Year: 2010

Eric Sloof at NTPRO.NL yesterday revealed that VMware is about to launch a new classroom course dubbed vSphere 4: Automation.

The training course should be fully focused on virtual infrastructure automation through PowerShell cmdlets offered by the VMware PowerCLI:

• Identify VMware vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets
• Identify how to obtain help with vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets
• Automate ESX/ESXi host storage and network configuration
• Automate virtual machine provisioning
• Automate virtual machine migration
• Automate cluster configuration
• Create reports with vSphere PowerCLI

While very interesting, it would be even better if a vSphere class about automation would also include extended training about the vCenter Orchestrator framework, mostly because it comes for free with all editions of vSphere.

Yesterday ChannelWeb reported about another major departure at VMware: Richard Geraffo, Vice President and General Manager of the Americas Region, left the company to join HP.

Geraffo landed at VMware from BEA in June 2008. For almost two years he has been the Vice President of Sales and General Manager, in charge of Sales, Marketing, Consulting, Operations, Channels & Finance, managing over 1000 people.

HP appointed him as its new Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the Americas for the Enterprise Business group.

As ChannelWeb correctly highlighted, HP is taking a number of steps (like the acquisition of 3Com or the partnership with Microsoft) to counter the VMware | Cisco | EMC (VCE) coalition and hiring Geraffo can certainly help. He’s probably one of the few executives that has full knowledge about the VMware’s and Cisco’s current and future strategy around fabric computing and the evolution of their partnership.

Why all private clouds being promoted these days are just Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds?

Why we have several vendors that offer hardware virtualization platforms for on-premises IaaS clouds and nobody that offers something similar for private PaaS and SaaS clouds?

On average, the commonly shared long-term vision for cloud computing is about a world where off-premises facilities host 100% of business applications and where nobody, except cloud providers, has to care about the underlying complexity of operating systems, physical servers, storage arrays, networking, security, and everything else comes to mind when we thing about our existing data centers.
Actualizing such vision requires addressing a number of technical issues (related to security and compliance, orchestration, billing, etc.) and changing the mindset of individuals inside corporations (the concepts of “physical ownership” and “trust what you see” are two of the strongest in human mind).

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Today VMware sent out a number of invitations to promote an upcoming announcement planned for April 27.
The online webcast will be jointly presented with Salesforce, one of the leading companies in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market since years, and it’s dubbed VMforce.

Because it’s highly unlikely that VMware and Salesforce would disclose a merge in such a way, the expectations to have a groundbreaking announcement are set rather low. Nonetheless, a new evidence discovered just a few hours ago, may suggest something really big between the two.

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During the weekend Xen.org finally released Xen 4.0.

It includes a number of very interesting features, even if they are definitively less than the ones listed in the proposed roadmap appeared in August 2009:

• Fault Tolerance (live transactional synchronization of VM state between hosts)
• Memory Overcommit (page sharing through the Transcendent Memory feature)
• Support for live snapshots and clones through the new VHD implementation called Blktap2
• Support for new Smart NICs with multi-queue and SR-IOV functionality through the network channel implementation called Netchannel2
• Support for Para-virtualized USB and VGA pass-through
• Support for Paravirt-ops in the Dom0 (with Linux kernel 2.6.31)
• Support for up to 64 vCPUs per virtual machine
• Support for up to 1TB RAM per host
• Support for Intel Xeon 5600 Series CPUs (codename Westmere)

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xvp (aka Xen VNC Proxy) is a suite of open source programs for managing Citrix XenServer or Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) virtual machines developed by Colin Dean.

The console allows to operate and access virtual machines through a browser (no matter if it runs on Linux, Mac OS or Windows), and to migrate VMs across hosts in the same pool.

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These days Citrix seems more and more interested in turning its attention to the SMB market. Last week virtualization.info covered the investment in Kaviza and its VDI-in-a-box solution that lowers the infrastructure cost down below $500 per virtual desktop.

Last week Citrix also published an interesting technical article about how to configure XenDesktop in an environment that  doesn’t have a SAN:

…
For small and medium businesses that want to reap the benefits of XenDesktop, but that don’t have significant capital to invest in a high-end SAN, the use of local storage to host the write-cache drive would remove a significant implementation barrier. In most situations, the IOPS supported by the local storage system is the primary constraint limiting the number of virtual machines that could run on a single host. For a small or medium business that does not require high density, local drive caching would be a viable alternative.

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A few days ago Oracle updated its desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox to version 3.1.6.

The minor update is primarily for bug fixing but it also includes a new, multi-threaded architecutre for the vboxowebsrv web service.

Intel just released a blueprint on how to build an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing architecture.

Titled Intel Cloud Builder Guide to Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel Xeon Processor-based Platforms, the 18-pages paper promotes the use of Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) Service Provider Edition as the management console of choice for IaaS clouds based on Xen, KVM or VMware ESX/ESXi.

The document includes both design principles and step-by-step implementation:

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There’s a lot of interest around the US startup Unidesk, primarily because Ron Oglesby recently left Dell to join it as Chief Solution Architect.

Oglesby is one of the most popular names in the virtualization industry, author of the bestsellers VMware ESX Server 2.5 Advanced Technical Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide.
He was one of the premiere speakers at our Virtualization Congress 2009 and he appears on virtualization.info from time to time as guest columnist (see his last article here: Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?).

Unidesk is a US startup founded in December 2007, funded by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture with a Round A investment of $8.1M and a Round B of $12M.

The company’s management team includes Don Bulens (President and CEO), who was the President and CEO of EqualLogic until Dell’s acquisition.
With Bulens there are: Chris Midgley (founder and CTO), the former Vice President of Digital Strategy at Iron Mountain, Jeannie Vineyard (Vice President of Engineering), who comes from Egenera (almost 6 years there) and Liquid Machines (3 years), Brian McDonough (Vice President of Sales), former sales executive at IBM in charge for the Watchfire product line, and Tom Rose (Chief Marketing Officer), the former Director of Worldwide Product Marketing at HP.

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