virtualization.info Editors

This is not exactly a bright moment for Red Hat, which received severe critics from VMware about several aspects of its Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform.

While it’s true that this a 1.0 version and it’s then acceptable that it has a number of limitations, it’s still true that Red Hat is supposedly developing this product since at least one year and a half (as soon as it acquired the startup Qumranet) and that it has to immediately deliver a very competitive product if it wants to play against VMware.

And probably to accelerate the process of maturation of RHEV, this week the company announced that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) will become an open source project.

Unfortunately this won’t help still for a long time.

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Second day here in San Francisco for the Citrix Synergy 2010. See virtualization.info’s coverage of day one.

Today’s focus will be around virtual datacenters, with announcements for XenServer and cloud computing.

On stage we’ll see Michael Dell (Dell’s Chairman and CEO), Brad Anderson (Microsoft’s Corporate Vice president of the Management and Services Division) and Frank Gens (IDC’s Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst).

Frank Gens is on stage.

He starts summarizing the challenges, expectations and history of cloud computing.
Everything in his speech has been discussed million of times by now, and there’s no sign of news, so virtualization.info is not going to summarize again the whole thing here.

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Yesterday, during its Synergy 2010 conference in San Francisco (see virtualization.info coverage), Citrix announced the availability of XenClient: the free client hypervisor formerly known as project Independence.

As published yesterday, the XenClient build released yesterday is Release Candidate.
A lot has been said about the huge delay that both Citrix and VMware accumulated to launch their client hypervisors, and the reasons behind it.
Despite that, Citrix managed to release a pretty stable version of the platform before VMware could do the same with it Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), and managed to support nine average laptops (three from HP, three from Lenovo and five from Dell).

After the keynote, virtualization.info sit with Peter Blum, Director Product Management and Marketing for this new platform, who detailed a lot of aspects never published before on XenClient.

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This year virtualization.info extends its live coverage of virtualization conferences to the Citrix Synergy 2010.
The event, taking place in San Francisco, actually started this Monday, but the first two days have been dedicated to the Citrix Technology Professionals (CTPs), the Citrix partners and other groups. Today and tomorrow instead the conference will be open to the general public with keynotes from Mark Templeton (Citrix’s President and CEO), Michael Dell (Dell’s Chairman and CEO), Brad Anderson (Microsoft’s Corporate Vice president of the Management and Services Division) and Frank Gens (IDC’s Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst).

Citrix is expected to announce the beta availability of XenClient as confirmed by early feedbacks already published yesterday evening by partners and attendees.
The presence of Michael Dell clearly indicates a major partnership announcement between the two companies, but there will be at least another key partnership will be announced with McAfee, as ChannelTimes and other publications already revealed.

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An amusing piece appeared earlier this week on PC World: Carl Eschenbach, Executive Vice President of Field Operations at VMware claimed that media overplayed his company’s role in the Cisco-EMC partnership.

That’s a interesting statement considering that EMC owns about 80% of VMware and that Cisco invested in the virtualization vendors over $160M.
It’s interesting considering that the Virtual Compute Environment (VCE) coalition that EMC and Cisco formed and announced in November 2009 includes VMware.
It’s interesting considering that VMware invested (along with Intel) in the joint venture, ACADIA, that EMC and Cisco formed to build, operate and transfer the VBlocks fabric computing units.
And it’s interesting considering that EMC developed an ad-hoc fabric manager, the Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), that fully blends VMware’s virtualization platform with network and storage layers.

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Like pretty much every other big vendor in the IT space, VMware has many ways to hit competition. A very efficient one is to criticize other vendors though non-corporate blogs. This allows the company to be way less polite than what customers expect, while not keeping full responsibility for the critics if something wrong is said.

This approach has additional benefits: it allows customers to read a brutal (brutal, not necessarily brutally honest) review of products that may be hard to evaluate, it obliges competitors to defend their approach clarifying technical details that wouldn’t be revealed otherwise, and eventually it leads to counter-attacks, which expose additional weaknesses on both sides.
Over the long term this turns into a futile marketing skirmish (see the multi-year VMware-Citrix one), but at the beginning the information exposed could be really valuable.

This is what is going to (hopefully) happen between VMware and Red Hat now that the former completely smashed the new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform, launched in November 2009.

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In September 2009 the Canadian startup CiRBA released version 5.2 of its capacity planning tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI).
Today the company finally releases a minor update, introducing a couple of new features:

• Integration of server performance ranking data provided by the analysis firm IDEAS
• Analysis of network traffic to recognize dependencies in multi-tier applications
• Support for IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM)

The Isreali publication Globes just revealed that the startup InstallFree secured an additional $3.8M in its third round of funding.

According to a SEC document the venture capital firms involved in this round are Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership, the same ones that already invested $8.5M in August 2008.

In total, InstallFree secured over $13M.

Intel recently published a short 8-pages paper about the performance of virtual desktop streaming in a Microsoft VDI environment powered by Xeon X5570 CPUs, Hyper-V 2008 R2 and Citrix Provisioning Server 5.1, serving Windows 7 guest OSes.

The findings are rather interesting:

• For basic office productivity applications, systems based on dual-core processors with streaming provided a 26 percent better WorldBench 5 performance benchmark score than VHD.
• Streaming server utilization was consistently low. Streaming used about 1 percent of the processor while VHD used from 10 to 70 percent or more for up to 40 PCs.
• A richer graphical user interface(GUI) with more features in Microsoft Windows 7 contributed to higher cumulative network traffic for both streaming and VHD, up to a 57 percent increase in traffic for 20 users.
• Using WorldBench 5 tests as the primary indicator, local computing using the latest technology provided the best user experience.

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The Cisco and EMC joint venture, ACADIA, announced in November 2009, was formed to provide consulting services to those customers that will buy the fabric computing units, dubbed Vblocks, powered by VMware, Cisco and EMC technology and manufactured by the so called Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition.

The two companies just appointed the joint venture’s CEO: Michael D. Capellas.

Cappellas was the he was Chairman and CEO of First Data Corporation, and before that, he was President and CEO at MCI.
But more importantly, Cappellas has been President of HP after merging Compaq with HP. At Compaq, he started out as CIO, then COO and later became Chairman and CEO.

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