virtualization.info Editors

Cloud.com (formerly VMOps) is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing startup that was founded in August 2008 by Shen Liang, the former Vice President of Engineering at SEVEN Networks. Earlier in his career, Liang was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

The company, which counts 40 employees according to its Linkedin corporate profile, raised $6.6M in Round A led by Index Ventures, and another $11M in Round B, led by Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Nexus Ventures.

The Cloud.com management team also includes Kevin Kluge (Vice President of Engineering), who come from Yahoo! where he was the Senior Director of Engineering, Shannon Williams (Vice President of Business Development), who was the Vice President of EMEA operations at Solidcore Systems, and Peder Ulander (Vice President of Marketing), who was the Senior Vice President of Marketing in Sun.

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Kaviza, the US startup that ambitiously sells an end-to-end VDI platform for a TCO of less than $500 / seat, yesterday announced the availability of VDI-in-a-box 3.0 beta.

This release, easy to guess considering the the Citrix investment announced last month, will fully support XenServer side-by-side with VMware ESX. But more importantly, the new release will feature the Citrix HDX remote protocol.

Several people questioned the Citrix decision to invest in Kaviza considering that both companies are competing in the VDI space.
This move seems to confirm the idea that Citrix invested in the startup to avoid that VMware could do the very same.

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Yesterday PHD Virtual announced the upcoming release of its disaster recovery solution esXpress for Citrix XenServer.
Easy to guess, the company preferred to use a completely different name, to avoid recalling VMware ESX, so esXpress becomes Virtual Backup for XenServer.

The product still is in development but PHD Virtual will show it at the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco next week.

On top of that, the company announced additional commitment to support XenServer and XenDesktop in future products.

A few hours ago SD Times published an interesting article revealing that SpringSource, the subsidiary that VMware acquired in August 2009 to lead its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing strategy, is about to acquire GemStone Systems.

The article has been removed just a few minutes after the publication but it was too late. The Google News bot has been quicker and redistributed the first few lines of the piece:

Rod Johnson, general manager of VMware’s SpringSource division, said that the GemStone acquisition is intended to round out the VMware Java middleware …

The way the sentence is wrote clarifies that this is not a rumor. Probably SD Times removed it just because the news was mistakenly published before the VMware’s embargo expired.

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The Canadian startup Lanamark today announced a new edition of its capacity planning product Suite.

Simply dubbed Suite Express, the product will be free of charge and finally available for end-users and not just IT service providers.

Suite Express enables discovery of Windows, Linux, NetWare and UNIX workloads across desktops and servers. Users can also collect inventory information from virtual machines and virtual machine hosts running Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Once IT assets are discovered, Lanamark Suite Express Edition offers free-form search across physical and virtual infrastructure as well as business-centric IT infrastructure reporting online.

Of course the product has some limitations, like the restriction to 50,000 discoverable systems only, and some missing features in the reporting, designing and administration modules.

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In the obscure world of virtualization licensing it’s a pretty well-known fact that Microsoft allows to have just one virtual instance for each Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition, up to four virtual instances for each Enterprise Edition and unlimited virtual instances for each Datacenter Edition.

Customers would expect a similar approach with other Microsoft backend server products that have Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter licensing editions, but there’s at least one exception: SQL Server 2008.

So far Microsoft allowed one virtual instance of its database server for the Workgroup, Web and Standard editions, while the Enterprise Edition allowed customers to have unlimited virtualized SQL Server instances.

No more: with the new SQL Server 2008 R2, to be released next week, the Enterprise Edition will be limited to just four VMs, pretty much like Windows.

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After investing a lot of years and resources on Xen, IBM seems now definitively decided to focus on KVM.

During an interview with InformationWeek in fact, the IBM Vice President of Open Systems Development, Dan Frye, said:

One of IBM’s current goals is to "accelerate the maturation of KVM as a world class hypervisor.

More than that IBM has been clear about investing on KVM to make it a competitive alternative to VMware ESX:

We spent a lot of time working with KVM (Qumranet), Red Hat and others. KVM has been hardened rapidly. We want to be able to virtualize 64 or 128 guests on KVM. We want it to be equivalent to VMware.

In the last few weeks virtualization.info received unconfirmed rumors that the US startup Fortisphere was in difficult financial conditions and that part of its assets was ready to be liquidated.

Today there are a number of confirmations that that company may be indeed out of business.

First of all Fortisphere lost its CEO, Siki Giunta, who joined the company just in July 2009.
Before Fortisphere, Giunta has been in Novell as Vice President of Business Development for just nine months, but she’s primarily known for its leadership at Managed Objects, where she has been President and CEO for more than nine years.
Now Giunta is at CSC as its new Vice President of Cloud Computing and Software Services.

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Just a few days ago Citrix lost its Group Vice President of Marketing, David Roussain, who worked at the company for the last four years.
For the first two years Roussain has been in charge of the XenApp business, and them moved to lead part of the hardware virtualization business, taking care of XenServer, Edgesight and Workflow Studio.

He landed at AppSense, a company tightly connected to Citrix, as its new Vice President of Business Development.

The VMware/Teradici remote protocol PC-over-IP (PCoIP) is rapidly being adopted by thin clients OEMs and that is not terribly surprising.
What’s more interesting is that PCoIP support may start to appear also among PC monitor OEMs.

Samsung seems to have been the first to embrace the idea at the end of last year: between December 2009 and January 2010 in fact, the company  launched a couple of new displays (19” and 23.6") that feature support for any PCoIP remote host.

Both monitors include a Tera1100 processor and 64MB (19”) or 128 (23.6”) XDR memory to manage the PCoIP load, plus of course a 1GbE port.

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