Year: 2010

Just before the beginning of VMworld 2009, VMware announced the upcoming availability of Go, a free web console to manage ESXi 4.0 (ESX hosts are not supported).

Yesterday the company finally released it.

Go allows to initialize and patch ESXi hosts, create and operate virtual machines, check the VMs patching level connecting to the Shavlik Technologies service (VMware OEMs the Shavlik technology for its Update Manager – VUM).

Go is a hosted application that resides on VMware servers.
To properly operate anyway, it needs that a number of components are installed on one corporate desktop, which basically acts like a proxy.
Specifically, Go needs the Microsoft .NET framework and PowerShell, the VMware vSphere Power CLI, the Remote Console and a copy of Converter Stand-Alone.
All this software can be installed on  any Windows desktop (XP SP3, Vista SP2 or 7).

Read more

With a very brief note, The Xen.org community announces that Xen reached the Release Candidate status and so it’s near its general availability, expected before the end of Q1 2010.

There’s a long list of reasons to wait for Xen 4.0.
One of them is the support for the software switch called Open Virtual Switch that will compete with the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

More importantly, the availability of Xen 4.0 may trigger a major launch of Oracle in the virtualization space (assuming its acquisition of Sun will be ever approved) and clarify its strategy against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

In the same way, it will be extremely interesting to see how Citrix will enhance the Xen 4.0 codebase to make XenServer more competitive.

While VMware continues its transformation from a virtualization vendor to a company that wants to compete with Microsoft, Google, IBM and soon Oracle, the massive replacement of its workforce, which virtualization.info documented in details for months, goes on.

Last week we covered the departure of Chris Hammans, Regional Director for UK and Ireland.
This one it’s the turn of Joanne Syben, Senior Director of R&D, in charge for ESX R&D.
Specifically she led the Core Storage team for ESX Server, including VMKernel components, FC and iSCSI. Syben componentized core storage stack to support native and 3rd party multipathing, policy and array specific modules. She also led the SMB team to work on scale-out-storage technologies (distributed systems, clustering, replication, LVM etc.)

Read more

As expected, today VMware confirmed the acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo.
The company didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but All Things D reports that we are talking about something more than $100M.

This is the acquisition #14 and like no other (not even the SpringSource one) this seems far, far away from the roots of VMware.

As already mentioned in the previous coverage of the deal, Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite which Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350M in cash and that competes with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PIMs offered by Google or Zoho for example.
Zimbra also offers an open source mail client that competes with products such as Microsoft Office and Mozilla Thunderbird.
Yahoo is rumored to be trying to sell it since September 2008.

What VMware is going to do with Zimbra? Something that is completely unrelated to virtualization: it’s going to continue to serve the 55 million mailboxes that customers created today and further develop the suite.
If there’s a more organic vision behind this acquisition, the company definitively failed to clarify it.

Read more

Offered for free with the Essential Plus and higher editions (except Standard) of vSphere 4.0, there’s an interesting product which VMware didn’t promote at all so far: Data Recovery.

Data Recovery is a disk & file backup/restore product that comes as a virtual appliance (powered by a 64bit CentOS 5.2 Linux distribution) and protects guest OSes in ESX and ESXi.

Read more

In December 2007 the founder of Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May 2009), Alex Vasilevsky, left his company to form a new venture with Dan McCall, former board advisor at Reflex Security (now Reflex Systems).

The new startup, fueled by Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners funds, came out the stealth mode in September 2008 and released the first semi-public beta of his flagship product, NxTop, in July 2009.

NxTop is one of the first client hypervisors to hit the market and one of the few that doesn’t require Intel vPro as mandatory hardware feature (both VMware and Citrix client hypervisors seems to need it to work).
Based on Xen, NxTop is sold as a new and more efficient platform to manage the PC lifecycle, so it’s not in direct competition with the upcoming VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) and the Citrix XenClient, which are meant to offer offline VDI capabilities.

Read more

The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is a sort of blueprint that companies can use to standardize the way they manage their IT, pretty similar to what the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of practices does.

Virtualization is such a complex technology that involves OSes, networks and storage administration, security hardening, performance monitoring and even applications troubleshooting in some cases. As we said a long time ago, virtualization professionals are sort of super heroes.
There’s a real need for operational frameworks to handle virtual infrastructures but unfortunately nor ITIL neither MOF are currently covering this aspect of the IT governance.

A step in the right direction may come from Microsoft, which released the first beta of what they call Reliability Workbook for Hyper-V, as part of the existing MOF 4.0 framework.
The Reliability Workbooks are task lists (in Excel format) that Microsoft recommends to follow to monitor and maintain the health and reliability of their products.

Read more

NetApp just released a very interesting 38-pages paper comparing storage protocols performance in VMware vSphere 4.0 and VI 3.5 environments with Rackable S44 servers and FAS3170 arrays.

The paper, titled VMware vSphere and ESX 3.5 Multiprotocol Performance Comparison Using FC, iSCSI, and NFS, highlights a significant performance improvement in vSphere, mostly for iSCSI and NFS, since both have Jumbo Frame support.

The document also includes an comparison between 4GB FC, 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, in terms of host CPU utilization and latency, which is worth a look.

Read more

VMware recently lost its Regional Director for UK and Ireland: Chris Hammans.

Hammans spent six years and a half at VMware and now moved to the virtualization startup Pano Logic as their EMEA Managing Director.

CRN informs that VMware replaced him with Mark Newton.

Newton previous positions include one at the distributor IBS and one in BMC, but most importantly he comes from Oracle, where he spent six years as Vice President of Sales.

Finally Microsoft launched Windows Azure, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing offering that competes with products like Google App Engine.

In Q3 2009 the company said that Azure will be more than just a PaaS cloud, hosting (Hyper-V) virtual machines pretty much like Amazon does with its Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Which makes it a hybrid IaaS + PaaS cloud. But Microsoft didn’t clarify if the IaaS offering would be launched at the beginning of 2010 with the PaaS one.

To find out virtualization.info explored a bit Azure.

The first thing that is worth to note is the pricing scheme:

Read more