Year: 2010

A couple of weeks ago, VMware released the second minor update for its desktop virtualization platform for the Apple market: Fusion.

Fusion 3.0.2 (build 232708) only fixes a bug that prevents latest build of Mac OS X 10.6 Server from running as a guest OS.

The interesting thing anyway is that with this release VMware introduced two versions of the product:

• Fusion, that includes a 12-months complimentary subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus 2009
• Fusion Light, that doesn’t include any 3rd party bundle

Oracle just released its first updated for VirtualBox after the acquisition of Sun.

The list of bugs corrected in version 3.1.4 is long but there are no new features .

An interesting thing is that the company decided to change the default behavior of the engine: now VirtualBox tries to leverage hardware virtualization acceleration by default, and this includes both VPDI and nested paging, provided by Intel VT-x and AMD-V RVI enhancements.

Last week, along with the acquisition of RTO Software assets, VMware also announced the acquisition of several assets from its parent company EMC.

The $200M deal includes Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and Service Manager (formerly Infra), all parts of the EMC Ionix infrastructure management portfolio.

• Configuresoft, acquired in June 2009, was a configuration management company founded in 1999 (with the name of Fundamental Software) and originally focused on the physical layer. The firm shifted its attention to the virtual infrastructures and VMware only in early 2008.
• FastScale, acquired in August 2009, was a startup launched in 2007 and specialized in optimizing operating systems, deploying them on bare-metal hardware or virtual infrastructures, and managing them as a single application fabric.
  The firm originally promoted its capability to work with VMware infrastructures and then progressively exposed its support for the physical layer.

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Last week VMware announced the acquisition of RTO Software, one of the few companies in the presentation virtualization market that are focused on the so called persona management.

RTO Software was founded in 2000, today it counts 12 employees, and offers four products: Virtual Profiles, PinPoint, Discover and TScale.

Both VMware and Symantec OEM’ed the RTO Software flagship product, Virtual Profiles, in VMware View and Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) and since 2009. Then, at the beginning of February the Symantec version (Workspace Profiles) suddenly disappeared.

Now VMware confirms the acquisition of most RTO Software assets, which will become part of the company Desktop Business Unit, for an undisclosed amount.

The recently appointed VMware CTO for Desktop Virtualization, Scott Davis, summarizes what Virtual Profiles does:

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Almost seven months after the launch of a public beta program, Microsoft finally released App-V 4.6 as part of the Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2010.

The new application virtualization platform introduces support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (including 64bit editions), as well as the upcoming Office 2010.

The last point is particularly important because the new virtualized version of Office 2010, dubbed Click-To-Run, depends on this version of App-V.

App-V 4.6 also introduces a new feature called Read-Only Cache Mode, which is particularly useful in VDI environments. Ruben Spruijt offered a detailed analysis of the feature:

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With an email to its VI and vSphere customers last week VMware announced the end of life (EOL) for its Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework.

The company informs that the next version of vSphere, due later this year, will not support VCB and will solely rely on the new vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) introduced with vSphere 4.0.

VCB binaries will be still available and supported on VI 3.x and vSphere 4.0 according to the support policy, but they will not be included in the new platform.

VMware is saying its Data Recovery product already supports VADP, and that most partners focused on backup/restore already support it too (if you are one of those vendors feel free to list your product in the comments).
VMware also promises that more vendors will offer VADP-based solutions in time for the next vSphere release.

During its annual Summit (see virtualization.info live coverage here) Parallels announced the upcoming availability of Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition (PSfMBME ???).

The name is a little confusing: PFfMBME is a type-1 hypervisor which doesn’t need any host operating system to run.
So the “for Mac” in the title just means that this specific version of the product supports Apple Xserve hardware, and thus allows customers to run Mac OS X Server virtual machines.

Parallels offers a version of this hypervisor that supports other enterprise class x86/x64 hardware since October 2009 but of course the Apple EULA prohibits to run Mac OS X Server guest OSes on it.

Both versions share the same engine and so offer the same capabilities:

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The Novell increased focus on KVM didn’t pass unnoticed.
Several news outlets suggested that this may the first step before Novell abandons Xen, following the Red Hat path, which will ultimately turn into the end of Xen as a community-driven open source hypervisor.

The whole idea is not useful to Citrix, which wants as many partners as possible on its side to validate Xen, and certainly it’s not useful to Novell, which needs to avoid that customers start looking elsewhere (read VMware, Citrix, Oracle).

So while Citrix helped to explain why KVM makes sense in some cases but it’s not a full Xen replacement, Novell somehow clarified its intention to support both virtualization platforms.

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A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced a new partnership with Novell on virtualization.

The deal includes two parts.
The first one is focused on providing joint technical support to those customers that run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a XenServer guest OS.
The second one grants the use of Platespin Recon for Citrix and its Solutions Advisors partners.

While Novell could be considered a Citrix competitor because of its implementation of Xen, the reality is that, at the moment, Citrix has no interest in competing with anybody at the hypervisor layer.
The Citrix strategy is focused on placing XenDesktop on top of every possible hypervisor. And this includes ESX, Hyper-V and of course as many Xen flavors as possible.
So the Novell version of Xen is just an additional opportunity to sell VDI for Citrix.

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Now that both Virtual Iron and Sun acquisitions are complete, Oracle owns three hypervisors, a couple of virtualization-friendly enterprise management consoles and a connection broker.
What the company is missing is everything else around the hypervisor, from capacity planning to VMs backup.

Oracle may decide to own the missing pieces, trying to rival the impressive VMware portfolio, or work to build a reach ecosystem, trying to convince several third parties to become virtualization partners. And while it’s true that the VMware aggressive expansion is pushing its partners in new directions, most vendors are mostly looking for deals with Microsoft or Citrix.

For these firms, focusing the limited R&D resources on Oracle VM is a risky move considering its scarce adoption after more than two years on the market.
At the same time anyway, there are two big opportunities in embracing the Oracle way: first of all, the early partners get as many deals as they can without competition; secondarily, if their success is remarkable, Oracle may always consider an acquisition.

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