Year: 2010

Yesterday VMware announced its Q4 2009 earnings. During the call, besides the numbers that we report below, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz gave a couple of very interesting answers that hint at the future steps the company will take in terms of acquisitions and new products.

Despite the whole 2009 license revenue declined 13% ($304M in Q4), the company reported a nice 8% growth and beated analysts estimates.

The software maintenance portion of our services revenues was $246 million, up 53% compared to last year, while professional services revenue was $58 million, up 47% from last year.

VMware also announced almost 20,000 new customers won in the second half of 2009.
US revenues increased 15% year-over-year to $315 million and grew 28% sequentially. International revenues were $293 million, an increase of 22% compared to last year and up 20% sequentially. International revenue growth was driven primarily by improved demand in China, Japan, Brazil and throughout Europe.

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This 2010 definitively started as the year to recruit talents.
After the news that Scott Lowe joined EMC, virtualization.info has just learned that Massimo Re Ferrè, is leaving IBM to join VMware.

Re Ferrè is one of the most popular professionals in the virtualization industry, leading the community since much before the launch of this publication (September 2003).
virtualization.info recognized his personal website as a top virtualization blog in 2008.

Re Ferrè worked in IBM for 15 years, most of them as IT Architect.
He will join VMware as Solutions Architect in the vCloud department in EMEA, working with other well-known talents (and bloggers) like Massimiliano Daneri, of VMBK fame, and Duncan Epping.

So while IBM is intensifying the competition with VMware, VMware recruits its best employees.
2010 is going to be an interesting year.

Today, with a joint webcast, VMware, Cisco and NetApp announced a new partnership.

The three companies created an architectural blueprint, and they jointly own the intellectual property (IP) of it, called Secure Multi-Tenancy.

It’s available today, since it doesn’t include any new product or technology, ready to be implemented and deployed through partners.

The announcement is nowhere near the launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition that VMware, Cisco and EMC used to shake the market in November 2009, but takes a similar approach in offering pre-tested and validated computing stacks.

Specifically, the fault-tolerant architecture includes VMware vSphere and vShield, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), the Nexus 1000V virtual switch and MDS Switches, and NetApp
MultiStore with Data Motion technology:

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Almost 7 months after the release of vSphere 4.0 (and its Update 1), VMware finally publishes a Hardening Guide that can be used to secure every aspect of the virtual infrastucture.

It’s not the final version of the document but just the first, public draft (internally called Rev B). Nonetheless every VMware administrator is highly encouraged to download and check it.

The guide is divided in five sections (excluding the introduction):

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Surgient has been one of the first startups to build value on top of virtual infrastructures in the early days of hardware virtualization, well before VMware led the technology to mainstream adoption.

Compared to its competitors, for a long time Surgient offered a hosted virtual lab automation platform.
Only in September 2008 it extended its business model, allowing customers to install the product on-premises.

That first change in strategy possibly depended on the limited interest that the market demonstrated so far in virtual lab automation solutions, despite Surgient has to compete with a really low number of vendors.
The fact that VMware is among those competitors doesn’t help: another company in this space, StackSafe, disappeared leaving no traces in March 2009 after just 15 months of activity. 
Nonetheless Surgient managed to raise a revenue of $1 million per month in 2007 and was fortunate enough to raise a new round funding for $4.3M in August 2009. 

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virtualization.info started this year questioning the industry interest in virtualization benchmarks.
In that article we reported that Intel discontinued its vConsolidate platform, giving the customers no other choice that using the VMware VMMark system and its non-competitive EULA.

Intel was kind enough to answer, confirming that vConsolidate was discontinued in early 2009, and providing some insights behind the choice, that we quote here integrally:

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Fedora, the Linux operating system supported by Red Hat, will reach version 13 in May 2010, and will introduce a number of new features to enrich the KVM capabilities:

• Hostinfo
  Allow a virtual machine to see information and statistics from the host operating system, under narrow and strictly controlled conditions and only at the discretion of the host administrator.
• KVM Stable PCI Addresses
  Allow devices in KVM guest virtual machines to retain the same PCI address allocations as other devices are added or removed from the guest configuration.
  (this is particularily important for Windows guests in order to prevent warnings or reactivation when device addresses change)
• Shared Network Interface
  Enable guest virtual machines to share a physical network interface (NIC) with other guests and the host operating system. This allows guests to independently appear on the same network as the host machine.

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At the end of last year, people from the University of California and MIT published an extremely interesting 14-pages paper about the risks of information leakage in multi-tenancy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
Titled Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds, it was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2009.

The research mentions The Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso), Microsoft Windows Azure, even if it doesn’t seem yet a IaaS platform, but it primarily focuses on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) describing how attack a target virtual machine inside the cloud in four phases:

1. map the cloud provider’s internal infrastructure (“cloud cartography”)
2. identify the attack target position
3. place a hostile virtual machine in the same host of the target virtual machine
4. perform side-channel attacks leveraging the shared resources

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As most readers know, virtualization.info can deliver its daily news through the email newsletter, the RSS feed, the Twitter stream and even the Windows Live Alerts service.
What most of you probably don’t know anyway is that virtualization.info is on Facebook too:

www.facebook.com/virtualization.info

If you become a fan, our news will appear on your Facebook stream, just in case you prefer to aggregate everything on this platform.

This may be even more convenient if you are using your Facebook identity to comment on our articles, a new feature that we activated just a few weeks ago.
With over 350 million users in the world, it was time for virtualization.info to be there too.

P.s.: Facebook offers a nice Discussion Board for each fan page.
Feel free to use the virtualization.info one to debate about any virtualization topic you like or just to say “Hi”.

IBM may have pioneered virtualization in the sixties, but it’s not a secret that it has no interest in dominating the modern x86 virtualization market.
So far, Big Blue has been happy enough to play the OEM role, distributing VMware platforms inside System x machines. And nobody will find hard to recognize that, compared to the HP and Dell efforts, the IBM commitment in this space has been less evident.

Behind the scene in fact, IBM perceives VMware and other x86 virtualization vendors as competitors which slow down the adoption of its PowerVM platform.

A good example of this comes from a paper released by the International Technology Group (ITG), which IBM often uses to prepare marketing papers, in April 2009: VALUE PROPOSITION FOR IBM POWER SYSTEMS – Comparing Costs of IBM PowerVM and x86 VMware for Enterprise Server Virtualization

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