Year: 2010

Last week virtualization.info covered the departure of Andrew Lee, the VMware’s former Director of Corporate Business Development, in charge for a number of acquisitions, including the SpringSource one.

But apparently there’s much more going on in Palo Alto: virtualization.info got a hint that Jocelyn Goldfein, Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop Business Unit, is gone too.

The news is not official, and there’s no trace of changes on her LinkedIn profile or in the VMware’s Leadership page, but we are able to confirm that she’s no more at VMware.
Goldfein is officially on sabbatical and the BU reports to Raghu Raghuram, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Virtualization and Cloud Platforms.

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Earlier today GigaOM reported an ongoing acquisition talk between VMware and Engine Yard, the hosting provider that offers a popular Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud for single and multi-tier Ruby-on-Rails applications.

So far Engine Yard raised $37.5M in three rounds of investment. Amazon participated the last two rounds.

After the acquisitions of SpringSource and the one of GemStone Systems, as well as the partnerships with Salesforce and with Google, it’s clear that VMware has a major interest in owning PaaS cloud providers for different development languages, even if the details of its strategy are still very vague at this point.

Almost one year passed since VMware started its expansionistic campaign in the PaaS and SaaS cloud computing markets, and after so much time it’s still extremely hard for customers to understand the new vision of the (former) virtualization vendor.
Hopefully this August, at the VMworld 2010 conference, VMware will finally explain how all the companies it bought so far will contribute to form the big picture of its post-Diane Greene era.

In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news that the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies was working to enter the virtualization space with its own hypervisor.

The bare-metal virtual machine monitor (VMM), based on Xen and dubbed HyperCore, was officially confirmed one month later but it took more than one year to reach version 1.0.

The vision of Phoenix for that platform has been partially shared by a number of vendors that are offering their client hypervisors (or that are working to do so) at today.
The idea was to provide a very low footprint client hypervisor, centrally managed (Virtual Computer approach) and secured out-of-band (Neocleus and Citrix approach), that could serve personal and corporate virtual machines side by side (Citrix and VMware approach).

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The server version of App-V (formerly SoftGrid), now officially dubbed Server App-V, was previewed for the first time ever in May 2009 at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) but Microsoft actually announced plan to deliver this product in January 2008.

In the last year Microsoft barely mentioned it again, showing an additional demo at MMS 2010.

Unfortunately, the just ended TechEd 2010 conference didn’t bring better news (see virtualization.info coverage). Quite the opposite, the event sanctioned a far distant release, probably scheduled for Q2 2011, in sync with the launch of the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

To be fair Microsoft didn’t explicitly said that Server App-V will arrive by that timeframe, but at this point there’s no hint about an earlier release.

This week VMware has announced a partnership with Novell to use SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) as guest operating system of choice for its virtual appliances.

The partnership goes beyond that, as the OEM agreement allows VMware to give away SLES patches and updates support agreements as part of the vSphere licensing:

Customers who want to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware in VMware vSphere virtual machines will be entitled to receive a subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server that includes patches and updates as part of their newly purchased qualifying VMware vSphere license and Support and Subscription.

The terms of the agreement in details are:

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Sometime in April VMware lost Andrew Lee, its former Director of Corporate Business Development.

Lee has been in VMware for over four years, with a major role in the merge and acquisition strategy of the company.
He has been responsible for six acquisitions, including the SpringSource one, and even the $20M investment in Terremark.

Lee left VMware to join the venture capital firm Battery Ventures as a principal.

Without much noise, VMware yesterday released Update 2 for its vSphere 4.0 virtual infrastructure platform, which includes ESX/ESXi hosts (build 261974) as well as the vCenter Server (build 258672).

The Update for ESX/ESXi primarily introduces additional hardware support:

• Fault Tolerance (FT) support for Intel Xeon 3400, Xeon 5600 and i3/i5 CPUs
• IOMMU support for AMD Opteron 6100 and 4100 CPUs

ESX/ESXi 4.0 U2 also introduces support for Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating system.

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Less than three months ago the Spanish startup Abiquo was preparing to release version 1.5 of its management console for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms.

The company is back with a new beta program for version 1.6 which is fully focused on programmable interfaces.

Abiquo 1.6 beta in fact comes with a Cloud Service API, to automate the migration of existing virtual machines into the cloud platform of choice through the VMware vCloud API standard, and a Cloud Operator API, to automate the workload balancing inside the cloud platform through capacity rules.

Plus, Abiquo 1.6 introduces support for Citrix XenServer as backend hypervisor, support for Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and support for a number of networking technologies, including:

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Earlier this week Leostream announced the availability of Connection Broker 6.5.

The company has set a pace of a new minor release every two months, each one coming with significant additions.

Version 6.5 features:

• Support for Citrix XenApp
  End-users can start an ICA session to access XenApp applications and desktops through the integrated Citrix Client for Java.
• Dynamic client display matching
  Administrators can create display plans that automatically match the layout and resolution of the client displays for viewer protocols that support it.
• Support for OpenLDAP authenticated users as virtual desktop local users

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Vizioncore, soon to become the Quest Software Server Virtualization Management Group, released last week vEchoShell 1.2.6 (formerly Virtualization Ecoshell).

vEcoShell is an extension for the Microsoft PowerShell IDE called PowerGUI that Quest offers for free since a long time. 
The tool was launched in April 2009 but Vizioncore declared it out of beta only now.

The new version introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and a major change in the way connections to ESX and vCenter are handled: now vEcoShell leverages the VMware PowerCLI to interact with the hosts, allowing the script to be executed outside the PowerGUI environment without problems.

The product remains freeware.