virtualization.info Editors

As expected, today VMware confirmed the acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo.
The company didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but All Things D reports that we are talking about something more than $100M.

This is the acquisition #14 and like no other (not even the SpringSource one) this seems far, far away from the roots of VMware.

As already mentioned in the previous coverage of the deal, Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite which Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350M in cash and that competes with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PIMs offered by Google or Zoho for example.
Zimbra also offers an open source mail client that competes with products such as Microsoft Office and Mozilla Thunderbird.
Yahoo is rumored to be trying to sell it since September 2008.

What VMware is going to do with Zimbra? Something that is completely unrelated to virtualization: it’s going to continue to serve the 55 million mailboxes that customers created today and further develop the suite.
If there’s a more organic vision behind this acquisition, the company definitively failed to clarify it.

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Offered for free with the Essential Plus and higher editions (except Standard) of vSphere 4.0, there’s an interesting product which VMware didn’t promote at all so far: Data Recovery.

Data Recovery is a disk & file backup/restore product that comes as a virtual appliance (powered by a 64bit CentOS 5.2 Linux distribution) and protects guest OSes in ESX and ESXi.

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In December 2007 the founder of Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May 2009), Alex Vasilevsky, left his company to form a new venture with Dan McCall, former board advisor at Reflex Security (now Reflex Systems).

The new startup, fueled by Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners funds, came out the stealth mode in September 2008 and released the first semi-public beta of his flagship product, NxTop, in July 2009.

NxTop is one of the first client hypervisors to hit the market and one of the few that doesn’t require Intel vPro as mandatory hardware feature (both VMware and Citrix client hypervisors seems to need it to work).
Based on Xen, NxTop is sold as a new and more efficient platform to manage the PC lifecycle, so it’s not in direct competition with the upcoming VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) and the Citrix XenClient, which are meant to offer offline VDI capabilities.

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The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is a sort of blueprint that companies can use to standardize the way they manage their IT, pretty similar to what the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of practices does.

Virtualization is such a complex technology that involves OSes, networks and storage administration, security hardening, performance monitoring and even applications troubleshooting in some cases. As we said a long time ago, virtualization professionals are sort of super heroes.
There’s a real need for operational frameworks to handle virtual infrastructures but unfortunately nor ITIL neither MOF are currently covering this aspect of the IT governance.

A step in the right direction may come from Microsoft, which released the first beta of what they call Reliability Workbook for Hyper-V, as part of the existing MOF 4.0 framework.
The Reliability Workbooks are task lists (in Excel format) that Microsoft recommends to follow to monitor and maintain the health and reliability of their products.

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NetApp just released a very interesting 38-pages paper comparing storage protocols performance in VMware vSphere 4.0 and VI 3.5 environments with Rackable S44 servers and FAS3170 arrays.

The paper, titled VMware vSphere and ESX 3.5 Multiprotocol Performance Comparison Using FC, iSCSI, and NFS, highlights a significant performance improvement in vSphere, mostly for iSCSI and NFS, since both have Jumbo Frame support.

The document also includes an comparison between 4GB FC, 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, in terms of host CPU utilization and latency, which is worth a look.

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VMware recently lost its Regional Director for UK and Ireland: Chris Hammans.

Hammans spent six years and a half at VMware and now moved to the virtualization startup Pano Logic as their EMEA Managing Director.

CRN informs that VMware replaced him with Mark Newton.

Newton previous positions include one at the distributor IBS and one in BMC, but most importantly he comes from Oracle, where he spent six years as Vice President of Sales.

Finally Microsoft launched Windows Azure, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing offering that competes with products like Google App Engine.

In Q3 2009 the company said that Azure will be more than just a PaaS cloud, hosting (Hyper-V) virtual machines pretty much like Amazon does with its Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Which makes it a hybrid IaaS + PaaS cloud. But Microsoft didn’t clarify if the IaaS offering would be launched at the beginning of 2010 with the PaaS one.

To find out virtualization.info explored a bit Azure.

The first thing that is worth to note is the pricing scheme:

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Over the last 12 months the security firm Tripwire took a series of steps to focus more on virtualization.
It first released a couple of free tool (ConfigCheck and OpsCheck) in collaboration with VMware to simplify the ESX hosts configuration management. Then it hired the well-known expert Stephen Beaver as its new Virtualization Evangelist. And finally the company released vWire, a configuration compliance tool that was very promising.

After just 6 months after the first release (vWire 1.0 was out in June 2009) the company announced that it has decided to permanently discontinue it and return to its core business.

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At the beginning of December 2009, Parallels lost one of its highest executives: Kurt Daniel, who was the Senior Vice President of the Online Business department and in charge for worldwide marketing, business development and corporate development.

Daniel spent five years at Parallels. He is now the COO of a Web 2.0 startup called WorkLight.

The press announcement released by his new employer and his LinkedIn profile, reveal some interesting information about the Parallels financial status: over $100M profitable annual revenue and over 1.5M customers worldwide.

Update: Parallels contacted virtualization.info and clarified that Daniel actually left the company in January 2009. His position wasn’t replaced but the company built a new marketing team over the year and hired Kerry McGowne as their new Vice President of Corporate Marketing.

McGowne was the VP of Corporate Marketing at ServiceSource before joining Parallels in September 2009, and before that he was the Director of Executive Communications and Director of Platform Strategy and Marketing at Microsoft.

As many virtualization.info already know (at least if you follow us on Twitter), the virtualization guru Scott Lowe has been just hired by EMC.

Lowe has been the National Technology Lead for Virtualization at ePlus Technology for almost four years.
But he also is one of the most popular virtualization expert in the industry thanks to his high quality blog (which virtualization.info named a top blog of 2008).

Lowe is also the author of the recently published book Mastering VMware vSphere 4, reviewed here.
Last but not least he has been a top speaker during the inaugural edition of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress in Las Vegas last year.

Lowe will join EMC starting next week as Cisco-VMware Solutions Principal (which means he will focus on the VCE vBlock technology). He will work with Chad Sakac, the extremely popular Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC.