virtualization.info Editors

Cloud computing means a lot of different things. As virtualization.info mostly focuses on virtual data centers technologies, our interest for cloud computing is, at the moment, limited to those architectures known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where a hypervisor meets an orchestration framework and generates a scalable, pay-per-use, on-demand virtual infrastructure.

Our attention of course also focuses on the many shapes that IaaS clouds can have, like the Server-as-a-Service (nobody every used this term so far, but the industry may do it at a point) or the imminent Desktop-as-a-Service architectures (DaaS).
Thus virtualization.info closely monitors both IaaS service providers (like Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, tuCloud, etc.) and IaaS technology providers (like Citrix, Desktone, Skytap, VMware, etc.).

Soon enough we are going to cover Microsoft as well.

Read more

As virtualization.info reported multiple times, VMware recently decided to appoint a second CTO to focus exclusively on desktop virtualization.
His business unit should include:

• the VDI connection broker View (acquired from Propero in 2007)
• the technologies OEM’ed from ThinPrint in 2007 (for remote printing), Wyse Technology in 2008 (for RDP acceleration) and RTO Software in 2009 (for persona management)
• the application virtualization platform ThinApp (acquired from Thinstall in 2008)
• the upcoming high-performance remote desktop protocol PCoIP (co-developed with Teradici since 2008)
• the upcoming hypervisor for embedded devices Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP, acquired from Trango in 2008)
• the upcoming client hypervisor Client Virtualization Platform (CVP, which will probably include the technologies acquired from Tungsten Graphics in 2008)

Read more

In the virtualization market, right now, Oracle is the company that has the biggest potential.

One of the most important values in virtualization is the capability to cut the dependency on a specific hardware vendor, switching the servers, the storage or the network gears at will, without most of the pain that such change would imply in the “physical” world.
Yet, while everybody desires an open and competitive market, a number of customers prefer to deal with the least amount of vendors whenever possible.

Dealing with a single vendor means (or should mean) less moving parts, less complexity in licensing, a piece-of-mind support agreement that covers the computing stack end to end (which implies a shorter resolution time), a smoother standardization process, and more.

Read more

So far VMware didn’t do a good job in explaining the reasons behind the SpringSource acquisition and how it fits the long term vision.

The ones that attended the VMworld 2009 conference in San Francisco last month, witnessed how many in the audience left the opening keynote as soon as the SpringSource CEO took the stage.
That was something never happened before (except for the sponsored sections at the end of the VMworld Europe 2009 first keynote).

Now that the acquisition is completed, hopefully VMware will say something more and more concrete to engage its audience.

Meanwhile, somebody totally unexpected took the time to explain this acquisition much better than what the VMware marketing did till now: Simon Crosby, the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management Division.

Read more

Since the VMware acquisition at the end of 2003, EMC always said that its new subsidiary had to stay independent to win the market.
A few really trusted those words at the time: nothing like virtualization has driven the storage spending in the history of enterprise IT (and it’s just the beginning, wait for VDI to become mainstream).
It was hard to believe that EMC wouldn’t leverage its relationship with VMware to declass NetApp, HP, IBM, Sun (now Oracle) and others as second choice options when designing virtual data centers.
But over the years the storage giant demonstrated its commitment to keep VMware independent.
For a period of time EMC was even accused of not doing enough, lacking that minimum integration that customers expect between two technologies as complementary and connected as the VMware hypervisor and the EMC storage array.

If EMC ever used its influence on VMware to damage its competitors, virtualization.info is not aware of it and no customer or reader ever complained about that.

Now everything is changing.

Read more

Guest star author: Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, at Dell.

One of the things that has consistently interested me has been the rate at which server virtualization is adopted within customers. The reason this is so interesting is the huge differences I see in different organizations that often have the same goals, and are about the same size. Some organizations have huge implementations with CEOs or CIOs driving everyone to virtualize. While other organizations have a ‘grass roots’ push for virtualization squeaking it in where they think they may get away with it. Sometimes I have even found that the ‘early adopters’ of the technology are only 30% virtualized after 3 or 4 years and their competition that just started their project last year is now 40% virtualized.

All of this led to me wonder if we could ‘grade’ where someone was in their adoption solely based on the % of their environment that is virtualized and the number of years they have been using server virtualization. And if we can grade someone, then we need to define a possible “optimal adoption curve” for server virtualization, again based on pure potential within an environment.

Before we get into some of the numbers behind the optimal adoption curve we have to dispose of a couple items / make a few assumptions.

Read more

Less than 10 months ago, Citrix released its own data center orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.

The future of virtualization (and cloud computing) depends on automation, so products like this are very welcome here at virtualization.info.
Unfortunately, for many customers, it’s not easy to recognize their value at today.
A company has to reach a critical mass of virtual machines before it can finally see the benefits of automating a large part of their lifecycle.

At the same time orchestration is often associated with scripting, which sounds like a complex procedure that only the most technical members of the staff can own, and that can be used only in very circumstantiated scenarios. 
Orchestration is much beyond scripting but virtualization vendors in general are not doing a great job in clarifying so, and so it’s still really hard to get the real potential of the technology.

Read more

At the end of August VMware finally released its authoring product Studio 2.0, which virtualization.info covered at the end of July.

This new Studio introduces the support for vApps, the next incarnation of the VMware Virtual Appliances (VA), and a number of additional, welcome features:

• Support for vSphere 4.0 (including both ESX and ESXi hosts), Server and Workstation as provisioning engines.
• Support for OVF 1.0 and 0.9 formats
• Support for VA/vApp customization (logo, EULA, first-boot script and user management capabilities)
• Support for virtual machines (previously created with Studio) as input
• Support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32/64 bit)
• Periodically publish critical updates to deployed VA/vApps through VMware Update Manager (VUM)
• Authored VA/vApps have an agent built on a Common Information Model (CIM) Broker and CIM Provider for guest OS management

Last week VMware released a bunch of updates for several products in its portfolio. Each build is primarily for bug fixing but View Manager 3.1.2 also introduces a new feature:

Just a couple of days ago virtualization.info wrote about the upcoming launch of Smart Business Desktop, the IBM Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud computing infrastructure powered by VMware, Citrix, Wyse Technology and Desktone products.

We can’t wait October to try what IBM claimed to be an industry first, even if we just spotted a company that seems to have a DaaS offering well before the Big Blue: tuCloud.

The startup promises to deliver on-demand Windows Vista or Windows 7 (with Aero) hosted desktops with up to 4GB RAM within 24 hours maximum (so it’s not in real-time through a self-service provisioning portal as we expect the IBM DaaS to work).

tuCloud offers pay-per-use and pre-pay pricing models, starting at $120 (or 100 Euros) for the first desktop (1GB RAM) plus $65 (or 50 Euros) for additional ones.
A customer can ask up to 100 virtual desktops and, paying an extra, it can have its environment preconfigured with popular commercial products.

Read more