virtualization.info Editors

When Red Hat announced its plan to focus on KVM, and subsequently acquired Qumranet, the startup that maintained the virtualization platform, it was clear that its implementation of Xen couldn’t survive much longer.
In Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 and 5.5 Xen and KVM coexisted, but the former is going to disappear in RHEL 6.0.

The first public beta of the new operating system in fact doesn’t have it anymore, according to ComputerWorld.

Quite interestingly, ComputerWorld also quotes Simon Crosby, the Citrix CTO of Datacenter and Cloud division, who said “Red Hat has not contributed to the Xen code base for several years”, also suggesting that Red Hat is now five years behind the market because of its decision to support KVM.

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The interest around Enomaly and its management console for Xen and KVM, Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) is rising as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing continues to be pushed forward by the large majority of IT vendors.
Earlier this month, the product has been featured in an Intel guide titled Intel Cloud Builder Guide to Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel Xeon Processor-based Platforms.

Enomaly just released two new editions of ECP 3.2, one for service providers and one for high-security environments.

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In June 2008 Veeam acquired nworks, a 14-years old company focused on management plug-ins for major enterprise management platforms.

So far Veeam released a couple of updates for the nworks management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to manage VMware environments, but the company is now extending its focus to System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Earlier this week in fact Veeam announced its first PRO Pack for SCVMM, to automate virtual machines workload distribution across VMware hosts managed by Virtual Machine Manager.
The pack leverages the SCVMM support for ESX and the Microsoft Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) technology.

The PRO Pack will be part of the nworks management pack 5.5 for SCOM, currently in release candidate and due within the end of this quarter.

Almost five months since version 2.0, the US startup Hyper9 is ready to launch a new upgrade for its flagship product Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO).

VEO 2.5 introduces the following new features:

• Application-aware capacity/performance visualization
  It projects when resources will run out (CPU, memory, shared storage), how many more workloads can be added, shortage forecasts and performance hot spots.
• Storage I/O analysis
  It gives visibility into storage bottlenecks; provides detailed storage metrics such as latency, throughput, IOPS (input/output operations per second) across all storage types including FC, iSCSI and NFS.

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After a few weeks since the first public draft, Microsoft released its new Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide dedicated to the so-called Dynamic Data Center.

As virtualization.info reported in a previous article about the draft, the 46-pages blueprint includes design recommendations for several aspects of the infrastructure, from the virtualization hosts to the network infrastructure:

• Determine the Dynamic Data Center Scope
  This part helps to define the scope and determine the workloads that will be included in the Dynamic Data Center project.
• Design the Virtualization Hosts
  This part helps to design hosts that meet the capacity, performance, placement, and fault-tolerance requirements of the organization.

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Now that Office 2010 has reached the GA status and Microsoft prepares to distribute it, many customers are looking for the new Click-To-Run (CTR) version: a special edition of the productivity suite virtualized by App-V 4.6. 

To simplify the evaluation, and to promote the Desktop Optimization Package (MDOP) which includes App-V, Microsoft released this week a very interesting Proof of Concept Jumpstart Kit.

The massive package (10GB) includes resources and trial versions of multiple products needed to setup and run a lab where to evaluate the migration to Office 2010 in enterprise scenarios:

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In January VMware released the first public draft of its vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide.
Last week the document finally reached the GA status and it’s available for download.

The 110-pages must-read document all aspects of a virtual infrastructure, including:

• The virtualization hosts (both ESX and ESXi)
• Configuration of the virtual machine container (NOT hardening of the
  guest OS or any applications running within)
• Configuration of the virtual networking infrastructure, including the
  management and storage networks as well as the virtual switch (but NOT
  security of the virtual machine’s network)

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Earlier this week Citrix announced its financial results for the first quarter of the year. Like VMware, Citrix too reports positive results and growth in every region.

Specifically, the company announced $414M in total revenue. $123M from sales, $85M from SaaS business (the GoTo product line), $62M for NetScaler and $32M just for XenDesktop.
Four out of the five largest transactions across the company included XenDesktop. Overall the company added more than 700 new XenDesktop customers in Q1, with twenty deals ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 seats and one (in Europe, public sector) with 140,000 seats.

From a geographic perspective, US revenues grew 14% compared to last year, while EMEA revenues grew 9%.

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Earlier this week VMware announced its Q1 2010 earning results. As usual, the Q&A session at the end of the call reserves interesting perspectives that are worth a mention.

In this specific call, VMware seemed particularly doubtful about the adoption timeframe of VDI as a mainstream technology.

The company continues to talk about VDI adoption in a very cautious way, mentioning desktop evaluations and proof of concepts, even if it has closed a deal for 30,000 virtual desktops with one of the largest banks in the world:

While we have a number of success stories, this market opportunity has not yet tipped and our challenge remains in moving the broader market from evaluation to purchase.

We expect to learn more about how this market will unfold over the coming quarters…

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Earlier this week VMware announced its earnings for the first quarter of the year. It is extremely positive, and came with interesting comments that are worth reporting.

Total revenue for Q1 2010 was $634M, up 35% from a year ago.
$312M come from licenses, $267 from software maintenance and support, and $54M from professional services.
The best performance comes from software maintenance and support, grew 52% compared to Q1 2009.

In terms of geography, half of VMware revenue comes outside US, with Europe, China and Japan growing strong and beyond expectations.
VMware closed a 8-figure Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) which netted over $8 million of license bookings   

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