Year: 2010

As most virtualization.info readers know by now, Cisco is leading a new trend in computing architectures by pushing for datacenter-in-a-box solutions, where the entire computing stack is designed and integrated to work as a whole.

It is the Apple philosophy applied to the data center. Or a modern interpretation of mainframes, if you prefer.

Oracle, thanks to the acquisition of Sun, announced its plan to do the same. In some ways HP is already going in the same direction, and may release more interesting solutions in the near future now that it has 3Com. 
IBM seems more interested in POWER architecture than in these x86 computing blocks.

What about Dell?

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Yesterday Quest announced its Q4 2009 financial results, disclosing some details about its virtualization business performance and future plans.

The most important one is that its subsidiary Vizioncore had more than 19,000 customers at the end of 2009.

Another interesting point is that Quest CEO, still sees the VDI market in early stage:

…What was most encouraging is that we really saw the growth accelerate within VDI in the second half of ’09.
The market is still in pilot mode but we saw some early larger deployments, particularly, in finance and healthcare…

Last but not least Quest shared a bit of its roadmap, talking about a future commitment in cloud computing:

…we’re bringing a couple of SaaS-based management solutions to the market in the first half of 2010…

Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript.

The capability to overcommit memory is an evident advantage that VMware has over competition. 
Marketing departments, partners, and even customers engage endless debates about its value and usefulness in every scenario. 

Microsoft has been particularly vocal in downplaying the importance of memory overcommitment, even if its President of Server and Tools Division, Bob Muglia, candidly admitted: 

we definitely need to put that in our product.

Maybe just a few people remind that Microsoft actually equipped its hypervisor with memory overcommitment capability and that was ready to appear in Hyper-V 2008 R2.
For some reasons anyway the company pulled the feature during the beta phase without disclosing when customers would finally get it.

The time is about to come, apparently.

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The VMware | Cisco | EMC coalition is waiting for Acadia to start its business and begin the implementation, administration and delivery of their new datacenters-in-a-box.

Meanwhile the three companies prepare and publish key documents to understand how the VBlock computing stack is designed and how it can be used.

Specifically, the documents published online are:

1. The Deployment Guide
   Deploy a full Vblock (for delivery) as an integrated whole
2. The Rapid Provisioning Guide
   Simplify Rapid Provsioning across the entire stack whether you are a service provider or an enterprise customer
3. The Reference Architecture Guide
   Detailed configuration specification, how it is tested, etc.

Only the Reference Architecture is available for public access. It includes information about Vblock configuration type 1 and type 2.

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Last week a report from The 451 Group ignited speculations about which company VMware may acquire next.
The list includes Terracotta, GenStone Systmes, MuleSoft, SOPERA, Heroku, Engine Yard, Skyway Software, Chordian Software.
The analysis firm even suggests that VMware may try to get MySQL from the just closed Oracle and Sun merger.
Worldwide press is quoting this shopping list with titles like  “More Acquisitions Ahead for VMware?”.

Of course VMware will acquire additional companies. And speculations aside, the company’s CEO already expressed an evident interest for middleware.

So, while everybody is busy with future steps, virtualization.info would like to take a different approach and recap the previous acquisitions, trying to figure out what VMware did with the technologies bought so far.

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Tracking the virtualization industry for more than six years (virtualization.info was launched in September 2003) has been a challenging, time-consuming and sometimes tiring task. But there always are fun moments.

The best ones come from the never ending skirmish between VMware and Microsoft marketing departments (and their allies), that in turn highlight the negative aspects of the competitor.
The VMware solution is too expensive and doesn’t manage anything but the virtual infrastructure, says Microsoft.
The Microsoft solution is not mature enough, it’s full of bugs (because it comes from Windows) and has hidden costs too, says VMware.

The effect that this exercise has on customers has been brilliantly summarized by Scott Adams in one of his recent Dilbert strips:

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At virtualization.info there’s a special skepticism about virtual appliances in their current form.
No less than three years ago we wrote about the shortcomings and hidden risks of this virtual machine incarnation. 
A modular data center may certainly be in the future of IT,  but in its implementation, a virtual appliance is not the best way to go there. The lack of enthusiasm from customers, which someone highlighted, is a confirmation.
The VMware effort to enhance the virtual appliance concept with metadata to define security policies and performance SLAs, something the company calls vApp since 2008, is a step in the right direction.

But while waiting for the first wave of vApps and its subsequent generations, there’s still much that can be said on this topic.
Christofer Hoff, Director of Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at Cisco, published an interesting article focusing on the current limitations of network virtual appliances. It’s definitively worth a mention here:

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At the end of last week VMware updated its Lifecycle Manager product, reaching version 1.1 (build 227208).
The product has been in beta for over six months, but it doesn’t introduce any major new feature.

It’s primarily for performance enhancements, and comes with internationalization support (but it’s not available in any language besides English).

Lifecycle Manager 1.1 includes a new build of the vCenter Orchestrator 4.0.1 (build 4502) that customers must install to use it.

Last week the startup Liquidware Labs updated its flagship product Stratosphere to version 4.5.3.

This minor update (version 4.5 came out in October 2009) just introduces a much welcome one-click assessment that produces a useful PowerPoint slidedeck.

To be honest the slides could be prettier but they are customizable, so users may want to apply their own themes before presenting to a wide audience.
The information inside the slide deck anyway is valuable, especially a graph showing how many physical machines and how many users are good candidates for client consolidation (aka VDI).

As most readers know, Microsoft offers three Hyper-V editions: the one coming with the full version of Windows Server 2008 R2, the one included in a stripped down version of Windows called “Server Core”, and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server.

The Server Core edition of Windows lacks the well-known GUI, has a limited .NET support and many other OS components are completely missing. It’s done so to reduce the OS surface attack, mimicking minimal Linux distribution that are popular among security professionals.

Problem is that this turns the local management of Hyper-V hosts into a real nightmare. Pretty much everything has be done on the command line but Microsoft doesn’t provide a CLI interface to perform every task.

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