virtualization.info Editors

At the beginning of July virtualization.info reported how VMware, Cisco and EMC (the VCE triumvirate?) are working together to execute virtual machines live migrations across data centers that are 80 km (50 miles) away from each other.

Well, what was considered an impressive yet experimental configuration in July became an officially supported scenario in September.

The three companies discussed three different scenarios for long-distance VMotion at VMworld 2009 and announced the joint validation for one of them, where VMware supports a 200 km live migration (assuming you can satisfy some pretty demanding requirements):

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More than one year ago IBM signed a partnership with the startup Desktone to implement a 1,400 seats VDI architecture powered by their technology at the Pike County Schools.

That move cleared the IBM plan to become a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud provider which became a reality at the end of last month.

Two weeks ago in fact IBM announced the upcoming availability of its new Smart Business Desktop, a IaaS architecture powered by VMware, Citrix, Desktone and Wyse products.

The company website doesn’t clarify which vendors will provide which components but it’s pretty easy to guess (Citrix helped with a specific announcement): VMware will provide the hypervisor (ESX) and management layer (vCenter), Citrix will provide the connection broker (XenDesktop) and remote desktop protocol (HDX), Wyse will provide the thin clients and Desktone of course will glue the whole thing with its self-service portal for customers and policy manager for the cloud provider.

IBM plans to launch the Smart Business Desktop offering in October 2009 with a subscription model.

For the very first time a hardware virtualization architecture will be an alternative to the web-based architectures that Google represents so well. Hopefully virtualization.info will be able to access the IBM cloud and report about it after some extended use.

In early September while most of the virtualization community was busy in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009, Red Hat was finally releasing the first piece of its new virtualization offering in Chicago at its Summit 2009.

The market expected the company to launch the new Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (RHEVH, a minimal version of RHEL plus KVM that could compete against VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V Server), and the new Enterprise Virtualization Managers (EVMs) for servers and desktops. But Red Hat only released RHEL 4.5.

In March the company announced that these new products would be released sequentially, starting mid 2009 and for next 18 months, but for now the general public knows nothing but a few technical details unofficially published by some a beta tester.

The ones that attended the Red Hat Summit in Chicago (or visited the Red Hat booth at VMworld) knows more. Luckily, Red Hat published some breakout sessions’ videos of the event, so we all can watch the ones related to virtualization:

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In March the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore started the execution of a new strategy to break free from its symbiosis with VMware.

So far the most important step of that execution has been the launch of a new product called vControl, a management console which supports multiple hypervisors and it’s ready for data center orchestration.

The first public version of vControl, released in May, introduced some interesting features and the broad support for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.

Anyway somebody at Vizioncore must have decided that the $399/socket pricing wasn’t aggressive enough, so, with a surprising move during the VMware’s VMworld 2009 conference, the company announced the release of the core features of vControl as freeware.

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Finally, after a long time under the scenes, ManageIQ gives a sign of its presence and updates Enterprise Virtualization Manager (EVM) Suite.

The startup had more than one year to extend the already very good EVM Suite 2.0. The new 2.3 version introduce support for VMware vSphere 4.0:

• Agentless management of ESX 4 and 4i hosts
• Federation of VMware vCenter 4.0 and VirtualCenter 3.x
• Support for VMware VMsafe APIs in compliance enforcement
• Integration with VMware vCenter Orchestrator

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In June VMLogix announced the upcoming availability of a special version of its virtual lab automation product that could support Amazon EC2.

The product, dubbed LabManager Cloud Edition (CE), was released two weeks ago at VMworld 2009.

While the privacy and security concerns expressed in our previous coverage remain, it is true that VMLogix may be one of the first vendors to set the trend for the coming months: those customers that decide to embrace cloud computing may easily recognize the need for management consoles that extend the 3rd party IaaS architectures to achieve specific tasks such as virtual lab automation.

There are evident benefits:

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After no less than 2 years, Parallels finally updates its hosted virtualization platform for Windows and Linux.
Formerly known as Parallels Workstation, the product is now called Desktop for Windows & Linux and jumps from version 2.2 to 4.0.

The amount of new features introduced is remarkable and of course come from the Desktop for Mac product where Parallels focused most of its R&D effort in the last years.
Here’s a list of the most significant improvements:

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The VMworld 2009 conference ended yesterday, an amazing experience as usual.
virtualization.info already covered the two opening keynotes (day 1 and day 2) plus a special closed-doors keynote about cloud computing.
Like every year will publish a long wrap-up with the impressions about the show in one week or so.

Before leaving San Francisco anyway, in a pure Steve Jobs style, there’s one more thing.

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Second day keynote here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009.
The yesterday keynote, performed by the VMware CEO Paul Maritz and the COO Tod Nielsen, was mostly focused on the company vision.

Today the CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod is expected to deliver, as usual, a more concrete, technology-wise keynote, dedicating more time to the new products that VMware is delivering or developing for a future release.

Stephen Herrod is on stage.
He starts recapping the three initiatives that make the VMware strategy and how there’s a major refocus on the desktop virtualization area and View. View enables Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS).

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Deeply hidden in the VMworld 2009 opening keynote the VMware CEO Paul Maritz introduced three new key concepts that define the new message of VMware:

• the next generation virtual data center will be a software mainframe, fully automated and self-sufficient
• the software mainframe will be populated through a service catalog (more on this later or tomorrow)
• the cloud-ready services available in the catalog are not here yet. The software mainframe services will be Java enterprise applications that ISVs develop, test and control inside the cloud through the SpringSource framework.

VMware is now hosting a second, closed-doors keynote just about cloud computing, where hopefully the three concepts above will be further defined.

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