virtualization.info Editors

Citrix recently lost a well-known professional in the virtualization community: Stephen Spector, its Community Manager for Xen.org.

Spector was at Citrix since 1997, in charge of corporate development with a specific focus on the Alliances and Developer program. After Citrix acquired XenSource, he became the Senior Program Manager for Xen.org, in charge of engaging the open source community around Xen for almost three years.

Spector landed at Rackspace where he’s the new Community Manager for the OpenStack project.

The desktop virtualization organization at VMware continues to morph. After the departure of Jocelyn Goldfein, Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop Business Unit, in June, the company renamed the BU in End-User Computing and hired as its new head Christopher Young, former Senior Vice President of RSA Products at EMC.

Another member of the unit recently left: Richard Flanders, the former Business Development Manager for View.
Flanders held this role at VMware for more than four years. Before that he was the Senior Business Development Manager for Server Solutions at Fujitsu-Siemens.

He landed at MTI, a system integrator focused on virtualization and the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition fabric computing portfolio, as Product Marketing Director.

MTI has been able to close the first European sale of VMware-Cisco-EMC VBlock 1 product, and it’s aggressively expanding its offering across the Europe, especially in UK, Germany and France.

At the end of August, during its VMworld conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) VMware announced the creation of a new End-User Computing business unit.

The company hired Christopher Young, the former Senior Vice President of RSA Products at EMC, as new head for the BU.
Young has been in that position for almost 6 years. Before that he was the Vice President of Safety and Security Premium Services at AOL.

With this move VMware probably wants to send out a strong message, suggesting that security is going to become a key part of its desktop virtualization offering.
A first step in this direction comes from the new vShield products recently announced: the security framework provided by vShield Endpoint is already integrated with View 4.5.
Additionally, the company just acquired TriCipher, a startup providing a single sign-on (SSO) solution for hybrid cloud computing infrastructures, which supports an impressive number of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) public clouds.

In August virtualization.info reported about the departure of Roger Baskerville from Quest.
Baskerville was the XenSource’s EMEA Sales Director before the Citrix acquisition. He then moved to Quest as Vice President of Sales of the EMEA region.

Quest has replaced him with Paul Roberts, former Software Director for the Northern Europe at Sun for more than three years.
Before that, Roberts was the Sales Director of Novell in the UK.
He’s now the new VP of EMEA Sales for the whole Server Virtualization Management Group, formerly known as Vizioncore.

In July the VDI startup Desktone lost its Vice President of Strategy, Jeff Fisher, who took a position at RES Software as Vice President of Business Development. 
At the end of August the company had another change in the executive ranks: its CEO Harry Ruda has been replaced by Peter McKay.

McKay served as executive in the board of directors of many companies for short period of time (no more than 3 years): Apperian, Automated QA, Lagan Technologies and Application Security. He even joined Insight Venture Partners as partner for an even shorter period of time.
The most significant mark of its career anyway is his position as President and CEO of Watchfire, a firm focused on application security testing and compliance management that IBM acquired in mid 2007.

Ruda, who founded Softricity and sold it to Microsoft in 2006, remains in the board of directors as Chairman.

A couple of weeks ago the startup RingCube announced a new addition to its advisory board: Julie Casteel, the former Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at Sitel Corporation, a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) call center provider.

Casteel spent 11 years at Sitel. Before that she has been a Senior Vice President of Sales at the EDS Group for 8 years.

RingCube wants to leverage the Casteel knowledge and position to increase its market share in the BPO and Call Center markets, choosing to focus on specific industries rather than trying to compete with other virtualization vendors on every opportunity.
This strategy has been adopted by at least a competitor of RingCube in the past, Sentillion, which focused its marketing effort on the healthcare industry. Microsoft acquired Sentillion in December 2009 for an undisclosed sum.

The rumors of a two-parts deal reached by Novell to sell its assets continues to be the top discussion of the week.
Apparently, the deal will be finalized within 3-4 weeks. Most analysts suggest that Novell’s strategic buyers may be VMware, Oracle, Red Hat and CA.

A new article published yesterday by the Wall Street Journal confirms that VMware is indeed interested in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) business unit:

Novell Inc. is in advanced talks with at least two buyers, including VMware Inc., to sell the software company in separate pieces, people familiar with the matter said.

Gartner Vice President of Research Chris Wolf weighs in, suggesting why the SUSE acquisition would make sense for VMware:

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At the recently ended VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) VMware announced its management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms: vCloud Director (formerly project Redwood).

A number of sources confirmed to virtualization.info that the product development started from the engine of Lab Manager, the virtual lab automation solution that VMware acquired from Akimbi in June 2006 for $59M.
Now that vCloud Director is out it will be interesting to see what happens to Lab Manager, mostly now that Citrix just acquired a competitive technology from VMLogix.

Jason Boche, a well-known virtualization expert in the VMware community, focused on the topic on his personal blog, recognizing a significant lack of development effort for this product:

…4.0 was released in July 2009 which provided compatibility with the recent launch of vSphere, that’s really it.

…

Development efforts are being put forth merely to keep up compatibility with the vSphere releases.  Lab Manager documentation hasn’t been updated since the 4.0 release.  The 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 versions both point back to the 4.0 documentation.  Lab Manager documentation hasn’t been updated in over a year even considering two Lab Manager code releases since then.  Further evidence there has been no recent feature development in the Lab Manager product itself…

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At the end of July a new startup called Pancetera entered the virtualization market with a solution, Unite, to manage and optimize virtual storage in VMware virtual infrastructures.

The storage management component is called SmartView.
SmartView aggregates all the storage resources available inside the virtual infrastructure as a hierarchy, under the P: virtual drive.

The storage optimization component is called SmartRead.
This piece of the solution cuts unnecessary I/O operations by marking which parts of the virtual machine disk file are redundant or no longer in use. SmartRead recreates a normalized VM that is ready to boot while consolidating active data and synthesizing a dedupe optimized VMDK file.

Pancetera recently updated Unite to version 1.2.1, introducing a few new features:

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In July virtualization.info reported about the roadmap of SPICE, the high-performance remote protocol that Red Hat acquired from Qumranet in September 2008 and turned into an open source project in December 2009: apparently, SPICE won’t hit its first production-ready version before H2 2011 even.

The new stable release, 0.6, which is not compatible with 0.4 clients, has been released at the end of August.
It introduces a few new features:

• Surfaces
  The older spice protocol drew directly on the frame buffer. The surfaces work lets the driver draw on an offscreen surface, and then use that surface as a source when drawing.
  This is a requirement for an efficient implementation of an X driver, as offscreen pixmaps are a very common thing in X. It is also very useful for Windows 7, as it lets Windows use a surface for every toplevel window which leads to much reduced redrawing and thus bandwidth use.
• WAN optimization
  Photo-like bitmaps compression with a lossy algorithm, addition of an entropy-based compression layer over GLZ.
• Support for ARM7 (the one used by the iPhone 3GS and 4, for example)
  SPICE is being ported on ARM architectures and recently landed on a Nokia N900

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