virtualization.info Editors

Exactly one year ago Surgient reported profitability after four years in the virtual lab automation market (the company was founded in 2003 but entered the market only in mid-2004).

A couple of months ago a business blog reported that the company scored $1M per month revenue in 2007.
Just a week before this information leaked, Surgient itself reported over 70 active customers.

The company secured $20M in July 2006, but its not clear if that was the first round of funding or not.
Anyway the company needs more cash as it secured $4.3M (only $3M made available at the moment) in a round led by Goldman Sachs, BlueStream Ventures and Crosslink Capital.

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In the last few weeks Veeam released a couple of updates for its products.

The most important is the nworks Management Pack 5.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007.
Veeam acquired nworks in June 2008 for an undisclosed sum.
Under the new control the nworks management suite received a major update (4.0) in December 2008 and now we have this new one.

This 5.0 release introduces two key things:

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At the beginning of this week VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million ($362M in cash and $58M in unvested stock and options).

The company tried to clarify the deal with a public presentation  hosted for its investors and an article published by Steve Herrod, the company CTO, on his corporate blog:

VMware has traditionally treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be running.

This is the largest acquisition in VMware’s history and the most complex to evaluate as it radically changes the company mission and market position.

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Yesterday Citrix announced that more than 10% of Global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated XenServer for production use in the last four months.

This seems to imply that these companies are actually using the Citrix hypervisor in production side-by-side with ESX, but the sentence may also mean that the product has been activated and there’s a plan to use it in production in future.
It doesn’t really matter: a 3rd party trusted entity has to confirm this market share increase before any conclusion can be drawn.

Anyway, if confirmed, it may be a bomb against the VMware fortress: it is a well-known fact that one of the biggest VI3.x selling points is its massive adoption in Fortune 100 (100%), Fortune 500 (98%) and Global Fortune 500 (95%) companies.

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At the end of July virtualization.info highlighted how Sony intentionally disabled the Intel VT capability in all its VAIO laptops, making its expensive hardware useless for virtualization professionals and highly undesirable for every Microsoft customer that wants to upgrade to Windows 7.
Now this short-sighted strategy is causing the company a major image damage.

A week after virtualization.info published that article the story was republished by The Register (too bad they forgot to mention our post as the original news source), and immediately after by pretty much every major news outlet including:

• Engadget: Sony laptops can’t use Windows 7’s XP mode due to disabled hardware virtualization
• ZDNet: Sony kills virtualization on Vaio notebooks
• CNET: Sony nixes Windows 7’s XP virtualization mode for current Vaio laptops
• Tom’s Hardware: Sony Vaio Have VT Disable; No Win 7 XP Mode
• Gizmodo: Sony Laptops Have Hardware Virtualization Disabled, Can’t Run Windows 7’s XP Mode
• Neowin: Sony laptops disable Windows 7’s XP Mode
• Slashdot: No Windows 7 XP Mode For Sony Vaio Z Owners

To calm down the users Microsoft probably asked a Sony VAIO product manager, Xavier Lauwaert, to address the issue on the Windows Partner blog. His post says nothing but his answer to a specific comment about the lack of VT capability provides an astonishing explanation and fix roadmap (our emphasis):

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Last week virtualization.info reported that both VMware VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0 are being tested by a Common Criteria lab to earn the EAL4+ rating.

VMware already has the EAL4+ certification for VI 3.0.2 but ESX is not they only hypervisor that was rated that high.

Microsoft in fact just announced that Hyper-V 2008 (the first release and not the just launched R2)  achieved the EAL4+ certification as well.

It is worth to note that Microsoft earned that certification for the release candidate version of Hyper-V that is embedded in the full version of Windows Server 2008, plus the KB950050 hotfix, which upgrades the hypervisor to 1.0 RTM.

Microsoft didn’t even need to certify Hyper-V using editions that have a reduced attack surface, like the version that is embedded in Windows Server 2008 Server Core or the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008.

This should clarify how the typical argument that Hyper-V is less secure than ESX, because the former comes with a full copy of Windows while the latter has a very small footprint, doesn’t work at all. Unless we accept to dispute the absolute value of the Common Criteria rating, as virtualization.info suggested several times.

Disclosure: virtualization.info runs its own independent conference about virtualization technologies called Virtualization Congress.
The first edition was arranged in US in May 2009 and was co-hosted with the Citrix Synergy 2009 conference. Even if the Citrix event sponsorship didn’t influence by any mean the agenda of the Virtualization Congress, the sessions’ contents or the speakers line-up, it is still true that Citrix is a competitor of VMware and that the Virtualization Congress may be mistakenly perceived as a very humble attempt to compete with VMworld.

At the end of May Brian Madden highlighted how the imminent edition of VMware’s main conference, VMworld 2009, has some unprecedented, severe restrictions for exhibitors (as many of them are direct competitors).

Specifically, the VMworld exhibitors are not allowed to market or demonstrate products that overlap with or replace VMware offering.
Additionally, all non-VMware partners (read “competitors”) can’t have a booth larger than 10x10ft (virtualization.info received a confirmation about this from one of the event sponsors). 
Last but not least, the exhibitor employees must remain in the boundaries of their booths.

Now Citrix is unveiling an additional limitation:

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Five months after launching its flagship product, Hyper9 has completely left behind its previous life as InovaWave: its product now has an actual name, Virtualization Optimization Suite or VOS, and already hits version 1.4.

The upgrade introduces a number of new capabilities that extend the core search engine:

• Dashboard
• Scheduled searches
• Inclusion of new predefined searches (unused VMs, orphaned VMDKs and files, etc.)
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0

The company also renamed its capability to track and compare performance and history of different virtual machines as VMDNA.

The rumors that circulated for months are now officially confirmed: VMware postpones the VMworld Europe from Q1 to Q4, just one month after the North America main conference.

This means at least three things:

• The Europeans that planned to go to the VMworld 2010 instead of the imminent VMworld 2009 in San Francisco to limit the travel expenses will have to wait an entire year instead of just few months.
• All the exhibiting vendors will have to build two conference teams to manage the two VMworld logistics with just one month of delay from each other.
  The biggest companies are perfectly ready to do so but the smallest VMware partners may have issues.
• Some customers that plan to attend both events won’t be able to do so because the quarter budget probably doesn’t allow to do so.

The early feedbacks expressed by well-known members of the virtualization community are not exactly positive: here, here and here.
Anyway VMware may have a few reasons to do so:

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By now most virtualization.info readers should know that Red Hat plans to (finally) unveil its KVM-based virtualization offering on Sep. 1, at the Red Hat Summit 2009 in Chicago (and maybe at VMware VMworld 2009 as well).

The new product portfolio will include not one but two management solutions:

• Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting.
• Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (the connection broker and management console SolidICE acquired from Qumranet in September 2008)

While the public knows how SolidICE looks like, nobody really saw the first management solution above, except the few lucky beta testers that Red Hat secretly selected before June.

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