virtualization.info Editors

Kaviza announced the release of version 3.1. of their VDI-in-a-box connection broker Software. Version 3.1 is the follow up of version 3.0 which was released in July 2010.

Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require a shared storage and dedicated, load balanced connection brokers.
The customer just has to deploy the vendor’s virtual appliance on its hypervisor of choice and he’s ready to go.

Version 3.1. introduces the following enhancements:

• Support for Citrix Receiver as a remote desktop software client
• Smart Card Support including the Department of Defense (DoD) Common Access Card (CAC) cards
• Support for 64-bit virtual desktops

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Forbes recently published an interview with Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center & Cloud division at Citrix, about a number of topics.

The title, Oracle Needs To Step Up Or Shut Up!, doesn’t seem to reflect the current relationship between Citrix and Oracle, as Crosby performed a part of the keynote at the just ended Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference. But this is not the interesting part.

What’s really interesting is Crosby revealing the Citrix goals for the virtualization market:

…Now, admittedly we have less enterprise share than VMware, but our projected run rate for XenServer goes up year after year and we are now expecting 18 to 20% market share, dominated by SME, some large enterprise and some monster cloud providers…

At the end of June Microsoft published a new paper against VMware titled: Operational Efficiency – Hyper-V versus VMware ESX & vSphere Operations & Management Cost Analysis.

The 17-pages report, released by a new War on Cost team at Microsoft, includes a research conducted in late 2009 and early 2010 by HANSA/GCR, which delivered a web-based survey to enterprises with 500 PCs or greater and collected the results.

The goal was to determine which platform, between Hyper-V and ESX, is less expensive in IT labor to operate on an on-going basis, and try to understand if the systems management products used to manage the environment impact the cost of managing either or both platforms.

The claimed results are quite interesting:

• the average costs were $10,357 per guest when hosted on Hyper-V versus $13,629 per guest when hosted on VMware, a 24% savings for Hyper-V versus VMware (but Microsoft admits that the IT labor costs varied widely based on the customer maturity)
• the average customer would spend $6,828,142 in IT Labor to run 501 Windows Server guests on VMware versus $5,189,233 in IT labor to run the same 501 guests on Hyper-V, an annual labor savings of $1,638,909 when using Hyper-V

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Starting 1995, the analysis firm Gartner started using a graph called Hype Cycle to represent the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.
virtualization.info missed the 2010 edition of the Hype Cycle for the virtualization market, released in June.

The 33-pages research that describes where different virtualization technologies are in the cycle, is available free of charge courtesy of Intel.
The mapping is really interesting for a number of reasons:

• Workspace virtualization (a technology that virtualization.info usually calls platform wrapper referring to products like Microsoft MED-V or VMware ACE) is placed at the very bottom of the curve, in the Technology Trigger section, and Gartner suggests that it will require another 5 to 10 years before mainstream adoption
• Smartphone hypervisors (like the upcoming VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform) are in the same section with the same timeline for mainstream adoption
• Virtual machine introspection technology (enabled by security frameworks like VMware VMsafe for example) is almost in the Peak of Inflated Expectations section, and its mainstream adoption is expected within 2-5 years

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VKernel recently published a new paper titled The Top 20 VMware Performance Metrics You Should Care About.

It’s a pretty interesting document not just because of the topic, but also because it goes straight to the point, solely focusing on the metrics that VKernel considers critical to reveal virtual machines performance issues. It provides a short description for each of them with, explaining why they are important, without trying to promote the VKernel products at all (not directly at least).

The 20 metrics are divided as follow:

CPU metrics

• cpu.extra.summation
• cpu.ready.summation
• cpu.usagemhz.average

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Ruben Spruijt, of Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) fame, CTO at PQR, just released version Application Virtualization Smackdown 3.0, a free research that compares all the major platform available on the market.

Released for the first time in April 2007, over time the paper has become richer and more comprehensive. This version 3.0 is a must-read independent resource for any company interested in adopting application virtualization technologies.

The 56-pages document compares products from Endeavors Technologies, Citrix, InstallFree, Microsoft, Spoon (formerly XenoCode), Symantec and VMware:

As part of new, smart marketing move, Veeam just started to give away a free book: The Expert Guide to VMware Data Protection and Disaster Recovery written by the well known virtualization expert and prolific writer Eric Siebert.

The company didn’t publish a full table of contents for it, so potential readers will have to be content with the promise of: the key virtualization concepts, comparison of virtual and traditional backup, best practices for VMware data protection and real-life examples.

Veeam is giving away a chapter at a time and of course you have to register to have it. The first one is available now.

And if this one is not enough, just remember that virtualization.info has a nice list of titles on its Bookstore, including others from Siebert.

Yesterday Oracle, during its OpenWorld conference, announced the availability of a virtualization platform called Oracle VM for SPARC 2.0. In reality this is the new version of the Logical Domains (LDoms) technology, which Sun originally launched in April 2007.

The product should not be confused with Oracle VM for x86, which reached version 2.x in the first half of 2008 and that is heading towards version 3.0.
While LDoms is hardware virtualization platform like the original Oracle VM is has a completely different architecture and capabilities.

LDOMs leverages the capabilities of UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T3 processors, which ship with a built-in hypervisor. 
It allows to create up to 128 virtual machines per physical server, and each can boot a restricted selection of guest operating systems, including Solaris 10 and 11, OpenSolaris (which Oracle recently dropped), Ubuntu Linux Server Edition and OpenBSD.

Despite the great confusion generated by this new naming policy, the new version introduces a few notable features:

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In March VMware launched a new online facility called Labs. It seems a sort of R&D website that exposes company’s engineers pet projects before they turn into real products.

In March Labs was hosting 10 projects but over time the company added more. The last one is called Auto Deploy:

VMware Auto Deploy supports automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems. Auto Deploy allows rapid deployment and configuration of a large number of ESXi hosts. After a DHCP server has been set up, Auto Deploy PXE boots machines that are turned on with an ESXi image. Auto Deploy then customizes the ESXi systems using host profiles and other information stored on the managing vCenter Server system. You can set up the environment to use different images and different host profiles for different hosts.

Like other projects, Auto Deploy is a released as Technology Preview, without any support and without any indication about future inclusion in the VMware product portfolio, anyway an interesting comment from Duco Jaspars hints at the VMware projects about it:

Is this based on the auto deploy appliance that did not make it in to the 4.1 release?

Last week Parallels announced that John Zanni joined the company as its new Vice President of Alliances.

Zanni spent 16 years at Microsoft. His most recent position was as General Manager for Worldwide Consulting Services Software + Services Industry.
Zanni was responsible of the Microsoft offering through service providers for a wide number of products and initiatives, including:

• Unmanged Hosting
• Managed Hosting
• SAAS ISVs
• MSOnline
• Unified Communications
• Subscription Computing
• Live offerings though service providers

Parallels’ well-known strategy is to dominate the profitable hosting industry, and Zanni is probably one the most significant help that the company could get aboard.