virtualization.info Editors

A little more than one year ago, Burton Group, an independent subsidiary of Gartner, reached unprecedented popularity with the launch of its Server Virtualization Evaluation Criteria.
The evaluation criteria was used to compare Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtual infrastructures on over 60 features and Burton Group became the first analysis firm to declare that XenServer 5.5 plus Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition was as enterprise-ready as VMware Infrastructure 3.5.

In May, Burton Group also released a Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria. The company avoided to call it Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) despite it’s a de-facto terminology because it was originally launched by VMware.

The new report compares Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.01 against over 100 features, but none of them achieved the score to be considered enterprise-ready.

Fast forward to last week: Citrix submitted XenDesktop 4.0 Platinum Edition with Service Pack 1 and Burton Group declared it the first enterprise-ready VDI solution available on the market.

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Now that the SPEC has finally released the first industry standard benchmark for hardware and OS virtualization platforms, customers may believe that there’s no more need for the VMmark proprietary framework that VMware released in July 2007.

VMware has a different opinion and last week announced the public beta of VMmark 2.0.

While SPECvirt_sc2010 and VMmark 1.x measure the performance of a single virtualization host, VMmark 2.0 has been designed to benchmark a whole virtual data center.
This implies measuring complex operations like manual and automated (or DRS-initated) vMotion, Storage vMotion, as well as virtual machines cloning and deployment.

On top of that, VMmark 2.0 also features more resource-intensive workloads, including:

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At the end of the last week the US startup PHD Virtual published a video previewing the upcoming support for vSphere Hypervisor (formerly ESXi) in its Backup product.

Now that VMware is just one release away from dropping ESX completely, all partners must work quickly to introduce support for its COS-less alternative.

For the ones who are wondering, it’s unlikely that PHD Virtual will be able to support also the free edition of ESXi. The first company that tried to do so, Veeam, received a kind request from VMware to stop altogether.

The video is embedded below:

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ChangeBASE is a UK firm focused on automated application compatibility testing and remediation software.
Its flagship product, AOK, is made of several modules, including Virtualise-It.

Virtualise-It allows AOK to recognize which applications can be virtualized with different application virtualization and presentation virtualization technologies by looking for non-supported drivers, hard-coded references, non-supported network updates, middleware dependencies, Windows Vista/7 compatibility, etc.

So far the module supported Microsoft App-V and Remote Desktop Services (RDS), Citrix XenApp, and Symantec (formerly SVS).
Last week the company also announced support for VMware ThinApp.

Despite it’s not a public company, Veeam recently started to update about its growth every quarter. 
Of course the financial results are missing or incomplete, and the announcement is primarily to promote its newest products, but the exercise is still useful to understand if the company is in good shape or not.

Almost 2,330 new customers won in Q2 2010 certainly don’t seem a bad result, even if Veeam is not providing any hard number about them.
Overall the company revenue grew 166% year-over-year, with a 145% growth for licensing booking revenue.
Veeam has now more than 12,000 customers worldwide.

To put things in perspective: the Veeam’s biggest competitor, Vizioncore, reported 19,000 customers in Q4 2009, and 25,000 customers right now.

VMware released vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0 in October 2009, introducing support for vSphere 4.0 and for twelve vendor that offer Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS storage replication solutions.
Actually a 2.0 product, SRM has been updated again to 4.0.1, then to 4.0.1.1 in March, and again last week to version 4.0.2 (build 272342).

But with the launch of vSphere 4.1, VMware also released SRM 4.1 (build 267817), which introduces a few new features:

• Capability to change guest operating system shutdown retry timeout when customizing IP address during recovery, and change datastore discovery timeout during recovery
• Support for networks backed by a VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) at the protected and recovery sites.
• Support for IP customization of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• Support for vSphere 4.1 and the vCenter Solution Licensing

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At the end of last week Microsoft published a useful paper titled: Planning, Implementing and Supporting SQL Server Virtualization with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration.

The 53-pages document provides guidance for planning and implementing SQL Server 2008 R2 on Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtual machines ready for Live Migration.
It’s divided in four parts that require the use of multiple System Center products such as Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2, Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 and Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010:

• Planning (which includes the use of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit)
• Implementation (which includes physical to virtual (P2V) migration of existing physical SQL hosts through SCVMM)
• High Availability and Live Migration
• Ongoing Operations and Support

In January virtualization.info covered a US startup still in semi-stealth mode: Pancetera.
The company features an interesting group of founders: one is the former CEO of Thinstall, acquired by VMware in 2008, the other three come from DataDomain, acquired by EMC in 2009.

virtualization.info also published details about the Pancetera technology just a few days ago: a storage management and optimization technology for VMware vSphere.

The company officially launches today and announces its first round of funding, closed in 2009: $5M, led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and ONSET Ventures.
The flagship product, previously addressed by the name of its components (SmartView and SmartRead) is now called Unite.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Last week virtualization.info reported about an analysis released in June by Goldman Sachs which forecasted a neat leadership of Citrix over VMware in the desktop virtualization market by 2013. Apparently Goldman Sachs is not the only one to believe so.

Even earlier than that, at the end of May, in its own intelligence report Morgan Stanley forecasted the desktop virtualization market revenue at $1.5B by 2014 and the market share breakdown in this way:

We identify large enterprises, govt, and education as the target segments, leaving SMB penetration as upside, and est. penetration of ~13% (47M PCs) to be virtualized by 2014, out of an estimated total installed base of 370M. We assume pricing declines 8%/year and that VMW and CTXS maintain 80% share through 2014.

…

we believe CTXS will likely hold the lion’s share of the market at 48% in 2014 vs. 36% for VMW. This implies a $735M rev. opportunity for CTXS in 2014, and $300-500M of potential rev. upside over the next 4 years.

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Earlier this week Citrix announced its Q2 2010 financial results.

The company announced $458M in total revenue, with more than $100M in cash flow.

New license sales were $149 million, up 15% from last yearLicense updates increased 13%.
Tech services grew 35%, online SaaS revenue (from the GoTo business unit) was $89 million, up 18% year-on-year.

In the Americas region Citrix revenue grew 17% from last year, in EMEA 11% year-on-year, and in APAC 31%.

Easy to expect the company reports a major growth for the XenDesktop business: in Q2 Citrix closed 18 transactions for over $1M each, 13 for over $18M and some for $5M. Some of these deals have more than 25,000 seats. 
During the quarter 3,500 customers purchased XenDesktop: 1,000 are new customers, the others are XenApp customers that used the XenDesktop Trade-up program.

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