virtualization.info Editors

So far Citrix released a number of interesting resources about its VDI platform XenDesktop, including a Modular Reference Architecture and a Performance Assessment and Bandwidth Analysis for Delivering XenDesktop to Branch Offices.

Coupled with independent comparisons of its features, like the Burton Group’s Virtual Desktop Evaluation  Criteria or the PQR’s VDI Smackdown, these resources are precious to understand the Citrix’s offering.

Now the company adds one more piece, by releasing a Design Handbook:

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Citrix has just hired Roland Wartenberg, the SAP Chief Virtualization Evangelist.

Wartenberg has been in SAP since 1997, covering multiple roles.
In 2006 he developed the virtualization strategy for the SAP Labs division.

Wartenberg has been actively involved in pushing the company’s marketing message about virtualization through the many SAP Virtualization Week events arranged around the world.

He will start at Citrix in a couple of weeks, in charge of the the strategic alliance with SAP.

After the departure of Ron Oglesby, now in Unidesk, Dell loses another key member of its virtualization team: Paul Rad.

Rad has been at Dell for more than 10 years. During this timeframe he covered multiple roles, including the Chief Architect of the first Dell | VMware | EMC Virtualization reference architecture in collaboration with Ed Bugnon and Dino Cicciarelli, before EMC acquires VMware in 2003.

In his last position, Data Center Virtualization Practice Executive, he developed intellectual property (including patents about virtualization and clustering solutions) and led the virtualization practice.

Rad already landed at Rackspace, as its new Vice President of Technology and CTO of Enterprise Cloud Division.

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Yesterday VMware announced that it has hired Jeff Casale as its new Senior Vice President and General Manager of Americas business.

Casale had a very long career in EMC which started in 1998, when he was the Vice President of Europe, in charge for France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal and South Africa.

Casale will report to Carl Eschenbach, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations.

In January 2010 VMware released a free web management console called Go.
The product, supporting ESXi hosts only, is a hosted platform that the vendor offers to SMB customers.

Go allows to initialize and patch ESXi hosts, create and operate virtual machines, check the VMs patching level connecting to the Shavlik Technologies service, but customers have to grant to VMware the privilege to analyze the way they interact with the console.

VMware never release any public information about the level of adoption of this tool, and this the first time it gets an update.

The new version is able to perform a Virtual to Virtual (V2V) migration from VMware Server to ESXi, an interesting move considering the hints that the former platform will be discontinued by June 2011.

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Just a few days ago VMware hired Scott A. Key away from Citi.

Key has worked at Citi for many years, covering different roles, including the Chief Architect for the Consumer International business.
He spent the last three years at the financial institution as Senior Vice President of Virtualization.

While at Citi, Key also wrote a column here at virtualization.info: Managing the Virtual Infrastructure.

VMware appointed him as its new Director of Solutions Marketing for the Financial Services Industry and virtualization.info wishes him the best for this new job.

July 7, 2010 I’ll be at the VirtualDays 2010 conference in Florence, Italy, hosted by In20, performing the opening keynote about the state of the industry and the emerging trends.

During the morning the three major virtualization players will present their solutions. It will be a typical VMware vs Microsoft+Citrix face-to-face on server and desktop virtualization.
During the afternoon there will be sessions from IHVs and ISVs that offer key products complementary to virtualization: IBM, EMC, Cisco, Pllar Data Systems, CommVault, Axel and Fujitsu.

Italy doesn’t host many independent events about virtualization so this is a welcome opportunity for customers to compare the message and the offerings.

If you plan to attend feel free to stop by after the presentation.

Alessandro

When Citrix announced the launch of the Open Virtual Switch project in May 2009 it raised a lot of attention.

The early bits of Open vSwitch appeared online in August 2009, along with a technology roadmap that clears the intention to compete against the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture and the Cisco Nexus 1000V software switch.

It took almost an entire year to reach version 1.0. Meanwhile Open vSwitch became a key component of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) networking infrastructure, another project supported by Citrix.

Customers are waiting to see a commercial implementation of the Open vSwitch and how Citrix will integrate it in XenServer and XenDesktop.
Maybe the time has come: Citrix briefly announced that a new beta cycle for its hypervisor is about to begin and that the new build will feature a distributed virtual switching technology.

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Despite the acquisition of Qumranet happened in September 2008, Red Hat remained silent for long time. But a few months after the launch of its new, KVM-based virtualization platform (just updated to version 2.2) the company started to push pretty hard the marketing message, and VMware is its main target.

The company’s CEO Jim Whitehurst is becoming increasingly aggressive: in March he said that VMware customers look at Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) as a parallel hypervisor to have. Now he’s promising that RHEV will leapfrog the the vSphere platform just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) leapfrogged Sun Solaris for SPARC.

The change in tune may depend on the massive criticism that VMware expressed on the RHEV platform.

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So far application virtualization vendors had a hard time to win the market. Even the biggest players like Microsoft, VMware and Symantec have been extremely slow in developing their platforms and the marketing effort to push them to the mainstream audience has been practically non-existent.
There’s even a doubt that the market really needs application virtualization.

Despite that, there are new players brave enough to enter the market.
The last one is a German firm called Dögel IT-Management.

Dögel IT-Management is a solution provider focused on desktop management and application virtualization, currently offering the solutions of most of its future competitors: VMware, XenoCode (now renamed in Spoon), InstallFree and Endeavors Technologies (recently resurrected with a new Chairman).

There is not much more about the company, founded in 2005, except that its founder and CEO is Mathias Dögel. He released an interview explaining the desire to enter the application virtualization market to fix the many shortcomings of the solutions above.

Two weeks ago, the company launched a public tech preview of its new application virtualization engine called Evalaze.

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