virtualization.info Editors

Last week VMware released an interesting new benchmark study about the thin provisioning feature launched with vSphere 4.0.

The 14-pages paper compares the performance of traditionally pre-allocated VMDK virtual disks (called thick) with the one of new thin provisioned VMDK virtual disks (called thin) in a Fibre Channel SAN.

Compared to thick VMDKs, the thin disks’ space is created and zeroed at the very moment the capacity is needed, so this may have an impact on performance for disk intensive guest applications. 
Besides that, the study suggests that the thick and thin disks perform in very similar ways, during the zeroing phase and after that:

Last week Leostream and Ericom announced a partnership to support the new Ericom accelerator for Microsoft RDP launched in September, Blaze, inside the Leostream Connection Broker.

It is an uncommon move considering that the two vendors compete in the VDI space with a multi-hypervisor connection broker.
Anyway both have to face the competition coming from the platform providers Citrix and VMware, plus the one coming from third parties like Quest/Provision Networks.

Assuming the market will receipt well this combined offering, this effort may lead to further collaboration and even a merge, to stay competitive in the VDI market which is considered by many as ready to explode next year.

So far we have dedicated a lot of space to Oracle, in terms of what virtualization offering it could provide and what mistakes may compromise its presence as a relevant player.

The Sun acquisition has not closed yet, so the company cannot disclose any specific plan. Without concrete information about that, what we have published so far, and what follows below, is pure speculation.
Nonetheless it’s worth spending some more time evaluating the strategy that Oracle may put in place and how it may impact the current players.

As already said many times, now the company is in the unique position to offer an entire computing stack, including servers, storage, the hypervisor, the operating system, the middleware, some of the most used business applications, thin clients, a VDI connection broker and an enterprise management software to coordinate all of the above.
Leveraged in the right way, and assuming Oracle may become a credible virtualization player, it represents a remarkable competitive advantage for some customers (while others can clearly see it as a painful way to lock themselves in).

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In the last two years Cisco made at least two long-term key investments in the server market: invested over $150 million in VMware and became a player with its own blade system Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco wants to sell and interconnect next generation data centers. To do so it needs servers, storage, networking, software abstraction and software management.
EMC is helping with storage and software management, VMware is helping with software abstraction.

The three worked together for some months and then announced a formal coalition, that will sell these integrated data centers through channels and direct relationship with customers (through a company called Acadia).

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At the end of August, Citrix announced a new major effort around Xen and cloud computing to counter the release of VMware vCloud Express.

The details of this project were scarce at that time and beyond the name, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), and the intent to integrate new and existing technologies, Citrix didn’t disclose much more.

Now the things are getting cleaver, with the Xen.org entity detailing the list of proposed components for XCP 1.0 and makes available the platform for download:

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Last week, at its TechEd Conference in Berlin, Microsoft published updated roadmaps for most of its products.
The most interesting one from a virtualization perspective is the one about System Center family.

It seems that Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will not receive any major update before 2011:

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Five months after the first beta, Microsoft is ready to push out the beta 2 of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, a special version of the popular IDE that interacts with Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to provide a fully featured virtual lab automation platform.

There’s not really much to say about this new beta, expect reporting a few improvements in the setup and administrative GUI, along with support for network fencing with virtual machines that are acting as domain controllers (this last one is a very welcome addition).

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Last week VMware finally released the much awaited View 4.0, which supports vSphere 4.0 and introduces the software-only version of the Teradici remote desktop protocol PCoIP.

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Last week Lanamark, another startup that, like VKernel, could be impacted by the launch of VMware CapacityIQ, released Suite 2009 R2.

And like VKernel, Lanamark is looking around, introducing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, along with refreshed support for VMware (now up to vSphere 4.0) and Citrix (now up to XenServer 5.5).

Suite 2009 R2 also introduces enhancements to its online dashboard, but the most important thing is that the product can now collect data from up to 50,000 systems.

At the moment the company only offers a hosted version of its platform, but if VMware CapacityIQ will start to get some traction, Lanamark may be obliged to reconsider its go-to-market strategy and give the product on-premises.

Just a few weeks after the release of VMware Fusion 3.0, Parallels answers with Desktop for Mac 5.0.

The company released the previous edition of this hosted virtualization platform exactly one year ago.

The new version 5.0 focuses on performance, claiming a 300% improvement on virtual machines operations (like start/stop a virtual machine) and up to 22% faster performance compared to Fusion (the study was conducted by Crimson Consulting Group but there’s no documentation for that).

Beyond that, the product ships features that seem on par with the ones provided by Fusion 3.0, with some advantages here and there:

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