virtualization.info Editors

The VMware | Cisco | EMC coalition is waiting for Acadia to start its business and begin the implementation, administration and delivery of their new datacenters-in-a-box.

Meanwhile the three companies prepare and publish key documents to understand how the VBlock computing stack is designed and how it can be used.

Specifically, the documents published online are:

1. The Deployment Guide
   Deploy a full Vblock (for delivery) as an integrated whole
2. The Rapid Provisioning Guide
   Simplify Rapid Provsioning across the entire stack whether you are a service provider or an enterprise customer
3. The Reference Architecture Guide
   Detailed configuration specification, how it is tested, etc.

Only the Reference Architecture is available for public access. It includes information about Vblock configuration type 1 and type 2.

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Last week a report from The 451 Group ignited speculations about which company VMware may acquire next.
The list includes Terracotta, GenStone Systmes, MuleSoft, SOPERA, Heroku, Engine Yard, Skyway Software, Chordian Software.
The analysis firm even suggests that VMware may try to get MySQL from the just closed Oracle and Sun merger.
Worldwide press is quoting this shopping list with titles like  “More Acquisitions Ahead for VMware?”.

Of course VMware will acquire additional companies. And speculations aside, the company’s CEO already expressed an evident interest for middleware.

So, while everybody is busy with future steps, virtualization.info would like to take a different approach and recap the previous acquisitions, trying to figure out what VMware did with the technologies bought so far.

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Tracking the virtualization industry for more than six years (virtualization.info was launched in September 2003) has been a challenging, time-consuming and sometimes tiring task. But there always are fun moments.

The best ones come from the never ending skirmish between VMware and Microsoft marketing departments (and their allies), that in turn highlight the negative aspects of the competitor.
The VMware solution is too expensive and doesn’t manage anything but the virtual infrastructure, says Microsoft.
The Microsoft solution is not mature enough, it’s full of bugs (because it comes from Windows) and has hidden costs too, says VMware.

The effect that this exercise has on customers has been brilliantly summarized by Scott Adams in one of his recent Dilbert strips:

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At virtualization.info there’s a special skepticism about virtual appliances in their current form.
No less than three years ago we wrote about the shortcomings and hidden risks of this virtual machine incarnation. 
A modular data center may certainly be in the future of IT,  but in its implementation, a virtual appliance is not the best way to go there. The lack of enthusiasm from customers, which someone highlighted, is a confirmation.
The VMware effort to enhance the virtual appliance concept with metadata to define security policies and performance SLAs, something the company calls vApp since 2008, is a step in the right direction.

But while waiting for the first wave of vApps and its subsequent generations, there’s still much that can be said on this topic.
Christofer Hoff, Director of Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at Cisco, published an interesting article focusing on the current limitations of network virtual appliances. It’s definitively worth a mention here:

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At the end of last week VMware updated its Lifecycle Manager product, reaching version 1.1 (build 227208).
The product has been in beta for over six months, but it doesn’t introduce any major new feature.

It’s primarily for performance enhancements, and comes with internationalization support (but it’s not available in any language besides English).

Lifecycle Manager 1.1 includes a new build of the vCenter Orchestrator 4.0.1 (build 4502) that customers must install to use it.

Last week the startup Liquidware Labs updated its flagship product Stratosphere to version 4.5.3.

This minor update (version 4.5 came out in October 2009) just introduces a much welcome one-click assessment that produces a useful PowerPoint slidedeck.

To be honest the slides could be prettier but they are customizable, so users may want to apply their own themes before presenting to a wide audience.
The information inside the slide deck anyway is valuable, especially a graph showing how many physical machines and how many users are good candidates for client consolidation (aka VDI).

As most readers know, Microsoft offers three Hyper-V editions: the one coming with the full version of Windows Server 2008 R2, the one included in a stripped down version of Windows called “Server Core”, and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server.

The Server Core edition of Windows lacks the well-known GUI, has a limited .NET support and many other OS components are completely missing. It’s done so to reduce the OS surface attack, mimicking minimal Linux distribution that are popular among security professionals.

Problem is that this turns the local management of Hyper-V hosts into a real nightmare. Pretty much everything has be done on the command line but Microsoft doesn’t provide a CLI interface to perform every task.

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An area where Microsoft doesn’t seem particularly active is the so-called virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
So far the company made just a few progresses, letting its partner Citrix dominate the scene and compete head to head with VMware.

Rather than on products, Microsoft is focusing on VDI licensing.
In July 2009 it introduced two new VDI licenses, the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Suite and the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium Suite, on top of its well-known Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD).
Now the company may perform additional adjustments to its offering.

A couple of days ago TechTarget reported that Microsoft plans to modify the VECD to reduce the cost per user ($23/seat/year if you are a Software Assurance customer, $110/seat/year if you are not).

Microsoft doesn’t plan to abandon its per-seat model but will introduces changes to extend use rights, allowing device roaming.

A couple of days ago Oracle finally announced its Sun merger plan.
virtualization.info reported live about those parts of the announcement that are related to virtualization.

While the company highlighted its commitment to continue investing and offering the Sun virtualization technologies (Solaris Containers, Logical Domains, Dynamic Domains, VDI, VirtualBox), it didn’t offer much details about how its own virtualization platform, Oracle VM, will benefit from this integration.

Shortly after the live event, Oracle also published a series of recorded webcast that provides more insights about the products roadmap.
The series includes a webcast about virtualization where Oracle exposes a part of the Oracle VM 3.0 and VirtualBox roadmap.

There’s not many new details compared to what was announced in July 2009, when Oracle suddenly killed the Virtual Iron product portfolio it acquired just a month earlier, but it’s a progress.

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This morning ZDNet released a surprising interview with the Novell CTO Moiz Kohari, where he took a completely distant position from the virtualization market leader and competitor VMware.

While the VMware CEO opens its company’s premiere conference by saying that at today there’s no workload that cannot be virtualized, the Novell CTO says instead:

…virtualization has yet to overcome I/O (input/output) latency issues at the hypervisor level, as compared to provisioned servers. As a result, virtualization is not the choice in cases where service providers and businesses need to ensure as little latency as possible…

Even more surprising, considering that Novell is a long-time virtualization player, is Kohari skepticism about a fully virtualized cloud infrastructure:

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