virtualization.info Editors

Both Citrix and VMware were expected to launch their client hypervisors within the end of last year, but Q1 2010 is almost gone and there’s no sign of them.
Announced in January 2009, Citrix XenClient (codename Project Independence), was expected to arrive in beta somewhere in H2 2009 and in GA by the end of 2009.
VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) instead, was originally announced in September 2008 and then postponed somewhere in H1 2010.

ComputerWorld reported that both companies are behind the schedule because of the many drivers required to control the endless hardware configurations that the market offers today.

The article says that VMware now hope to release CVP by the end of 2010 while Citrix, which is running a XenClient private beta, is not committed to any specific date.
So, not only these platforms will oblige companies to refresh their hardware with new machines that support Intel vPro, but they won’t be realistically mature before another two years, at least.

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At the beginning of January virtualization.info published a lengthy article describing the VMware approach to cloud computing. The piece mentioned the vCloud Express beta program and the first five hosting provided selected to offer it worldwide.

The only European provider selected by VMware was Logica.
The company’s website promoted its participation in the following way (our emphasis):

Logica vCloud Express provides a reliable test and development on demand service on a Pay-as-You-Go model. It is a part of the Logica Real Time Infrastructure Services solution (RTIS), built on the same robust and reliable shared infrastructure platforms used for supporting business critical applications for Logica’s outsourcing customers.

…

vCloud Express is a partnership between Logica and VMware and is a first step in the vCloud initiative that Logica started in September 2008. This means that Logica, as GSI (Global System Integrator) partner, has been chosen to be one of the initial partners to participate in the vCloudExpress Initiative.

Logica has been chosen to be the first partner in EMEA to host and develop this solution…

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This month the VMware’s competitive department has been particularly active, commenting on Citrix HDX performance and Essentials for Hyper-V sales volume, as well as the cost of managing Hyper-V, and its stability. 
Citrix just answered back, in two ways.

First, the company highlighted how VMware recently released a patch for ESX just to improve its score in a specific scenario, Terminal Services workload on Intel 5500 CPUs when Hyper-Threading is enabled, benchmarked by the independent framework Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC):

It took us some time to understand the reason for these results, but we eventually identified a very specific condition where ESX’s scheduler enforces fairness in scheduling vCPUs at at cost of throughput. ESX’s scheduler has long be subject of the intensive scrutiny of a large number of VMware engineers to guarantee fair access to the processor for each virtual machine. It is because of this fairness that VMware’s customers can rely on CPU resource controls. But, when fairness goes too far, throughput may be sub-optimal.

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Yesterday, while BlueLock was postponing the GA of its vCloud Express implementation in US, VMware was clarifying its cloud computing vision to the channel in UK.

CRN reports that VMware unveiled a hybrid model for cloud service delivery, that will allow organizations to choose between private and public clouds when it comes to storing data and hosting applications.

What this means is that the upcoming vCloud Service Director (codename Project Redwood) will allow some sort of bridging between the on-premises virtual infrastructure and public cloud ones, something virtualization.info already detailed a detailed coverage of the VMware strategy at the beginning of January.

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Easy to expect, during the last earnings call about Q1 2010 results (Red Hat Q4 fiscal 2010), the Red Hat President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, had to address a significant number of questions about the new KVM-centric virtualization strategy and the early performance of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), launched in November 2009.

Whitehurst said a few interesting things. First of all he alluded that the Hyper-V market presence is weak. Secondarily, and more interestingly, he described the reasons why a VMware usually looks at RHEV.
Last but not least, Whitehurst hinted at “another version of the management tools coming out”. He was probably referring to the Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (REVMD), which is the SolidICE product acquired from Qumranet in September 2008, expected somewhere in the H1 2010.

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As expected, after seven months in beta, the vCloud Express implementation offered by BlueLock, one of the five hosting providers selected for this program by VMware, has been declared GA expected to reach GA yesterday, has been postponed.

Despite that, the company moved from a free beta to paid service and published the price list, which is rather interesting compared to the Terremark one, the company where VMware invested $20 million in June 2009, and the Amazon EC2 one.

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VMware and Teradici announced their technology agreement in September 2008.
The two co-developed a software version of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol for over one year, and officially included it in View 4.0.

VMware has other OEM partnerships. With ThinPrint, since a long time, for example. The last one is with Likewise. But none of them can be considered instrumental to the success of a core product like View.
And, apparently, the VMware-Teradici version of PCoIP competes pretty well against Citrix HDX. It should be competitive also against the upcoming Microsoft RemoteFX.

The point is that, as far as we can understand, the agreement with Teradici is not exclusive. The company may close a similar deal with other vendors, but most of all, it may receive an unsolicited acquisition proposal.

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Yesterday Dell announced a number of initiatives around cloud computing. One of the is the launch of the PowerEdge C Servers, available today globally.

The interesting part of the news is that PowerEdge C machines will be offered with a new software option: the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) platform. 

UEC is the Canonical private cloud computing offering based on Ubuntu Server and Eucalyptus (or Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems), which is an open source management interface for Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) clouds.
Eucalyptus is able to manage both Xen and KVM, but Canonical switched from Xen to KVM for its distributions more than two years ago.

Both KVM and Eucalyptus are integrated in the Ubuntu Server installer since version 9.10.

Dell will provide blueprints to create IaaS cloud architectures based PowerEdge C and Ubuntu UEC.

After exactly a year since its public launch, the startup HyTrust releases today version 2.0 of its access control and change management appliance for VMware virtual infrastructures.

It’s worth to remember that HyTrust sits between the VMware management interfaces (vCenter Client, ESX SSH and web management interfaces, vCenter and ESX APIs) as a transparent proxy that enforces authentication, authorization and corporate policy.

Every time a vSphere administrator tries to issue a command, his request is intercepted by the HyTrust appliance that sits in the network: the engine checks authentication credentials first, it verifies that the administrator is in a user group allowed to interact with the virtual infrastructure entities that he’s trying to manipulate, and then it verifies if the desired action is allowed on those entities.
If not, HyTrust doesn’t move forward the command and returns to the vSphere management interfaces a customizable warning, saying that the desired action is denied.

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PHD Virtual released yesterday version 4.0 of its backup/restore solution for VMware virtual infrastructures.

The new build is primarily about performance: the company claims up to 20x faster backups thanks to the technology called Change Block Tracking (CBT).
By leveraging vSphere Change Tracking APIs, CBT only reads the blocks that have changed inside virtual disks, reducing the time to complete the backup. 
Unfortunately CBT doesn’t work with templates, VMs with snapshots created before the activation of CBT, VMs with independent disks and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) LUNs.

esXpress 4.0 also includes support for IDE and SCSI VMDKs and the capability to restore virtual machines from the management GUI.

The latest esXpress release tracked by virtualization.info was 3.6, announced in July 2009.