Year: 2010

In March 2009, VMware signed an agreement with Neverfail to use its technology for vCenter fail-over.
Called vCenter Server Heartbeat, the product impacted the business of other VMware’s partners, including Double-Take, SteelEye and CA.

Earlier this week Neverfail announced that the OEM agreement with VMware has been renewed. vSphere 4.1 in fact includes vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3, which ships with the new Continuous Availability Director.
The new module is a centralized management console to view the status of multiple vCenter Servers and their associated back-end databases.

Interestingly, Neverfail reports that more 500 customers adopted the solutions since early 2009. It seems a pretty low number considering that VMware has over 200,000 customers worldwide and most of them are enterprise ones.

Read more

Earlier this week the application virtualization startup Spoon (formerly XenoCode) released the new major version of its platform: Studio 2011.

The new version primarily introduces support for 64bit virtualized applications, for Microsoft Windows 7 (32 and 64bit) and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Studio 2011 also comes with many new templates to simplify the package authoring of virtualized applications like Office 2010, Internet Explorer 8 or Google Chrome 6.

Quite interestingly, the company is pitching the product directly against the just released ThinApp 4.6, highlighting how the VMware’s application virtualization platform is still lacking many of the features offered by Studio.

Last week the network monitoring and management company SolarWinds announced its second free tool for VMware administrators: VM Console.

The first one, VM Monitor, monitors ESX hosts health, providing statistics about the virtual machines state (vCPUs, vRAM, vNICs) and best practices thresholds to recognize performance degradation.

This new product instead allows administrators to view, search for, take a snapshot, shutdown and restart the VMs without any interaction with vCenter.

SolarWinds published a video to demonstrate the product in action:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtGyBn6WYEE[/youtube]

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

jWhile most of the virtualization vendors in the industry rushed to announce something before or during the just ended VMworld conference, a few companies remained absolutely silent. Among them there is Parallels.
Considering that most of the 17,000 attendees VMware collected this year won’t pay any real attention to the over 200 press releases for at least another week, it has been a savvy choice.

So Parallels silently released version 6 of its Desktop virtualization platform for Mac, as TUAW reports.
Apparently, the product is already on the shelves as a picture confirms:

No words yet about the new features 9to5mac.com managed to find a pretty generic list of new features, which includes:

Read more

Intel is definitively building something. The chipmaker is shopping, and shopping quickly, in the software market with a primary focus on security. At least for now.

Just a couple of weeks ago the company announced the acquisition of the security giant McAfee for $7.68B in cash. Now it acquires the virtualization startup Neocleus.
The news is not official yet, but Neocleus posted the news on its corporate blog a few hours ago, which Intel immediately required to remove, virtualization.info has learned.

Neocleus launched in May 2008, entering the virtualization market with an ambitious plan to leverage a client hypervisor for security purposes. Their product, based on Xen, has been one of the first on the market, along with the Virtual Computer NxTop.
The company, funded by Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel for $16.4M in two rounds, has been under the radar for most of its time.

Neocleus go-to-market strategy changed over the last two years, as their product failed to get any serious traction: in early 2010 the company released a version of its TrustedEdge platform called NeoSphere that could be OEM’ed and extended by PC lifecycle management (PCLM), security and help desk vendors. The first company to adopt it, in March, has been BigFix.

Read more

VMworld 2010 is at its last day and VMware decided to place the second keynote today. The second keynote is usually more technical than the first one, but as virtualization.info readers know, the first keynote already was a split between vision/strategy and technology/roadmap, with both Paul Maritz, CEO, and Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP of R&D on stage. 
So today it will be interesting to see what will be presented.

Rick Jackson, CMO, is on stage to introduce the day. The theme is “innovation”. Apparently, VMware wants to use today to reinforce its image as leading innovator. To do so it invited three guest speakers to show some cutting-edge technologies.

The first one is Pranav Mistry, inventor of SixthSense.
SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that leverages a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant to augment reality on any object around users. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and other physical objects.
A video of the prototype in use is shown. It’s almost exactly the futuristic interface seen in the Minority Report movie and even more than that. A lot of companies are working to bring to the market that interface, but Mistry’s project seems well beyond that.

