Year: 2010

In March the startup VKernel launched a simple and extremely effective free tool called CapacityVIEW: a single-window dashboard to immediately recognize the virtual infrastructure elements (data centers, clusters, hosts, virtual machines, resource pools, data stores), the resources allocation (both physical and virtual) and the amount of alerts that VMware vCenter is raising at any given moment.

In May the company repeated the experiment launching AppVIEW, another minimal dashboard that evaluates and presents potential CPU, memory, disk and storage I/O bottlenecks by collecting 30 days of performance stats.

Last week VKernel added a third free piece to its arsenal. This one is called StorageVIEW: it identifies the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest storage I/O latency in a VMware environment:

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After over two years in stealth mode, in April the US startup Unidesk officially launched, introducing an interesting new application virtualization product that is especially desirable in a VDI environment: CachePoint.

Last week Unidesk released CachePoint 1.0 as GA, pricing it at $150 per named user.

Last week VMware announced two new classroom courses for the vSphere training path. The first is Manage and Design for Security. The second is Transition to ESXi.

Manage for Design and Security, available as a 3-days live classroom course, teaches how to secure the virtual networking layer, the vCenter Server management layer, the ESX/ESXi platform layer and the virtual machines virtual hardware layer. The course also introduces the discipline of configuration and change management in the last module, which is an extremely welcome addition.

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In April Red Hat hired away from its major competitor Kevin Pereau, the Novell’s Director of ISV Ecosystems.

Pereau has been in Novell for more than five years, and now he’s in charge of the Channel Business Development for Cloud Computing at Red Hat.

The VAR Guy reports that Pereau will help drive the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform  marketing, and he’ll work closely with Red Hat North American Channel Chief Roger Egan and Global Channel Chief Mark Enzweiler.

The UK startup tuCloud, which launched in September 2009 with one of the first Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering on the market, just hired a new CTO: Jose Luis Medina.

Medina has been the CEO of Bató IT Services, a consulting firm focused on virtualization and based in Spain, for almost a year and a half. Before that he covered several roles as project manager and business development manager for multiple companies in Spain.

In February Computer Associates (CA) appointed Andi Mann as its new Vice President of Product Marketing for Virtualization Management.

Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) for more than four years, Mann is a well-know and respected industry analyst, extremely focused on the virtualization and cloud computing markets.

His insight and privileged position in the industry will hopefully increase the confidence in the CA virtualization strategy and capability to execute.
So far the company in fact didn’t play a too active role, and while its messaging seem to imply a renewed  effort, customers may want to wait the delivery of these promised new, robust, insightful management tools:

The announced Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, which will introduce Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and the RemoteFX technology (acquired from Calista in January 2008), is expected to be released within the end of this year by Microsoft.

Its official beta program started on June 21 and the first build already escaped the Microsoft Connect facility, probably hitting the illegal software distribution channels within the next 24-48 hours.
The documents accompanying the beta 1 are already circulating, and they indeed include confirmation of the two major features mentioned above:

Changes specific to Windows Server 2008 R2

Dynamic Memory
Constraints on the allocation of physical memory represents one of the greatest challenges organizations face as they adopt new virtualization technology and consolidate their infrastructure. With Dynamic Memory, an enhancement to Hyper-V™ introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, organizations can now make the most efficient use of available physical memory, allowing them to realize the greatest possible potential from their virtualization resources. Dynamic Memory allows for memory on a host machine to be pooled and dynamically distributed to virtual machines as necessary. Memory is dynamically added or removed based on current workloads, and is done so without service interruption.
Virtual machines running a wide variety of operating systems can use Dynamic Memory; for a complete list, see the “Dynamic Memory Evaluation Guide” at [removed URL]. The guide also discusses Dynamic Memory settings and usage in detail.

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TechTarget is reporting that VMware had to delay the release of View 4.5, planned for June 14. virtualization.info sources confirm that the product was supposed to reach the GA status one week ago and that, instead, VMware released a new beta.
The product won’t appear before September, in time for VMworld or may be even later.

TechTarget also adds that the product won’t have the profile management component acquired from RTO Software in March, because of incompatibilities with Windows 7.

In early May Brian Madden reported about another feature that was supposed to be included in View 4.5 and that has been axed: the client hypervisor known as Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).

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The new version of vSphere may be released earlier than expected according to some changes in the VMware’s website. And the virtualization platform may be indeed called vSphere 4.1 rather than 4.5 as virtualization.info suggested so far.

An attempt to browse the URL http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=ESX41 in fact redirects to the default login page for non-public downloads, and on this page the product name used is ESX 4.1:

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Yes, it’s true: virtualization.info already used the “Diane is back” theme in February, when the founder and former CEO of VMware sort of reappeared on the virtualization market as an investor of the startup Nicira.
But Nicira still is in stealth mode at this point and the Greene’s role in there will probably be all but operational.

She may be more active in another startup that emerges today from the stealth mode: Nimbula (formerly Benguela).
Greene will be a board member, advising an interesting team of former Amazon and VMware employees.

The company has been founded in 2008 by Chris Pinkham (CEO) and Willem van Biljon.
Pinkham is the former Vice President of Engineering at Amazon.com, where he spent five years, and one of the founders of Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). van Biljon was an Amazon Director, leading the EC2 development team, but in his career he founded Mosaic Software and managed it for over 11 years.

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