Year: 2010

The VMware’s annual conference, the VMworld, will take place at the end of August in San Francisco and while its agenda includes many interesting sessions for many different kind of virtualization professionals, in July virtualization.info published a short list of sessions recommended for everybody.

It turns out that VMware recorded a video teaser for some of them, and one includes a hint about a major networking feature that the company may announce during the show keynotes.

The session is TA8361 – Future Direction of Networking Virtualization, performed by Howie Xu, Director of R&D at VMware.
Xu is at the company since June 2002 and has been in charge of the Distribute Virtual Network (vDS) component of vSphere architecture, of the integration with the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch, and of the Network I/O Control feature introduced in vSphere 4.1. 
He’s also one of the people behind several VMware’s acquisitions, including the B-hive one (May 2008) and the Blue Lane Technologies one (October 2008).

Xu is directly responsible for the VMware’s vision and company-wide strategy about networking and I/O virtualization, so what he says in his video is definitively reliable.

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The analysis firm Forrester just released a cost analysis of XenDesktop 4.0 used for VDI, commissioned by Citrix in March.

For the analysis Forrester used the San Jose Campbell Union High School District case study, which had 2,500 physical desktops and 500 laptops.
The school replaced this environment with only 500 virtual desktops and 200 virtualized applications, accessed by 2,500 students and hosted on 40 physical server along with another 100 virtual servers for the back-end.

Interestingly, the virtual desktops boot up and down every 90 minutes, according to the classes schedule. This makes the case study slightly different than the average corporate environment where the workforce mostly uses its virtual machines non-stop.

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After the benchmark about Office SharePoint Server 2007 (171,000 concurrent users on a single server), VMware published a new performance report related to its new vSphere 4.1 virtual infrastructure. This time it’s about SAP.

Once again the company measured the performance of the system using a single physical host: a Dell PowerEdge R905 4U rackmount server with 4 AMD Quad-Core Opteron 8384 CPUs and 128GB RAM.

vSphere 4.1 started serving a single virtual machine with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, loaded with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2, SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 4 and IBM DB2 9.7.
The test was repeated with multiple VMs, with 2 and 4 vCPUs each.

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virtualization.info is a publication about technology. On these pages you’ll find information just about vendors and products.
Today I’ll make an exception for a person that has made a piece of the virtualization history. Today I’d like to honor Alex Vasilevsky, who died yesterday of cancer.

Alex Vasilevsky co-founded Katana Technology in 2003, with Scott Davis, who now is the CTO of the Desktop Virtualization business unit at VMware.
Alex Vasilevsky was the Chief Scientist of Katana Technology, which was rebranded as Virtual Iron in January 2005, and officially launched one month later. 
Virtual Iron has been acquired by Oracle in May 2009.

After Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky founded another virtualization company in December 2007: Old Road Computing.
The stealth startup was rebranded as Virtual Computer in September 2008 and officially launched three months later.
Virtual Computer launched one of the first client hypervisors in the market. As a very promising company, it attracted the interest of many investors, including Citrix.

With both his companies, Alex Vasilevsky greatly contributed to the development of the open source hypervisor Xen, which now is a leading virtualization engine, powering virtual infrastructures and public cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon EC2.

I wrote about Katana for the first time in December 2004, quoting an article from ARNnet.
I’ve met Alex for the first time in June 2007: we were both speaking at the same virtualization conference in NYC.

In the early days of virtualization, the biggest competitor of Virtual Iron was XenSource.
Simon Crosby, founder and former CTO at XenSource and now CTO at Citrix, just published some words about Alex Vasilevsky.

Update: Alex Vasilevsky’s company, Virtual Computer, where he was the CTO, published some words about him.

At the end of the last week Parallels announced the appointment of Birger Steen as its new President.

Steen started in Microsoft in 2002. He led the Norway subsidiary for two years as General Manager, then moved to Russia.
There, in four years, he built a 1000+ people subsidiary spread across 34 locations, achieving a 10x revenue and profit growth.

Parallels says that Steen will report to Serguei Beloussov, Chairman and CEO, and will be responsible for sales, marketing, product management, and support, as well as assisting Mr. Beloussov in transforming the company for the next stage of growth.

At the end of the last week Oracle released another maintenance build for its desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox.

VirtualBox 3.2.8 primarily introduces a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements. The only new feature seems the support for remote installations in the Solaris Installer.

Last month virtualization.info reported that, along with the launch of vSphere 4.1, VMware also disclosed a number of upcoming architectural changes to its virtual infrastructure.
Probably, the most significant one is that the next version of its hypervisor will come without a Console Operating System (COS).

Just in case some customers need an additional confirmation that ESXi is the only way to go, VMware made it clear once and forever, by announcing the ESX end of life:

…Going forward customers will be able to deploy vSphere only using ESXi. Although the infrastructure management tasks once performed by the Service Console are now handled by tasks running under the VMkernel, some ESX users may still depend on the custom scripts, third-party products, or operational procedures that use the Service Console.

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Just before the end of the week Oracle announced an online virtualization event set for August 19: the Online Virtualization Forum.

This is not something uncommon: many vendors arrange day-long online events to market a big number of products all together. And after the acquisition of Sun, Oracle certainly has a big virtualization portfolio to talk about.
Anyway, Oracle may use this occasion to announce something big.

First of all, the event’s tagline is pretty bullish: “Discover How Oracle’s Virtualization Delivers More Value Than VMware”.
Right now the company may have a few issues to justify the statement, considering that Gartner recently recognized VMware as the sole leader in the server virtualization space and Oracle VM is at the bottom of the Niche Players section of the Magic Quadrant.

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Starting May, the Citrix Lead Architect for Worldwide Consulting Solutions Daniel Feller published a series of posts about the top 10 mistakes that can be done when implementing a desktop virtualization solution.

The last one was published earlier today, so here’s the complete list:

1. Misconfiguration of storage
2. Using VDI Defaults
3. Not spending your cache wisely
4. Not Optimizing the Desktop Image
5. Managing the incoming storm
6. Protection from Anti-Virus
7. Improper Resource Allocation
8. Lack of Application Virtualization Strategy
9. Not considering the user profile
10. Not calculating user bandwidth requirements

In November 2008 Microsoft unveiled that the upcoming version of its worldwide popular IDE, Visual Studio 2010, was designed to orchestrate Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to provide a fully integrated virtual lab automation (VLA) environment.

Marketed at that time as a stand-alone edition, and called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management, the first beta of this product appeared in June 2009, while the second beta went public in November 2009.

Now it finally seems that Microsoft is ready to release the product: earlier this week in fact, during its Visual Studio Live! event, Microsoft announced that its VLA platform will be available for web download at the end of August.

There’s a last minute change anyway: the product is no more a stand-alone edition of Visual Studio 2010 but it’s included in Ultimate and Test Professional editions.