Year: 2010

An area where Microsoft doesn’t seem particularly active is the so-called virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
So far the company made just a few progresses, letting its partner Citrix dominate the scene and compete head to head with VMware.

Rather than on products, Microsoft is focusing on VDI licensing.
In July 2009 it introduced two new VDI licenses, the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Suite and the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium Suite, on top of its well-known Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD).
Now the company may perform additional adjustments to its offering.

A couple of days ago TechTarget reported that Microsoft plans to modify the VECD to reduce the cost per user ($23/seat/year if you are a Software Assurance customer, $110/seat/year if you are not).

Microsoft doesn’t plan to abandon its per-seat model but will introduces changes to extend use rights, allowing device roaming.

A couple of days ago Oracle finally announced its Sun merger plan.
virtualization.info reported live about those parts of the announcement that are related to virtualization.

While the company highlighted its commitment to continue investing and offering the Sun virtualization technologies (Solaris Containers, Logical Domains, Dynamic Domains, VDI, VirtualBox), it didn’t offer much details about how its own virtualization platform, Oracle VM, will benefit from this integration.

Shortly after the live event, Oracle also published a series of recorded webcast that provides more insights about the products roadmap.
The series includes a webcast about virtualization where Oracle exposes a part of the Oracle VM 3.0 and VirtualBox roadmap.

There’s not many new details compared to what was announced in July 2009, when Oracle suddenly killed the Virtual Iron product portfolio it acquired just a month earlier, but it’s a progress.

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This morning ZDNet released a surprising interview with the Novell CTO Moiz Kohari, where he took a completely distant position from the virtualization market leader and competitor VMware.

While the VMware CEO opens its company’s premiere conference by saying that at today there’s no workload that cannot be virtualized, the Novell CTO says instead:

…virtualization has yet to overcome I/O (input/output) latency issues at the hypervisor level, as compared to provisioned servers. As a result, virtualization is not the choice in cases where service providers and businesses need to ensure as little latency as possible…

Even more surprising, considering that Novell is a long-time virtualization player, is Kohari skepticism about a fully virtualized cloud infrastructure:

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The virtual machines per core (VMs / core) ratio is a measurement unit that virtualization vendors use with extreme prudence to provide a rough idea of the server consolidation level that can be achieved on their hypervisors.

This ratio can be greatly influenced by several factors. The most important one is the kind of application workload that will run inside guest operating systems.
Depending on this element alone, some customers may end up having as low as 2:1 ratios while others may experience much higher values, so the best answer to any question around this topic is “it depends”.

To be honest, VMware is the only vendor that publicly disclose this number, while all its competitors, including Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle and Parallels, never exposed information about it so far. 
Officially, the company says that its hypervisor can support an average consolidation ratio of 8 VMs / core, a number that several customers report as a realistic one mostly in VDI environments.

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virtualization.info tracks and reports about the US startup FastScale since its launch in 2007.
The company has always been under most radars despite its interesting technology to reduce the size of virtual appliances and manage large scale VMware infrastructures like application fabrics.

When it emerged from stealth mode in April 2007, its products, Composer Suite and Virtual Manager, were already deployed inside VMware organization.

At the end of August 2009, while the attention was fully focused on the VMware VMworld conference, EMC announced the acquisition of FastScale for an undisclosed sum.

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During the Q4 2009 earnings call, beside the numbers we report below, the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton provided a couple of interesting details about the company’s past performance and future plans.

Citrix grew 9% during 2009, for a total of $451 million in revenue.
Revenue from new license sales was $168 million, up 4% from 2008, and up 30% from Q3, while license update revenue increased 6% from 2008.
Technical services increased 20%, led by support, maintenance agreements, and online SaaS revenue was $82 million, up 18%.

Citrix closed 5 deals with over 10,000 seats for XenDesktop in Q4 2009, reaching around 3,000 total XenDesktop customers.
The company also counted over 20,000 XenServer downloads in that quarter.

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After months of wait, today Oracle can finally disclose its roadmap to integrate the Sun product portfolio, acquired for $7.4 billion.

To introduce this all day online event the company prepared a long introductory video that shows the entire computing stack that the two giants now have in common. Each hardware piece has the new Sun|Oracle logo.

In these months several people suggested that Oracle may want to drop the Sun hardware business to focus on other parts, more in line with its current strategy.
The introductory video does everything but giving this idea. Quite the opposite, it seems to emphasizes the potential that Oracle now has in the hardware market, and the presence of three racks on stage is a further sign of the company commitment in this area.

The event starts with a tagline that tells everything: Software. Hardware. Complete.

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A new US startup, currently in semi-stealth mode, is about to enter the virtualization market: Pancetera.

The company was founded in early 2009 by four people:

• Henrik Rosendahl, the former CEO of Thinstall, acquired by VMware in January 2008
• Bart Bartlett, the former Director of Sales Operations/Marketing/Channels at Data Domain, acquired by EMC in July 2009
• Mitch Haile, a former Senior Software Engineer at Data Domain
• Greg Wade, another former Software Engineer from Data Domain

Pancetera is funded by Hummer Winblad Ventures and ONSET Ventures for an unknown amount. 
Hummer Winblad already invested in Scalent and VKernel.

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Despite its huge potential, it’s pretty evident that the market is not embracing the application virtualization approach (to not be confused with presentation or desktop virtualization) anytime soon.

All the biggest vendors in the IT industry invested in application virtualization: Microsoft acquired Softricity in May 2006, VMware acquired Thinstall in January 2008, Symantec acquired Altiris in January 2007 and AppStream in April 2008, Novell distributes XenoCode with an OEM agreement since September 2008, and Citrix has its own engine as part of XenApp since a long time.

Regardless of this massive commitment, the top players above spent almost zero effort to push for application virtualization adoption.
The startups that were not acquired in the last three years are struggling to make any impact. See AppZero (formerly Trigence), Ceedo or Trustware.

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Thanks to the help of VMware, it really seems that Cisco is turning into a virtualization vendor.

The company’s interest in virtualization has its roots in mid-2007, when it invested $150M in VMware, but the ambition to play a major role in this industry became evident with the launch of Unified Computing System (UCS) and the announcement of a coalition with EMC and VMware.

Just yesterday, Cisco announced a second alliance with NetApp to jointly deliver a private cloud architecture called Secure Multi-Tenancy. Of course such cloud is powered by VMware virtualization.

A much bigger anyway was announced a couple of days ago and passed under the radar of most: Cisco launched an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering for service providers.

With this initiative, Cisco is basically pushing a specific architecture to simplify the jumpstart to IaaS cloud computing. The recommended design implies the use of many Cisco gears (from the MDS to the Nexus 700), of any storage backend of choice (even if EMC is the first suggestion) and, guess what, VMware vSphere 4.0 as the foundation virtualization platform:

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