Year: 2010

This week the CEOs of both VMware and Red Hat offered very interesting comments on cloud computing that the mainstream press has republished.

First, Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO, said that customers are now ready to invest in cloud computing after months of putting off the decision due to the economic downturn:

There was a qualitative change in our customer base in the last 18 months…Now, customers really want to go do this.

True or not, one thing is sure. Maritz has all interest in saying so since VMware is about to release its vCloud Service Director (vCSD) in mere two months.

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Apparently, in the effort to comply with the regulations of Section 508 standards for accessibility, VMware exposed part or its entire product roadmap for this year online.

The list includes many products that customers may expect to see at the upcoming VMworld 2010 conference:

• VMware vSphere 4.1
  virtualization.info unveiled the features of this upcoming release in May. It’s very likely that this will become 4.5 to stay aligned with the upcoming View release (see below).
• VMware View 4.5
  View 4.5 was planned for a Q2 launch but has been postponed.
• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.1
• VMware vCloud Service Director (vCSD) 1.0
  virtualization.info detailed the vision and the architecture behind vCSD in January. Some of the features have been unveiled earlier this week.
• VMware vCenter AppSpeed 2.0
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4.x

Thanks to NTPRO.nl for the news.

Vizioncore, soon to be fully assimilated into the parent company Quest, just announced the release of a free version of vFoglight, the popular monitoring tool for VMware virtual infrastructures.

The new edition is called vFoglight QuickView and it’s limited to a single VMware vCenter instance, up to 250 virtual machines (and no more than 500 inventory objects in total) and up to 6 reports:

Vizioncore uploaded a 6-minutes video that describes how the product works.

Yesterday Novell announced the upcoming availability of three new major release from its PlateSpin division: Migrate 9.0, Protect 10.0 and Forge 3.0.

All three products have in common the same physical to virtual (P2V) migration engine originally developed by PlateSpin and formerly called PowerConvert.
Over time, PlateSpin first and Novell then, forked it in three different tools to serve different use cases.

The new wave of releases introduces support for Linux guest operating systems, which is available for P2V, V2V and P2P migrations.

In details, this means that PlateSpin Migrate now can apply its Live Transfer and Live Server Sync technologies to Linux workloads. Novell introduces the two new features almost one year ago with Migrate 8.1.
PlateSpin Migrate 9 also supports the migration of Windows Clusters between physical and virtual infrastructures.

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Oracle just released a minor update for the VDI connection broker inherited from Sun.

Version 3.0, formerly called Sun xVM VDI, came out more than one year ago.

At that time Sun introduced support for VirtualBox side by side with the existing support for VMware ESX. A odd choice considering that VirtualBox is a hosted virtualization platform (aka type-2 virtual machine monitor or VMM) and is not supposed to perform as well a bare-metal hypervisor (aka type-1 VMM) as ESX. 
In March 2009 the Sun hypervisor, xVM Server, wasn’t ready for prime-time yet, so the company preferred to support VirtualBox rather than just stick with the competing platform.

Today Oracle introduces VDI 3.1.1 which comes with a major new feature: support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

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Yesterday Microsoft released the first version of a new free tool dubbed Application Virtualization Dashboard.

It packages together charts, gauges, and tables to track any App-V dataset in near-real time, so customers can monitor usage, health, and compliance of all their virtualized applications.

It supports both App-V 4.5 and 4.6, and offers the following capabilities:

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Today Citrix released XenServer 5.6, announced a few weeks ago at the Synergy 2010 conference (see virtualization.info coverage of the event and our article about the new features and packages).

For the occasion John Humpheys, Senior Marketing Director at Citrix, shares some numbers about the market penetration of XenServer.

The most important information revealed is that XenServer is now the backend hypervisor for more than half of all XenDesktop installations worldwide.

One may think that this number is pretty low, and indeed there’s a lot to do here to leverage the opportunity with a more sophisticated and compelling integration, but the fact that many XenDesktop clients don’t choose XenServer isn’t really surprising.

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iPhone and iPad are quickly becoming preferred endpoint devices for business. Citrix recognized the opportunity a long time ago and has been quick in releasing its Receiver for both the Apple devices.

While VMware still doesn’t seem interested in pursuing the opportunity, somebody else is doing on its behalf.
Yesterday in fact, a new remote desktop application for the iPad (and the iPhone) has been published on the AppStore: Gamma VNC.

As many similar apps in the store, this is a VNC viewer. Anyway there are a couple of interesting features. The first one is that it’s free (and it won’t stay that way much longer if it gets some popularity).
The second and most important is that it natively support the VNC server that comes as part of VMware Fusion:

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In April the startup Hyper9 lost his Senior R&D Scientist Schley Andrew Kutz, popular on the virtualization scene thanks to his reverse engineering work of the VMware vCenter plug-in architecture, and father of many tools that the company released in the last year.

Hyper9 hired Kutz just one year ago, bringing in his intellectual property about the Virtualization Manager Mobile and the SVMotion GUI plug-in.
Kutz moved to EMC where he’s working as Principal Software Engineer.

On top of that, Hyper9 loses today its founder and CTO Dave McCrory, virtualization.info has just learned. McCrory just left to pursue new opportunities and he’s rumored to be working on a new startup already.

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In July 2009 VMware hired Fred King, former General Manager of Technology Alliances & Channels in the Australian & New Zealand region at Oracle, as his new Director of Partners for the same geography.

Less than one year after that, King leaves the company as ARN just reported.
VMware doesn’t have a replacement yet.