Year: 2010

In January virtualization.info covered a US startup still in semi-stealth mode: Pancetera.
The company features an interesting group of founders: one is the former CEO of Thinstall, acquired by VMware in 2008, the other three come from DataDomain, acquired by EMC in 2009.

virtualization.info also published details about the Pancetera technology just a few days ago: a storage management and optimization technology for VMware vSphere.

The company officially launches today and announces its first round of funding, closed in 2009: $5M, led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and ONSET Ventures.
The flagship product, previously addressed by the name of its components (SmartView and SmartRead) is now called Unite.

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

Last week virtualization.info reported about an analysis released in June by Goldman Sachs which forecasted a neat leadership of Citrix over VMware in the desktop virtualization market by 2013. Apparently Goldman Sachs is not the only one to believe so.

Even earlier than that, at the end of May, in its own intelligence report Morgan Stanley forecasted the desktop virtualization market revenue at $1.5B by 2014 and the market share breakdown in this way:

We identify large enterprises, govt, and education as the target segments, leaving SMB penetration as upside, and est. penetration of ~13% (47M PCs) to be virtualized by 2014, out of an estimated total installed base of 370M. We assume pricing declines 8%/year and that VMW and CTXS maintain 80% share through 2014.

…

we believe CTXS will likely hold the lion’s share of the market at 48% in 2014 vs. 36% for VMW. This implies a $735M rev. opportunity for CTXS in 2014, and $300-500M of potential rev. upside over the next 4 years.

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Earlier this week Citrix announced its Q2 2010 financial results.

The company announced $458M in total revenue, with more than $100M in cash flow.

New license sales were $149 million, up 15% from last yearLicense updates increased 13%.
Tech services grew 35%, online SaaS revenue (from the GoTo business unit) was $89 million, up 18% year-on-year.

In the Americas region Citrix revenue grew 17% from last year, in EMEA 11% year-on-year, and in APAC 31%.

Easy to expect the company reports a major growth for the XenDesktop business: in Q2 Citrix closed 18 transactions for over $1M each, 13 for over $18M and some for $5M. Some of these deals have more than 25,000 seats. 
During the quarter 3,500 customers purchased XenDesktop: 1,000 are new customers, the others are XenApp customers that used the XenDesktop Trade-up program.

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In March 2009 virtualization.info published an article titled Quest uses Surgient, why not acquire it? suggesting that such acquisition would fit the Quest expansion plans and would be the natural evolution of a pre-existing relationship between the two.

Quest answered today to that question by announcing in fact the acquisition of Surgient for an undisclosed sum.

Surgient is one of the very first startups that populated the (almost empty) virtualization ecosystem in 2003.
The company initially launched a hosted virtual lab automation (VLA) solution. In 2008 it changed its business model, allowing customers to install the product on premises and reshaping its strategy to market the platform as a VM lifecycle solution rather than a VLA solution.
In 2010 Surgient changed again: it dropped the concept of VM Lifecycle Automation entirely and fully embraced the private cloud automation hype.

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Yesterday Oracle announced a major deal with Dell and HP: the two OEMs will certify and resell the Oracle VM virtual infrastructure, along with Oracle Solaris x86 and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Those customers that will buy Dell’s and HP’s Oracle solutions will have full access to the Oracle Premier Support.

It sounds odd considering the Oracle’s tagline adopted after the acquisition of Sun, Software. Hardware. Complete., to push the idea of an end-to-end computing stack available from a single vendor. But it’s understandable that this is an attempt to increase the Oracle VM market share.
And, market share or not, Oracle VM Server now officially becomes the fourth hypervisor available out-of-the-box in industry standard servers, side by side with Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.

It will be interesting to see how this will impact the Oracle presence one year from now.

In April Microsoft announced the beta program for the Linux Integrated Services (LIS) 2.1 for Hyper-V.
Among the many new features, the package introduced support for up to 4 vCPUs inside Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems.

Yesterday Microsoft finally released it.

Besides the 4 vCPUs support for SLES 10 SP3 and 11, as well as for RHEL 5.2-5.5, LIS 2.1 also includes:

• Driver support for synthetic devices
  LIS 2.1 supports the synthetic network controller and the synthetic storage controller that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.
• Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V
  Boot devices take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance.

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A couple of days ago VMware officially validated an end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) hardware configuration provided by Cisco and NetApp.

The solution includes Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches and NetApp FAS3100 and FAS600 series SANs, now included in the vSphere 4.1 hardware compatibility guide.

To be fair, the three companies already presented a hardware configuration that could support end-to-end FCoE n December 2009, with a paper titled Designing Secure Multi-Tenancy into Virtualized Data Centers.
In that document anyway FCoE was suggested as an optional alternative to standard Ethernet or Fibre Channel, which doesn’t imply VMware was supporting the protocol at that time.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) just announced the LPI-304 exam, titled Virtualization and High Availability.

The exam is elective for the vendor-neutral Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC)-3 and includes virtualization (Xen, KVM, OpenVZ, VirtualBox), load balancing, cluster management and cluster storage.

Interestingly, LPI has assigned a weight of 10 to the questions about virtualization theory and the ones about Xen, while just 7 to the ones about KVM, and just 3 to the questions about other solutions (OpenVZ and VirtualBox).

Like every other LPI exam, the LPI-304 is available at Prometric and VUE testing centers.

Duncan Epping at Yellow Bricks yesterday posted a brief but very interesting article about the best approach to pursue when a company is about to replace its SAN arrays: Storage vMotion or SAN Replication.

Epping breaks down the pros and cons of both approaches:

SAN Replication

• Can utilize Array based copy mechanisms for fast replication (+)
• Per LUN migration, high level of concurrency (+)
• Old volumes still available (+)
• Need to resignature or mount the volume again (-)
  • A resignature also means you will need to reregister the VM! (-)
• Downtime for the VM during the cut over (-)

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The US startup Virtual Computer earlier this week announced its new Senior Vice President of Marketing: Andrew McKay.

McKay is the co-founder and former Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing of Attivio, a software company focused on enterprise search solutions.
From 2002 to 2006 McKay has been the Vice President of Sales, Technical Sales and Product Marketing at Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), acquired by Microsoft in early 2008.