virtualization.info Editors

In less than one hour Paul Maritz, the VMware CEO, will be on stage to start the VMworld 2009.
This year there are 12,500 attendees, slightly less than last year, but definitively an amazing result considering the economic conditions.

A number of demos are highly expected from the audience. One for sure is the software implementation of the PCoIP remote protocol that VMware is developing with Teradici.
Another is the client hypervisor that will compete with the Citrix Xen Client expected later this year.

Tod Nielsen is on stage.
Nielsen is one of the first Microsoft veteran that joined VMware this year as the new COO.
Every single move, word, joke or smile he has on stage is 100% Microsoft style, which neatly breaks with the usual style of VMware keynotes.

Nielsen’s introduction is about the Fortune 1000 customers that are not using VMware technologies, only 30, and about the company’s goal: energize and save. 

Paul Maritz is on stage.
This is the second VMworld keynote for the former Microsoft executive who replaced the VMware founder and CEO Diane Greene in July 2008.
His first keynote last September was entirely dedicated to the new focus that the company has on cloud computing. We’ll see if this year the message will be exactly the same.

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This Friday Forbes unveiled the upcoming launch of vCloud Express, a VMware initiative to accelerate the adoption of vSphere a cloud computing platform.

Now it’s the eWEEK’s turn to ruin another VMworld surprise: VMware Go, a free web management service for ESXi.

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The Web-based service automates the installation and configuration of VMware’s freely downloadable ESXi hypervisor, VMware ESXi.

VMware Go will enable SMB customers to “fly through the ESXi setup process with just a few mouse clicks,” Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s vice president of product marketing for servers, told eWEEK.

…

VMware Go will be made available as a beta offering on Aug. 31, 2009 to customers at a special Web.  It is scheduled to become generally available in Q4 2009, Balkansky said.

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Earlier this week Amazon announced its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, a segmented version of its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) that is accessible only through a VPN connection.

There were at least a couple of reasons to launch VPC right now: sure, it is the 3rd anniversary of EC2, but most of all it’s the week before VMworld, the VMware conference that this year is going to have a major focus on cloud computing.

Both Xen.org and VMware will in fact launch two new initiatives called Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and VMware vCloud Express.

XCP will be a set of tools, of course distributed as open source, to extend the capability of the hypervisor as a cloud computing platform. And it will be supported by all the members of the Xen.org advisory board members, including Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle.

So the Xen Cloud Platform will merge together new and existing pieces of software in a single package even if it’s not clear at the moment what will be part of the platform exactly.

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When VMware introduced its new cloud computing mantra one year ago, there were at least four reactions: hope, skepticism, irritation and confusion.

Some truly hoped that the data center could become as easy and ubiquitous as the power grid in just a couple of years, as VMware predicted.
Others expressed skepticism (include this site among them) about the chances that such revolution could happen in such short time frame and that it would be of any relevance for the SMBs.
Google got irritated because the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz started his new career by saying that the search giant approach to cloud computing is fundamentally wrong.
And others were just confused by the introduction of public and private clouds.

The public cloud VMware was talking about is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture, where virtual machines are provisioned on demand and the customers are billed on a pay-per-use model (it’s much more than that, but these are the two fundamental aspects that everybody keeps in mind).

But what is a private cloud exactly?
Is it a new way, cooler way to call the already cool enough data-center-in-a-box concept where hardware virtualization still is the fundamental piece? 
Or is it a cloud-in-a-cloud solution, where housing meets virtualization?
Or something even different?

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The formal launch of the new Red Hat virtualization offering based on KVM is just a few days away.

Excluding the products names, so far most Red Hat didn’t disclose any detail about the platform that will replace its previous implementation of Xen.

For the impatient ones, Mark Wilson published some concrete information about this product that are worth a check (our emphasis):

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At the end of April, a Russian business magazine reported about a $11M investment that Parallels secured from Almaz Fund, and unveiled how the company contemplated an IPO one or two years ago.

Now Bloomberg further confirms the interest to launch an IPO, reporting the words of Serguei Beloussov, the Parallels founder and CEO:

Parallels Chief Executive Officer Serguei Beloussov says he wants to take the software maker public in about two years, striving to stay independent.

More interestingly, Beloussov reveals how IBM and Microsoft started a discussion to acquire his company:

Companies including Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. have “casually” approached him about an acquisition, Beloussov said in an interview last week.

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VMLogix is a US startup that entered the virtual lab automation market in October 2006.

Its segment is reasonably empty, with just a bunch of competitors. Unfortunately among those competitors there is VMware and its vCenter Lab Manager.

Despite that, VMLogix always managed to provide valuable features in a timely fashion, like the support for Linux, the support for heterogeneous virtual environments (something that VMware killed as soon as it acquired Akimbi in 2006) or the support for the Amazon Xen-based cloud infrastructure EC2.

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Embotics is a Canadian startup that entered the VM lifecycle management market exactly two years ago.

The alliance programs that the company joined over time, with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, clarify the intention to become the product of choice in heterogeneous virtual environments.

The acquisition of the former Vice President of Global Alliances at PlateSpin, further confirms that Embotics doesn’t want to stick with VMware only, and this makes perfectly sense considering that VMware has its own products in this market segment.

Earlier this week the company released version 3.0 of its flagship product V-Commander.
The product is now rearranged in a new modular architecture, with three modules that customers can license individually to incrementally upgrade the platform:

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In December 2007 PlateSpin launched Forge, a hardware appliance which embeds VMware VI 3.x and uses the company’s P2V migration technology to simplify the way customers do disaster recovery.

The company updated the platform to version 2.0 exactly one year ago, months after being acquired by Novell.

Earlier this month Forge reached version 2.5, introducing the following features:

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Leostream just released a new version of its Connection Broker.

In version 6.0 the company introduced the full support for Citrix XenServer. With this new 6.2, Leostream completely focus on Microsoft technologies.

Connection Broker 6.2 in fact fully supports Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as backend hypervisors, plus Windows 7 as virtual desktop guest OS and RDP 7.0 as remote protocol.

On top of that the new version of this product adds a number of interesting new features:

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