Year: 2010

In mid-March virtualization.info covered the release of VMware ThinApp 4.5. 
A key thing we overlooked is the change in the end user license agreement, which the company highlighted in a recent post:

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you can license a device or a named user. If you have 50 devices but 100 users you use 50 client devices. If you have 50 users but they use many different clients (desktop, laptop and Citrix sessions) you still only needs 50 licenses (named user method of license).
There are not two different licenses that you can buy. You buy one license for a device and this could either be used to license a device or a named user.

YellowBricks just hinted at a new VMware HA feature that will appear in vSphere 4.0 Update 2:

4 Hosts – iSCSI / NFS based storage – Isolation response: leave powered on

When one of the hosts is completely isolated, including the Storage Network, the following will happen:

Host ESX001 is completely isolated including the storage network(remember iSCSI/NFS based storage!) but the VMs will not be powered off because the isolation response is set to “leave powered on”. After 15 seconds the remaining, non isolated, hosts will try to restart the VMs. Because of the fact that the iSCSI/NFS network is also isolated the lock on the VMDK will time out and the remaining hosts will be able to boot up the VMs. When ESX001 returns from isolation it will still have the VMX Processes running in memory. This is when you will see a “ping-pong” effect within vCenter, in other words VMs flipping back and forth between ESX001 and any of the other hosts.

As of version 4.0 ESX(i) detects that the lock on the VMDK has been lost and issues a question if the VM should be powered off or not. Please note that you will(currently) only see this question if you directly connect to the ESX host. Below you can find a screenshot of this question.

With ESX 4 update 2 the question will be auto-answered though and the VM will be powered off to avoid the ping-pong effect and a split brain scenario

In March 2009 virtualization.info reported that Citrix was working on a hosted version of XenServer, dubbed XenWorkstation. Apparently, we were wrong (or Citrix decided to indefinitely postpone it, as some sources report).

What really happened, in April 2009, is that Xen.org announced the open source project Hosted Xen (HXEN): a type-2 (hosted) virtual machine monitor (VMM) that runs on 32bit versions of Windows (XP, Vista and 7) and Mac OS .

The HXEN code is a snapshot of the Xen code base used in XenServer and nothing stops Citrix from adding its own code and market the product as XenWorkstation.

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Both Citrix and VMware were expected to launch their client hypervisors within the end of last year, but Q1 2010 is almost gone and there’s no sign of them.
Announced in January 2009, Citrix XenClient (codename Project Independence), was expected to arrive in beta somewhere in H2 2009 and in GA by the end of 2009.
VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) instead, was originally announced in September 2008 and then postponed somewhere in H1 2010.

ComputerWorld reported that both companies are behind the schedule because of the many drivers required to control the endless hardware configurations that the market offers today.

The article says that VMware now hope to release CVP by the end of 2010 while Citrix, which is running a XenClient private beta, is not committed to any specific date.
So, not only these platforms will oblige companies to refresh their hardware with new machines that support Intel vPro, but they won’t be realistically mature before another two years, at least.

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At the beginning of January virtualization.info published a lengthy article describing the VMware approach to cloud computing. The piece mentioned the vCloud Express beta program and the first five hosting provided selected to offer it worldwide.

The only European provider selected by VMware was Logica.
The company’s website promoted its participation in the following way (our emphasis):

Logica vCloud Express provides a reliable test and development on demand service on a Pay-as-You-Go model. It is a part of the Logica Real Time Infrastructure Services solution (RTIS), built on the same robust and reliable shared infrastructure platforms used for supporting business critical applications for Logica’s outsourcing customers.

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vCloud Express is a partnership between Logica and VMware and is a first step in the vCloud initiative that Logica started in September 2008. This means that Logica, as GSI (Global System Integrator) partner, has been chosen to be one of the initial partners to participate in the vCloudExpress Initiative.

Logica has been chosen to be the first partner in EMEA to host and develop this solution…

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This month the VMware’s competitive department has been particularly active, commenting on Citrix HDX performance and Essentials for Hyper-V sales volume, as well as the cost of managing Hyper-V, and its stability. 
Citrix just answered back, in two ways.

First, the company highlighted how VMware recently released a patch for ESX just to improve its score in a specific scenario, Terminal Services workload on Intel 5500 CPUs when Hyper-Threading is enabled, benchmarked by the independent framework Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC):

It took us some time to understand the reason for these results, but we eventually identified a very specific condition where ESX’s scheduler enforces fairness in scheduling vCPUs at at cost of throughput. ESX’s scheduler has long be subject of the intensive scrutiny of a large number of VMware engineers to guarantee fair access to the processor for each virtual machine. It is because of this fairness that VMware’s customers can rely on CPU resource controls. But, when fairness goes too far, throughput may be sub-optimal.

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Yesterday, while BlueLock was postponing the GA of its vCloud Express implementation in US, VMware was clarifying its cloud computing vision to the channel in UK.

CRN reports that VMware unveiled a hybrid model for cloud service delivery, that will allow organizations to choose between private and public clouds when it comes to storing data and hosting applications.

What this means is that the upcoming vCloud Service Director (codename Project Redwood) will allow some sort of bridging between the on-premises virtual infrastructure and public cloud ones, something virtualization.info already detailed a detailed coverage of the VMware strategy at the beginning of January.

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Easy to expect, during the last earnings call about Q1 2010 results (Red Hat Q4 fiscal 2010), the Red Hat President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, had to address a significant number of questions about the new KVM-centric virtualization strategy and the early performance of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), launched in November 2009.

Whitehurst said a few interesting things. First of all he alluded that the Hyper-V market presence is weak. Secondarily, and more interestingly, he described the reasons why a VMware usually looks at RHEV.
Last but not least, Whitehurst hinted at “another version of the management tools coming out”. He was probably referring to the Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (REVMD), which is the SolidICE product acquired from Qumranet in September 2008, expected somewhere in the H1 2010.

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As expected, after seven months in beta, the vCloud Express implementation offered by BlueLock, one of the five hosting providers selected for this program by VMware, has been declared GA expected to reach GA yesterday, has been postponed.

Despite that, the company moved from a free beta to paid service and published the price list, which is rather interesting compared to the Terremark one, the company where VMware invested $20 million in June 2009, and the Amazon EC2 one.

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VMware and Teradici announced their technology agreement in September 2008.
The two co-developed a software version of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol for over one year, and officially included it in View 4.0.

VMware has other OEM partnerships. With ThinPrint, since a long time, for example. The last one is with Likewise. But none of them can be considered instrumental to the success of a core product like View.
And, apparently, the VMware-Teradici version of PCoIP competes pretty well against Citrix HDX. It should be competitive also against the upcoming Microsoft RemoteFX.

The point is that, as far as we can understand, the agreement with Teradici is not exclusive. The company may close a similar deal with other vendors, but most of all, it may receive an unsolicited acquisition proposal.

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