluna) for an undisclosed sum.

VirtualLogix is a US company founded in 2002 and focused on hardware virtualization for embedded devices. It offers a hypervisor, VLX, that can run real-time operating systems side by side with Windows and Linux flavors as guest OSes on Intel, Texas Instruments, Freescale and ARM and Power architectures.
Leading venture capital firms like Intel Capital, Index Ventures, Atlas Ventures and Esprit Capital Partners invested in the company so far.

VirtualLogix has very few competitors, including Trango Virtual Processors, which has been acquired by VMware in November 2008, and Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), which received a major investment from Citrix in January 2009.

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In March 2009 the Canadian application virtualization startup Trigence, launched in 2006, changed its name in AppZero.
In its history the company remained under the radar most of the time, even after the brand identity refresh.

Last week AppZero announced a new recapitalization and a new chairman.

Nigel Stokes, former CEO and chairman of DataMirror (acquired by IBM in July 2007), has become the controlling and majority investor.

Meanwhile the company lost pretty much its entire executive team: two CEOs (Chuck Colford and David Roth), the CFO (Walter MacDonald), the CTO (Donn Rochette), the COO (John Hamilton), the Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Business Development (Mark Yohai), the Director of Strategic Channel Partners (Chris Dodunski).
Some of them, like the CFO and the COO, left after less than one year.

As Trigence, the company raised $1.6M in angel and seed funding, $5.5M in Round A and another $8M in is Round B funding.

The open source Open Virtual Switch project was announced by Citrix in May 2009. 
It reached version 1.0 exactly one year later, and meanwhile it became a key building block of the upcoming Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Citrix already announced that it will appear in the next version of XenServer, codename Cowley, hopefully to be released early next month at the Synergy 2010 Berlin conference.
On top of that, yesterday Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Cloud Computing division, added interesting details about its roadmap.

First of all, the next version of Citrix hypervisor will expand support for the Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology, introduced in XenServer 5.6, so that its configuration will not require an interaction with the command-line interface.
Secondarily and more importantly, the next version of Open vSwitch will support SR-IOV so that virtual traffic won’t bypass the policy enforced at the switch level.

This version of Open vSwitch will specifically support the Intel 10Gbit NIC 82599ES (formerly codename Niantic).

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Last week Citrix turned a few heads by announcing a brand new partnership with Cisco to deliver XenDesktop on Unified Computing System (UCS), powered by NetApp storage.

As a key promise of fabric computing, Citrix, Cisco and NetApp will jointly validate the infrastructure, providing a reference architecture and a Starter Kit to deliver an entry-level 300 virtual desktops environment. An Expansion Kit will also be available to scale to thousands of virtual desktops.
The companies will also provide shared support and training.

Probably the best part of this upcoming solution is that customers are free to select their back-end hypervisor: initially only Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX will be supported, while Microsoft Hyper-V will be added at a later time.

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A couple of weeks ago, during the VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced the acquisition of two companies: Integrien and TriCipher.
In both cases VMware didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition.

Both are strategic acquisitions, critical to deliver the cloud computing vision detailed on stage.

Integrien is a company focused on real-time performance analytics. 
Their flagship product, Alive, analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly.
Impressively enough, Alive can handle upwards of 10 million individual metrics every 5 minutes.

Alive is a next generation performance monitoring solution that VMware probably plans to integrate in its upcoming Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, just renamed vFabric, along with SpringSource tcServer, GemFire, RabbitMQ and Hyperic. 
Interestingly, Alive integrates with a plethora of products, including Hyperic.

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At the beginning of August, Burton Group, an independent subsidiary of Gartner, declared Citrix XenDesktop 4 Service Pack 1 the first enterprise-ready solution in the VDI market, according to their Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria.

But the Citrix supremacy didn’t last long: the just released VMware View 4.5 immediately received the same honor .
Specifically, View 4.5 Premier Edition earned the certification because it addressed multiple shortcomings in the previous version: the lack of role-based access  control (RBAC) for administration delegation, the lack of administrative change logging capabilities to provide an audit trail for all administrative actions, the lack of support for Microsoft Windows 7 and the lack of integration with enterprise management software like Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).

Here’s the Burton Group scorecard for View 4.5 Premier Edition:

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A couple of weeks ago Microsoft launched the public beta of a new physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool for client operating systmes called P2V Migration for Software Assurance.

The product leverages the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Sysinternals Disk2VHD to convert a user’s existing Windows XP SP3, Vista or 7 environment to a virtual hard disk. When the process is complete, this tools automatically formats the physical hard drive, installs a fresh copy of Windows 7, which includes a version of Virtual PC, and deploys the previously saved virtual hard drive.
The applications installed in the old, virtualized operating system are mapped on the new Windows 7 environment. The applications of both OSes appear side by side thanks to the seamless window technology that Microsoft call RemoteApp.

As the name suggests, the product is only available for Software Assurance customers, and it requires a valid license for both the old and the new operating systems. So, for example, all OEM copies of Windows (the ones shipped with branded computers) cannot be used with this tool.