virtualization.info Editors

Last week a very interesting stealth startup just entered the virtualization market and is preparing to launch a capacity management solution: VMTurbo.

VMTurbo is a very small (11 employees) US startup founded in 2008 by four people: Shmuel Kliger, Yuri Rabover, Shai Benjamin and Yechiam Yemini.
The first three have in common the same root as they all come SMARTS, the company acquired by EMC in early 2005: Kliger (President and CEO) was the co-founder and CTO, Rabover (Director of Product Strategy) was the Director of Technology Partners, and Benjamin was a Senior Staff Engineers.
Yemini (Chief Scientific Advisor) is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University since 30 years. He’s connected to Shaula Alexander Yemini, the other co-founder of SMARTS.
For some reasons only Kliger and Yemini appear and are listed as founders in the company’s website.

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Since the release of VMware View 4.0 and the software-only implementation of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol, there’s a lot of discussion about its performance in local area networks and its efficiency across WAN links.

BrianMadden.com recently published an insightful interview with VMware about how PCoIP works in deep, technical details.
It’s just three questions and answers, but it’s well worth a read:

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Novell extended its interest beyond hardware virtualization in September 2008, when it officially entered the application virtualization thanks to an OEM agreement with XenoCode.

The XenoCode Application Studio was rebranded as ZENworks Applicaton Virtualization (ZAV) and updated once (ZAV 7.0 released in March 2009).

Yesterday Novell announced the availability of ZAV 8.0, based on XenCode Virtual Application Studio 2010, so the product includes the new application streaming technology, the capability to restrict virtualized application usage, the support for Windows 7 and for 64bit applications.

Yesterday Pano Logic announced the release of its VDI platform Pano System 3.0.

The new product introduces the support for Windows 7 and the integration of VMware View 4 Manager into the Pano System console.

This last feature is specifically targeting large enterprises as Pano marketing literature is pretty clear about when View Manager makes sense in their VDI architecture:

For most Pano System deployments, the only VMware products needed are vSphere’s ESX or ESXi and vCenter Server.
Suggested uses for View Manager with the Pano System:

1. You need to manage a mixed or hybrid VDI client device population that includes both Pano Devices and thin clients or PCs running View Client.
2. Your initial deployment has over a 1,000 virtual desktops and is expected to grow.
3. You have 1,000 or more DVMs, storage space is a critical cost factor, and your IT group has the VMware expertise to implement View Composer’s linked clones.

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Born as a as a spin-out of Credit Suisse, the US startup DynamicOps launched almost two years ago, introducing a very interesting multi-hypervisor management console, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), which merges together VM lifecycle management and virtual lab automation capabilities.

After a great start in 2008, when it hired away a couple of key executives from PlateSpin (now part of Novell) and Dunes Technologies (now part of VMware), the company remained under the radar for a very long time, releasing just one minor update in June 2009.

In December 2009 the company announced integration with BMC BladeLogic Ops Manager, in February 2010 it announced integration with NetApp FlexClone technology, and last week they announced integration with HP Server Automation.

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On April 27 VMware and Salesforce plan to announce a new partnership with a public webcast where both companies’ CEOs will appear. None of them disclosed any information about the terms of the deal, but an evidence spotted in Google Cache suggests that Salesforce may launch a VMware-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing facility, turning into a competitor for companies like Amazon and Rackspace (both powered by the Xen hypervisor).

virtualization.info is now able to disclose exactly part of what the two companies are going to announce.

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VMware acquired SpringSource in August 2009, as part of what seems a rather complex (and honestly pretty much obscure) strategy to lead the emerging cloud computing market.

While SpringSource continues to exist as an independent subsidiary, it’s clear that every move is done to execute the VMware’s vision.
virtualization.info even received unconfirmed tips that SpringSource was operating on behalf of VMware well before August 2009: the SpringSource acquisition of Hyperic was exactly requested (and funded) by the virtualization vendor.

Yesterday SpringSource acquired a third firm for an undisclosed sum: Rabbit Tecnologies.
The second one was Cloud Foundry, acquired ten days after the deal with VMware was announced.

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Eric Sloof at NTPRO.NL yesterday revealed that VMware is about to launch a new classroom course dubbed vSphere 4: Automation.

The training course should be fully focused on virtual infrastructure automation through PowerShell cmdlets offered by the VMware PowerCLI:

• Identify VMware vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets
• Identify how to obtain help with vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets
• Automate ESX/ESXi host storage and network configuration
• Automate virtual machine provisioning
• Automate virtual machine migration
• Automate cluster configuration
• Create reports with vSphere PowerCLI

While very interesting, it would be even better if a vSphere class about automation would also include extended training about the vCenter Orchestrator framework, mostly because it comes for free with all editions of vSphere.

Yesterday ChannelWeb reported about another major departure at VMware: Richard Geraffo, Vice President and General Manager of the Americas Region, left the company to join HP.

Geraffo landed at VMware from BEA in June 2008. For almost two years he has been the Vice President of Sales and General Manager, in charge of Sales, Marketing, Consulting, Operations, Channels & Finance, managing over 1000 people.

HP appointed him as its new Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the Americas for the Enterprise Business group.

As ChannelWeb correctly highlighted, HP is taking a number of steps (like the acquisition of 3Com or the partnership with Microsoft) to counter the VMware | Cisco | EMC (VCE) coalition and hiring Geraffo can certainly help. He’s probably one of the few executives that has full knowledge about the VMware’s and Cisco’s current and future strategy around fabric computing and the evolution of their partnership.

Why all private clouds being promoted these days are just Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds?

Why we have several vendors that offer hardware virtualization platforms for on-premises IaaS clouds and nobody that offers something similar for private PaaS and SaaS clouds?

On average, the commonly shared long-term vision for cloud computing is about a world where off-premises facilities host 100% of business applications and where nobody, except cloud providers, has to care about the underlying complexity of operating systems, physical servers, storage arrays, networking, security, and everything else comes to mind when we thing about our existing data centers.
Actualizing such vision requires addressing a number of technical issues (related to security and compliance, orchestration, billing, etc.) and changing the mindset of individuals inside corporations (the concepts of “physical ownership” and “trust what you see” are two of the strongest in human mind).

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