Read more

Here we go again. As usual virtualization.info is at the VMworld conference to live cover the keynotes and any other major announcement released by VMware during the event.

Paul Maritz, CEO, is today’s keynote speaker. He will speak in front of 17,000 attendees, as Rick Jackson, CMO, confirmed on stage. Is VMworld on track to compete against the Oracle OpenWorld in terms of audience?

Before Maritz performance, VMware starts with a funny video that tries to describe what cloud computing is without using any technical jargon. The choice demonstrates how early-stage this market still is considered.

Martiz on stage.
He reports that in 2010 the number of virtual machines surpasses for the first time the number of physical servers deployed (more than 10M).
He also reports that VMware has over 25,000 partners and over 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) worldwide.

Maritz says that VMware is committed to innovate on automation and management to decrease OpEx. Seeing that the primary focus is on automation is very positive: datacenter orchestration has been overlooked for too much time.
He also says that innovation should also focus on the way infrastructure resources should be purchased.

Now Maritz is making a case for the SpringSource acquisition (and all the others related to that): are legacy apps on new infrastructure enough?
VMware believes that the world embracing cloud computing would move on more sophisticated, next generation web applications , and this implies the need for a new application platform, made of management tools (Hyperic), open frameworks (Spring) and common services (APIs).

Read more

In the attempt to distract the audience just before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix announced last week the imminent availability of XenClient 1.0.

The Xen-based client hypervisor (see virtualization.info report about it) is expected to ship at the end of September as part of the XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2.
The platform will be free only for XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum editions customers with current Subscription Advantage agreements.

It’s not clear if consumers will be able to download and use the product in some way but it seems that Citrix is primarily targeting enterprise customers with this first release.
But no fear: Virtual Computer is expected to release NxTop 3.0 later today, which will introduce a free downloadable client hypervisor that doesn’t require the enterprise management component.

Update: Those ones that don’t have XenDesktop can still use the product. Citrix will release a XenClient Express edition you can be used on up to 10 devices free of charge, with full functionality, and no expiry.

Just one day before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix managed to distract the audience with a major announcement: the acquisition of VMLogix for an undisclosed sum.

VMLogix entered the virtual lab automation (VLA) market in October 2006, in competition with a really short number of companies.
In February 2009 the company signed a deal with Citrix to OEM its flagship product in the Essentials management package, which is available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
As Citrix has to enrich its virtual infrastructure to better compete against VMware, this acquisition was largely expected.

The acquisition is expected to complete during the Q3 2010. The VMLogix technology will be fully integrated in the next version of XenServer (6.0?) as well as in the just announced OpenCloud platform.

With VMware owning Akimbi (June 2006), Quest owning Surgient (July 2010) and StackSafe out of business (March 2009?), there are no more virtual lab automation startups out there, except Skytap and the just born CloudShare. But both companies only offers a hosted business model, and this restricts the range of potential bidders.
According to this, in the attempt to become more desirable acquisition targets, both Skytap and CloudShare may want to offer soon a version of its platform for on-premises deployment.

Earlier this week Symantec announced two new products for VMware virtual infrastructures dubbed ApplicationHA and VirtualStore.

ApplicationHA, powered by Veritas Cluster Server technology, monitors applications and virtual machines health. It can restart both: applications by direct intervention, and VMs by coordinating with vCenter Server.
Plus, the product can be fully operated from the vCenter Client and supports VMware HA and DRS.

VirtualStore instead is powered by Veritas Storage Foundation and is a virtual NAS that has a couple of specific capabilities for VDI environments.
The first one, called FileSnap, allows to rapidly clone and provision thousands of virtual machines in minutes through vCenter.
The second is a page caching system that Symantec claims able to eliminate the performance bottlenecks when multiple users concurrently power their virtual desktops.

ApplicationHA will be available in September, at $350 per VM.
VirtualStore instead will be released in November with a per-server pricing model.