virtualization.info Editors

Last week Red Bend Software, a mobile software management company, announced the acquisition of the virtualization startup VirtualLogix (formerly Jaluna) for an undisclosed sum.

VirtualLogix is a US company founded in 2002 and focused on hardware virtualization for embedded devices. It offers a hypervisor, VLX, that can run real-time operating systems side by side with Windows and Linux flavors as guest OSes on Intel, Texas Instruments, Freescale and ARM and Power architectures.
Leading venture capital firms like Intel Capital, Index Ventures, Atlas Ventures and Esprit Capital Partners invested in the company so far.

VirtualLogix has very few competitors, including Trango Virtual Processors, which has been acquired by VMware in November 2008, and Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), which received a major investment from Citrix in January 2009.

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In March 2009 the Canadian application virtualization startup Trigence, launched in 2006, changed its name in AppZero.
In its history the company remained under the radar most of the time, even after the brand identity refresh.

Last week AppZero announced a new recapitalization and a new chairman.

Nigel Stokes, former CEO and chairman of DataMirror (acquired by IBM in July 2007), has become the controlling and majority investor.

Meanwhile the company lost pretty much its entire executive team: two CEOs (Chuck Colford and David Roth), the CFO (Walter MacDonald), the CTO (Donn Rochette), the COO (John Hamilton), the Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Business Development (Mark Yohai), the Director of Strategic Channel Partners (Chris Dodunski).
Some of them, like the CFO and the COO, left after less than one year.

As Trigence, the company raised $1.6M in angel and seed funding, $5.5M in Round A and another $8M in is Round B funding.

The open source Open Virtual Switch project was announced by Citrix in May 2009. 
It reached version 1.0 exactly one year later, and meanwhile it became a key building block of the upcoming Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Citrix already announced that it will appear in the next version of XenServer, codename Cowley, hopefully to be released early next month at the Synergy 2010 Berlin conference.
On top of that, yesterday Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Cloud Computing division, added interesting details about its roadmap.

First of all, the next version of Citrix hypervisor will expand support for the Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology, introduced in XenServer 5.6, so that its configuration will not require an interaction with the command-line interface.
Secondarily and more importantly, the next version of Open vSwitch will support SR-IOV so that virtual traffic won’t bypass the policy enforced at the switch level.

This version of Open vSwitch will specifically support the Intel 10Gbit NIC 82599ES (formerly codename Niantic).

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Last week Citrix turned a few heads by announcing a brand new partnership with Cisco to deliver XenDesktop on Unified Computing System (UCS), powered by NetApp storage.

As a key promise of fabric computing, Citrix, Cisco and NetApp will jointly validate the infrastructure, providing a reference architecture and a Starter Kit to deliver an entry-level 300 virtual desktops environment. An Expansion Kit will also be available to scale to thousands of virtual desktops.
The companies will also provide shared support and training.

Probably the best part of this upcoming solution is that customers are free to select their back-end hypervisor: initially only Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX will be supported, while Microsoft Hyper-V will be added at a later time.

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A couple of weeks ago, during the VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced the acquisition of two companies: Integrien and TriCipher.
In both cases VMware didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition.

Both are strategic acquisitions, critical to deliver the cloud computing vision detailed on stage.

Integrien is a company focused on real-time performance analytics. 
Their flagship product, Alive, analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly.
Impressively enough, Alive can handle upwards of 10 million individual metrics every 5 minutes.

Alive is a next generation performance monitoring solution that VMware probably plans to integrate in its upcoming Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, just renamed vFabric, along with SpringSource tcServer, GemFire, RabbitMQ and Hyperic. 
Interestingly, Alive integrates with a plethora of products, including Hyperic.

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At the beginning of August, Burton Group, an independent subsidiary of Gartner, declared Citrix XenDesktop 4 Service Pack 1 the first enterprise-ready solution in the VDI market, according to their Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria.

But the Citrix supremacy didn’t last long: the just released VMware View 4.5 immediately received the same honor .
Specifically, View 4.5 Premier Edition earned the certification because it addressed multiple shortcomings in the previous version: the lack of role-based access  control (RBAC) for administration delegation, the lack of administrative change logging capabilities to provide an audit trail for all administrative actions, the lack of support for Microsoft Windows 7 and the lack of integration with enterprise management software like Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).

Here’s the Burton Group scorecard for View 4.5 Premier Edition:

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A couple of weeks ago Microsoft launched the public beta of a new physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool for client operating systmes called P2V Migration for Software Assurance.

The product leverages the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Sysinternals Disk2VHD to convert a user’s existing Windows XP SP3, Vista or 7 environment to a virtual hard disk. When the process is complete, this tools automatically formats the physical hard drive, installs a fresh copy of Windows 7, which includes a version of Virtual PC, and deploys the previously saved virtual hard drive.
The applications installed in the old, virtualized operating system are mapped on the new Windows 7 environment. The applications of both OSes appear side by side thanks to the seamless window technology that Microsoft call RemoteApp.

As the name suggests, the product is only available for Software Assurance customers, and it requires a valid license for both the old and the new operating systems. So, for example, all OEM copies of Windows (the ones shipped with branded computers) cannot be used with this tool.

Last week virtualization.info reported about the stealth release of Parallels Desktop 6.0. A few days later the company formally announced the product which is available for download today.

The product introduces 80 new features and improved performance: the Crimson Consulting Group, in a July 2010 study, reports that Desktop 6.0 can launch Windows applications 41% faster than the previous version and that 3D games are 40% faster.

Top new features include:

• 64bit engine
• virtual machines hard drive encryption
• Mac OS keyboard shortcuts mapped to Windows applications
• automated migration of personal data from Windows folders to Mac OS X folders
• automated migration of browser bookmarks from Windows to Mac OS X (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari supported)

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In March VMware acquired a number of products from its parent company EMC for $200M, all parts of the Ionix infrastructure management portfolio, and all coming from acquisitions of small technology firms happened between 2006 and 2009.

In July some of these products have been rebranded and relaunched so that Application Discovery Manager (acquired from nLayers in June 2006) has been renamed in vCenter Application Discovery Manager (ADM).

As the name suggests, vCenter ADM is an interesting product that automatically, in real-time and without agents, discovers applications and maps their dependency by analyzing the network traffic and recognizing specific software patterns.
In a large, complex data center this is extremely useful to perform change and configuration management, or to speed up infrastructure troubleshooting.
In a cloud computing environment, ADM could be leveraged to automatically update a content catalog.

EMC used to ship this product as a physical appliance, using an IBM 3250 System x server, but in mid August VMware released vCenter ADM 6.1 (build 6060), which introduces the virtual appliance version.

Other new capabilities of ADM 6.1 are:

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In mid February the startup Virsto entered the virtualization market with a rather unique positioning: it’s offering a storage optimization technology for virtual infrastructures powered by Microsoft Hyper-V.
Virsto developed a solution to improve efficiency and performance of Hyper-V virtual machines, by hijacking and optimizing their interaction with the underlying storage.

Virsto has been brave enough to steer away from the VMware crowded ecosystem, where a startup can cash in much faster with the right solution (until VMware starts competing with it), to bet on the Microsoft hypervisor.
Hyper-V still has less than 30% market share, but Virsto has practically no competitors there.

The company released the first update of its flagship product yesterday: One 1.2
This release introduces a number of key capabilities:

• full support for the Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS) technology
  One now uses a writer and provider model ensure that VSS can perform a full server backup to help protect all data required to fully restore the server

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