virtualization.info Editors

The virtual machines per core (VMs / core) ratio is a measurement unit that virtualization vendors use with extreme prudence to provide a rough idea of the server consolidation level that can be achieved on their hypervisors.

This ratio can be greatly influenced by several factors. The most important one is the kind of application workload that will run inside guest operating systems.
Depending on this element alone, some customers may end up having as low as 2:1 ratios while others may experience much higher values, so the best answer to any question around this topic is “it depends”.

To be honest, VMware is the only vendor that publicly disclose this number, while all its competitors, including Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle and Parallels, never exposed information about it so far. 
Officially, the company says that its hypervisor can support an average consolidation ratio of 8 VMs / core, a number that several customers report as a realistic one mostly in VDI environments.

Read more

virtualization.info tracks and reports about the US startup FastScale since its launch in 2007.
The company has always been under most radars despite its interesting technology to reduce the size of virtual appliances and manage large scale VMware infrastructures like application fabrics.

When it emerged from stealth mode in April 2007, its products, Composer Suite and Virtual Manager, were already deployed inside VMware organization.

At the end of August 2009, while the attention was fully focused on the VMware VMworld conference, EMC announced the acquisition of FastScale for an undisclosed sum.

Read more

During the Q4 2009 earnings call, beside the numbers we report below, the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton provided a couple of interesting details about the company’s past performance and future plans.

Citrix grew 9% during 2009, for a total of $451 million in revenue.
Revenue from new license sales was $168 million, up 4% from 2008, and up 30% from Q3, while license update revenue increased 6% from 2008.
Technical services increased 20%, led by support, maintenance agreements, and online SaaS revenue was $82 million, up 18%.

Citrix closed 5 deals with over 10,000 seats for XenDesktop in Q4 2009, reaching around 3,000 total XenDesktop customers.
The company also counted over 20,000 XenServer downloads in that quarter.

Read more

After months of wait, today Oracle can finally disclose its roadmap to integrate the Sun product portfolio, acquired for $7.4 billion.

To introduce this all day online event the company prepared a long introductory video that shows the entire computing stack that the two giants now have in common. Each hardware piece has the new Sun|Oracle logo.

In these months several people suggested that Oracle may want to drop the Sun hardware business to focus on other parts, more in line with its current strategy.
The introductory video does everything but giving this idea. Quite the opposite, it seems to emphasizes the potential that Oracle now has in the hardware market, and the presence of three racks on stage is a further sign of the company commitment in this area.

The event starts with a tagline that tells everything: Software. Hardware. Complete.

Read more

A new US startup, currently in semi-stealth mode, is about to enter the virtualization market: Pancetera.

The company was founded in early 2009 by four people:

• Henrik Rosendahl, the former CEO of Thinstall, acquired by VMware in January 2008
• Bart Bartlett, the former Director of Sales Operations/Marketing/Channels at Data Domain, acquired by EMC in July 2009
• Mitch Haile, a former Senior Software Engineer at Data Domain
• Greg Wade, another former Software Engineer from Data Domain

Pancetera is funded by Hummer Winblad Ventures and ONSET Ventures for an unknown amount. 
Hummer Winblad already invested in Scalent and VKernel.

Read more

Despite its huge potential, it’s pretty evident that the market is not embracing the application virtualization approach (to not be confused with presentation or desktop virtualization) anytime soon.

All the biggest vendors in the IT industry invested in application virtualization: Microsoft acquired Softricity in May 2006, VMware acquired Thinstall in January 2008, Symantec acquired Altiris in January 2007 and AppStream in April 2008, Novell distributes XenoCode with an OEM agreement since September 2008, and Citrix has its own engine as part of XenApp since a long time.

Regardless of this massive commitment, the top players above spent almost zero effort to push for application virtualization adoption.
The startups that were not acquired in the last three years are struggling to make any impact. See AppZero (formerly Trigence), Ceedo or Trustware.

Read more

Thanks to the help of VMware, it really seems that Cisco is turning into a virtualization vendor.

The company’s interest in virtualization has its roots in mid-2007, when it invested $150M in VMware, but the ambition to play a major role in this industry became evident with the launch of Unified Computing System (UCS) and the announcement of a coalition with EMC and VMware.

Just yesterday, Cisco announced a second alliance with NetApp to jointly deliver a private cloud architecture called Secure Multi-Tenancy. Of course such cloud is powered by VMware virtualization.

A much bigger anyway was announced a couple of days ago and passed under the radar of most: Cisco launched an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering for service providers.

With this initiative, Cisco is basically pushing a specific architecture to simplify the jumpstart to IaaS cloud computing. The recommended design implies the use of many Cisco gears (from the MDS to the Nexus 700), of any storage backend of choice (even if EMC is the first suggestion) and, guess what, VMware vSphere 4.0 as the foundation virtualization platform:

Read more

Yesterday VMware announced its Q4 2009 earnings. During the call, besides the numbers that we report below, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz gave a couple of very interesting answers that hint at the future steps the company will take in terms of acquisitions and new products.

Despite the whole 2009 license revenue declined 13% ($304M in Q4), the company reported a nice 8% growth and beated analysts estimates.

The software maintenance portion of our services revenues was $246 million, up 53% compared to last year, while professional services revenue was $58 million, up 47% from last year.

VMware also announced almost 20,000 new customers won in the second half of 2009.
US revenues increased 15% year-over-year to $315 million and grew 28% sequentially. International revenues were $293 million, an increase of 22% compared to last year and up 20% sequentially. International revenue growth was driven primarily by improved demand in China, Japan, Brazil and throughout Europe.

Read more

This 2010 definitively started as the year to recruit talents.
After the news that Scott Lowe joined EMC, virtualization.info has just learned that Massimo Re Ferrè, is leaving IBM to join VMware.

Re Ferrè is one of the most popular professionals in the virtualization industry, leading the community since much before the launch of this publication (September 2003).
virtualization.info recognized his personal website as a top virtualization blog in 2008.

Re Ferrè worked in IBM for 15 years, most of them as IT Architect.
He will join VMware as Solutions Architect in the vCloud department in EMEA, working with other well-known talents (and bloggers) like Massimiliano Daneri, of VMBK fame, and Duncan Epping.

So while IBM is intensifying the competition with VMware, VMware recruits its best employees.
2010 is going to be an interesting year.

Today, with a joint webcast, VMware, Cisco and NetApp announced a new partnership.

The three companies created an architectural blueprint, and they jointly own the intellectual property (IP) of it, called Secure Multi-Tenancy.

It’s available today, since it doesn’t include any new product or technology, ready to be implemented and deployed through partners.

The announcement is nowhere near the launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition that VMware, Cisco and EMC used to shake the market in November 2009, but takes a similar approach in offering pre-tested and validated computing stacks.

Specifically, the fault-tolerant architecture includes VMware vSphere and vShield, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), the Nexus 1000V virtual switch and MDS Switches, and NetApp
MultiStore with Data Motion technology:

Read more