virtualization.info Editors

The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), announced in August 2009, is the Citrix answer to the VMware vCloud initiative that a few hosting providers are implementing worldwide.

The first XCP implementation (version 0.1) emerged in November 2009.

This week the Xen.org community announced a little step forward which moves the platform to version 0.1.1, which includes a number of improvements.
The platform is on based on Xen 3.4.2 and its Dom0 is now based on CentOS 5.4.

The most important news anyway is that the team expects to deliver the alpha no later than early February.
It’s a good news but at this pace customers won’t have anything concrete (like a XCP 1.0 GA) before next year. And considering that the VMware partners have frozen their vCloud Express implementations in an “unlimited beta” status, maybe we should all reconsider the idea that 2010 is the year of private clouds. More likely 2012.

Lanamark is a Canadian startup that entered the capacity planning market in June 2008. It is led by Mark Angelo, coming from PlateSpin and VMLogix.

Compared to most of its competitors, Lanamark offers a hosted capacity planning suite that is available only to its partners.
VMware is the only other company in this space that restrict the usage of its hosted Capacity Planner to the channel.

So far the Lanamark platform has been available only on a project-basis: a PSO requires access to the Suite to complete a certain project, like a desktop virtualization assessment, and it’s charged accordingly. Any new activity on the same customers site required to start a new project.

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The startup 5nine Software, which emerged from the stealth mode in June 2009, announced its third product: Migrator for Hyper-V.

Their first solution, P2V Hyper-V Planner, is a physical to virtual migration engine that also performs some capacity planning, by comparing the consolidation plans in case you use VMware or Microsoft hypervisors. 

Migrator is a superset of the P2V Hyper-V Planner, which attempts to merge the capacity planning, P2V migration, and ongoing placement optimization in a single software. It makes a lot of sense.

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Along with System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010 and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 Lab Management, Microsoft is about to release another product that will have extended virtualization capabilities: System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010.

Essentials (to not be confused with Citrix Essentials, which indeed is another management suite for Hyper-V) is a bundle of multiple System Center products, integrated by a single management console, that supports up to 50 servers and 500 clients.

The current version, SCE 2007, merges together System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0.
It doesn’t have any capability to manage Hyper-V because it doesn’t include the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) engine.

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As most virtualization.info readers know by now, Microsoft is finally approaching the .NET developers with a virtualization-friendly edition of its upcoming IDE Visual Studio 2010.

The product will be called Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, and will integrate Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to offer a virtual lab automation platform that competes against products like VMware Lab Manager, VMLogix LabManager, Surgient Virtual Automation Platform and others.

Microsoft took forever to leverage its huge MSDN community to let Hyper-V slip into new customers’ sites.
Ironically, the company is doing it right now that VMware, who rules the developers world thanks to Workstation, seems to have lost interest in it.

On top of the new Visual Studio 2010, which may be released in Q2 2010, Microsoft recently released another tool called VM Factory:

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One aspect where Microsoft is extremely weak in the virtualization realm is the VMs backup and restore.

The market doesn’t offer many choices to Hyper-V customers and even the Microsoft own enterprise disaster recovery solution, System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2007, leaves much to desire.

Things are slowly changing. In part because existing partners like NetApp are more committed to release products that support Hyper-V now that Microsoft is gaining some concrete market share.
In part because the VMware strategy is pushing even its most loyal partners into Microsoft’s arms.
In part because Microsoft is working on a better integration between Hyper-V and most of its other products.

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Yesterday Microsoft and HP announced a 3-year agreement to spend $250M on several fronts: Hyper-V and System Center, Windows Azure, Exchange, SQL Server and more.

The problem with such announcements (see the 3-year alliance with EMC for another example) is that just a few (to not say nobody) really understand what’s the difference between before and after the deal.
The language used in the press announcements never helps.

Microsoft and HP already are very good partners. Customers expect the option to have Microsoft products inside their brand new HP servers at the purchase time because this happens since a lot of year.
So this deal requires some clarifications (of course we’ll focus on Hyper-V, System Center and Azure):

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Just before the beginning of VMworld 2009, VMware announced the upcoming availability of Go, a free web console to manage ESXi 4.0 (ESX hosts are not supported).

Yesterday the company finally released it.

Go allows to initialize and patch ESXi hosts, create and operate virtual machines, check the VMs patching level connecting to the Shavlik Technologies service (VMware OEMs the Shavlik technology for its Update Manager – VUM).

Go is a hosted application that resides on VMware servers.
To properly operate anyway, it needs that a number of components are installed on one corporate desktop, which basically acts like a proxy.
Specifically, Go needs the Microsoft .NET framework and PowerShell, the VMware vSphere Power CLI, the Remote Console and a copy of Converter Stand-Alone.
All this software can be installed on  any Windows desktop (XP SP3, Vista SP2 or 7).

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With a very brief note, The Xen.org community announces that Xen reached the Release Candidate status and so it’s near its general availability, expected before the end of Q1 2010.

There’s a long list of reasons to wait for Xen 4.0.
One of them is the support for the software switch called Open Virtual Switch that will compete with the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

More importantly, the availability of Xen 4.0 may trigger a major launch of Oracle in the virtualization space (assuming its acquisition of Sun will be ever approved) and clarify its strategy against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

In the same way, it will be extremely interesting to see how Citrix will enhance the Xen 4.0 codebase to make XenServer more competitive.

While VMware continues its transformation from a virtualization vendor to a company that wants to compete with Microsoft, Google, IBM and soon Oracle, the massive replacement of its workforce, which virtualization.info documented in details for months, goes on.

Last week we covered the departure of Chris Hammans, Regional Director for UK and Ireland.
This one it’s the turn of Joanne Syben, Senior Director of R&D, in charge for ESX R&D.
Specifically she led the Core Storage team for ESX Server, including VMKernel components, FC and iSCSI. Syben componentized core storage stack to support native and 3rd party multipathing, policy and array specific modules. She also led the SMB team to work on scale-out-storage technologies (distributed systems, clustering, replication, LVM etc.)

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