Year: 2010

After a couple of months of beta testing, the startup Kaviza announces the availability of VDI-in-a-box 3.0.

The new version  introduces support for the ICA/HDX remoting protocol and XenServer, an expected move considering that Citrix has invested in Kaviza an undisclosed sum in April.

The company is now saying that its solution can lower the cost of a virtual desktop down to a price range between $260 and $410 (including hardware, software and licensing).
The minimum amount of virtual desktops is set to 25.

The US startup 5nine entered the virtualization market in June 2009, launching four different products in a very short timeframe: a capacity planning tool that also offers manual P2V migration capabilities, a capacity management tool, an automated P2V migration tool, and a virtual firewall.

To be fair, the first three ones could easily merge into a single product: since the technology is already there, a customer would probably expect that the same tool performs capacity planning before and after consolidation, allowing the administrator to go for manual or fully automated execution of the plan by orchestrating P2V migrations.
Separating all these features in different tools is just a way to complex things, and in fact 5nine now has a bundle called Migration Suite that comprises all products.

While shaping its capacity management offering, 5nine also updates on its other product: Virtual Firewall.

Launched in July 2009, the first version showed severe limitations and a way too simple packet filtering engine to be considered for any medium business or enterprise deployment.

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Two well-known security players in the virtualization market, HyTrust and Catbird, just announced a technology partnership to integrate their two flagship products.

The HyTrust Appliance  provides control and compliance for host machines by analyzing, authorizing and creating an audit trail for all virtualization administration operations and enforcing correct host configuration; while Catbird vSecurity proactively secures the virtual network and guest operating systems by analyzing and responding to network events and attack, and enforcing correct VM configuration.

HyTrust data will be incorporated into Catbird’s compliance framework. From the Catbird Command Center, IT administrators will be able to manage and monitor the automated and continually-updated compliance posture of a data center. Rolled up into a single view, the combined information covers more controls than any other solution in the marketplace, simplifying auditing and reporting for regulators and security directors monitoring compliance changes in the move from P to V.

ToutVirtual is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in February 2006. The company initially focused its management solution on VMware platforms, and then slowly added support for Xen (the Citrix, Novell and Oracle implementations) and Hyper-V.

So far the flagship product, which changed names from ShieldIQ to VirtualIQ to VirtualIQ Pro, didn’t win any relevant market share. The company barely updated it three times in four years: the last version, 3.0, is dated January 2009.

But something is moving again: two days ago the company announced an OEM agreement with Symantec to include Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) in the upcoming VirtualIQ Pro 4.0.

ToutVirtual will use Backup Exec to provide continuous backups, application-aware backups, as well as physical to virtual (P2V), virtual to physical (V2P) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations.

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Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, along with Alexander Galitsky, founder of Almaz Capital Partners, just launched a new Russian venture capital fund: Runa Capital, capable to offer approximately $30 million in seed financing.

Almaz Capital Partners is the same VC firm that bought 5% of Parallels stake in April 2009, equal to about $11M, previously owned by Insight Fund.
Runa Capital investment activities will be supported by Runapark business incubator.

Runa Capital list of venture partners include some well-known high-tech entrepreneurs and investors: Andreas Gauger and Achim Weiss, co-founders of the world’s largest hosting provider 1&1, Ilya Zubarev, co-founder of Rolsen and Acronis, Igor Borovikov, founder of the largest Russian software distributor Softline, Charles Ryan, сhairman of UFG Asset Management, and Igor Daniloff, founder of ‘Doctor Web’ antivirus company.
Some of these people already sit in the Parallels board of directors or are tightly connected to the company.

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As virtualization.info reported earlier today, VMware is about to significantly change the architecture of its virtual infrastructure. Before that transformation, which customers won’t see before 2011 probably, the company will change another key aspect of its offering: the pricing model.

Along with the release of vSphere 4.1 in fact VMware announced today a new per-VM licensing that will take effect starting September 1, 2010:

VMware vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager will be sold in VM packs on a per VM basis starting on September 1, 2010. VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager are already licensed on both a per VM and physical server model. Per VM licensing for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ will take effect in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The minimum number of virtual machine licenses in a licensing pack is 25, reports IT News.

vCenter will continue to be priced per-Server, but for how long? It’s easy to guess that the per-VM licensing will be extended to the key tier of the virtual infrastructure as soon as the next version of vSphere will be out.

With the today’s release of vSphere 4.1 VMware also announced a remarkable number of upcoming changes in the platform architecture. Some of them are well-known since a lot of time while others are surprisingly new.

The next version of vSphere will not have:

• the Console Operating System (COS)
  VMware published a warning recommending its customers to transition to the ESXi architecture.
• the Converter plug-in for vCenter
  VMware recommends customers to look for the stand-along Converter product
• the Guided Consolidation module for vCenter
  VMware recommends customers to look for the Virtualization Assessment, the P2V Migration Jumpstart or the P2V Accelerator services.
  The company doesn’t mention the new CapacityIQ product, but it’s clear that it will be the solution of choice for capacity planning and management.

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As expected, VMware releases today a significant update for its vSphere virtual infrastructure.

vSphere 4.1 introduces an impressive number of new features that virtualization.info partially unveiled in May:

• Scripted Install for ESXi. Scripted installation of ESXi to local and remote disks allows rapid deployment of ESXi to many machines. You can start the scripted installation with a CD-ROM drive or over the network by using PXE booting.
• vSphere Client Removal from ESX/ESXi Builds. For ESX and ESXi, the vSphere Client is available for download from the VMware Web site. It is no longer packaged with builds of ESX and ESXi.
• Boot from SAN. vSphere 4.1 enables ESXi boot from SAN (BFN). iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are supported.

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Now that the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available as a public beta, Microsoft published a detailed article about what its Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V is.

The company already published an 80-minutes webcast on this topic, exactly one month ago, but this piece is part of a long and insightful series about memory management in virtual infrastructures and memory over-commitment techniques:

…With Hyper-V (V1 & R2), memory is statically assigned to a virtual machine. Meaning you assign memory to a virtual machine and when that virtual machine is turned on, Hyper-V allocates and provides that memory to the virtual machine. That memory is held while the virtual machine is running or paused. When the virtual machine is saved or shut down, that memory is released.

…

With Hyper-V Dynamic Memory there are two values: Startup RAM and Maximum RAM:

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VKernel is one of the many VMware partners that over the years added value on top of VI / vSphere. Focused on capacity planning and management, the startup saw its partner turning into a competitor the day vCenter CapacityIQ was announced, in October 2009.

Reacting accordingly, VKernel first criticized the competing product, then it started releasing a number of free tools to increase its customer base as soon as possible, and then it introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V in its flagship solution.

Meanwhile VMware didn’t push too much for CapacityIQ, giving VKernel and other partners/competitors like Lanamark, CiRBA and Liquidware Labs enough room to grow. But this are changing apparently, as the virtualization leader is now actively promoting its product on the corporate blogs.

The business relationship between the two companies seems now completely compromised, as the startup got evidence about VMware’s competitive marketing material, circulating since December 2009, that trashes Capacity Analyzer:

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