Year: 2010

Along with the new vShield Edge and vShield App (which apparently is a rebrand for vShield Zones), VMware is preparing a third security product, in collaboration with TrendMicro.

Internally codenamed Seraph, it seems a security framework for agent-less antivirus scanning that leverages the VMsafe API.

ApparentlyVMware originally planned to partner with both TrendMicro and McAfee for this project, but TechTarget recently reporting about the news only mentioned the former. Maybe McAfee is still in, but it’s more likely that VMware decided to drop the partnership after the security vendor announced a big security project with Citrix on XenClient, XenDesktop and XenServer.

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Earlier this month VMware announced two new variants of its vShield Zones (formerly VirtualShield) virtual firewall: vShield App 1.0 and vShield Edge 1.0, both available now as beta.

The company inherited the security product after the acquisition of Blue Lane Technologies, in October 2008. Since that time, VMware updated the product only one time, including it for free in vSphere 4.0 (but only for Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus SKUs).
The new vSphere 4.1 doesn’t bring in any update for the product, or at least there’s no mention of updates in the official release notes (for both vSphere and vShield Zones).

VMware describes vShield App as a stateful inspection firewall, capable to analyze inter-VM traffic and to attach the security policy to the virtual machine itself. It’s not clear if this means that Zones has been renamed in App or not.

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In mid July Quest released a new version of its VMware Management Extensions (QMX) for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2.
The product has been included in the Vizioncore portfolio, rebranded as  Management Pack for VMware 1.0, even if the internal build actually is 7.0.0.40, and relaunched yesterday.

It’s not clear why Quest decided to leverage the Vizioncore brand in this way: the company in fact already announced the upcoming drop of its subsidiary brand within the end of August.

Anyway, the Management Pack, available for free, allows Microsoft administrators to manage the VMware environments thanks to:

• Alert and event management and trending inside the SCOM console
• Performance monitoring & availability event monitoring
• Out-of-the-box reports for host and guest metrics

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Yesterday VKernel released version 2.0 of its Chargeback product.

The startup recently recognized an increased competition with VMware, which has a capacity analyzer product (vCenter CapacityIQ) and a chargeback product (vCenter Chargeback), fully overlapping the VKernel offering.
So it doesn’t surprise much to see the introduction of support for Microsoft Hyper-V (both 2008 and 2008 R2), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2.

Chargeback 2.0 also introduces support for allocated and actual resource usage.
For some reason there’s no mention of support for VMware vSphere 4.0 or the new 4.1 despite the last version tracked by virtualization.info, 1.4, was released in February 2009.

In March Convirture released version 2.0 of its open source management console ConVirt (formerly XenMan) for multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.
At that time the company also announced an upcoming Enterprise Edition that is finally available today.

This edition introduces the following features:

• dynamic resources allocation (through the use of resource pools)
• high availability (through hosts and virtual machines fail-over)
• virtual machines backup (both scheduled and on-demand)
• network and storage automated configuration (VLAN and SAN setup across multiple hosts)
• role-based access control
• alerting and email notification
• CLI and APIs

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Microsoft is not the only one that is pushing its channel to sell more virtualization. While at Redmond the company is preparing a new 20% deal registration incentive program that will start in October, VMware launches a new Accumulative Volume Purchasing Program (VPP).

The program provides incremental, tier-based discounts for VMware partners to offer their customers over a rolling two-year period.
Partners receive financial incentives when they purchase VMware products in volume with discounts on eligible license products, through a 4-level discount range:

Virtualization and cloud computing are changing the way we design data centers. The more powerful CPUs Intel and AMD produce, the more virtual machines per core administrators can host on a single hypervisor. But the higher consolidation ratio we achieve the more issues we have with memory, storage and networking components, that are quickly becoming the new virtual infrastructure bottlenecks.

Virtualization vendors try to overcome memory limitations with several overcommitment techniques, like the new Memory Compression from VMware and the upcoming Dynamic Memory from Microsoft, while storage vendors try to develop more virtualization-friendly SANs controllers able to facilitate acrobatics like long-distance virtual machines live migrations, like the EMC VPLEX. 
Excluding Cisco and HP, established networking vendors don’t seem equally busy in addressing the new challenges that exist in virtual and cloud computing infrastructures.

This topic has been covered a number of times before. The last one is in a roundtable hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) last month.

The group of experts that participated the round table is particularly interesting as it includes CTOs and Vice Presidents from Citrix, Juniper, HP, Yahoo! and even the semi-stealth startup Nicira, where the founder and former CEO of VMware Diane Greene invested.

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Despite the great Q2 performance reported two days ago by VMware, not everybody believes that the virtualization vendor will continue to keep its leadership position in every market segment the near future.

Dow Jones in fact reports about a research note released last month by Goldman Sachs about VDI suggesting that Citrix will surpass VMware and lead the market in the next three years.

The financial firm wrote in the Americas Morning Summary of June 9:

We believe Citrix and VMware will dominate the VDI market for the foreseeable future, with close to 90% of the market between the two. However, momentum is diverging currently in favor of Citrix. Hence, we have updated our model to reflect increasing market share for Citrix increasing from 42% in CY2009 to 50% in CY2013. VMware’s share moves from 51% to 39% over the same timeframe. Previously we had both vendors with equal share in CY2013.

The skepticism expressed by the VMware’s executives during the Q2 2010 earnings call certainly didn’t help to counter the Goldman Sachs forecast.

The Computer Security Division of the US National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) published last week the first draft of a new paper titled Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies.

By “full virtualization” the authors mean what the Industry calls “hardware virtualization”: a virtualization platform based on a type-1 (bare-metal, or hypervisor) or a type-2 (hosted) virtual machine monitor (VMM) that hosts virtual machines (VMs).
The document also refers to “server virtualization” meaning “hardware virtualization for server consolidation” and to “desktop virtualization” meaning “hardware virtualization executed on a consumer desktop” and not “hardware virtualization for client consolidation”.

The 35-pages paper has three sections: the first one introduces the concept of full virtualization and its implementations. the second one presents the security recommendations for virtualization components, and the third one introduces to the discipline of secure virtualization planning and deployment.

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In April virtualization.info covered the soft launch of a very interesting stealth startup called VMTurbo.

Without unveiling its product, the company promised a solution that could automate virtual infrastructures following constrains dictated by capacity management and platform optimization engines.
At that time, the VMTurbo’s Product Marketing and Business Development Manager John Gannon said:

…we are absolutely providing capacity management functionality in our product but we’re also addressing the issues of (automated) bottleneck prevention and remediation, workload balancing, rightsizing, and power management at the same time…

Now the company has finally unveiled more details about its offering and the product seems really articulated.

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