virtualization.info Editors

Last week Vizioncore announced a couple of interesting changes around its executive team.

Jason Mattox is now appointed as Vice President of Support, while Tyler Jewell becomes the Vice President of Products.

Mattox is the co-founder of Vizioncore while Jewell is a long time Quest executive.

The latter joined the Vizioncore parent company in May 2005 and was the Senior Director in charge of  several business units inside Quest in the last four years.
His new position as Vice President of Products, Virtualization sounds like a major Quest take over on the Vizioncore product line and strategy, which operated as a fully independent subsidiary since its acquisition in January 2008.

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virtualization.info keeps tracking the massive executive replacement that VMware is operating on a global scale, in almost every area, including the PR, the marketing and the sales department.

Last month we reported how a growing number of former Business Objects executives are joining VMware in the EMEA region after Maurizio Carli was hired as General Manager in this area in December 2008.
Before that we tracked the arrival of other high level executives from Microsoft, from Borland and from Oracle.

Another ex-Oracle joins the list today: Fred King, the former General Manager of Technology Alliances & Channels in the Australian & New Zealand region.

King joins VMware, after five years in Oracle, as its new Director of Partner Organization in the ANZ region, as CRN reports.

Last month virtualization.info reported how Oracle killed the Virtual Iron brand immediately after the acquisition, firing every employee but 10, terminating the reseller program and severely limiting the capability for existing customers to buy new licenses or upgrade licenses.

The move was so quick and brutal that Oracle gave the impression to completely disregard the loss of 1000-3000 SMB customers. And this represented an opportunity for VMware which launched a discount program to attract those customers on vSphere.

It’s possible that the pressure from competitors (also Microsoft jumped in recently) had a positive impact on the Oracle strategy, which finally decided to talk to the Virtual Iron customers through a semi-private webcast held today by Wim Coekaerts, Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering.

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IBM just announced VMControl, a plug-in for the Director management suite, which is free for the IBM customers.
VMControl, available in two editions (Express and Standard) adds management capabilities for multiple hypervisors on top of the Director 6.x platform:

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With an unprecedented move, today Microsoft releases the Hyper-V paravirtualization drivers for Linux guest OSes, called Linux Integration Components, as GPLv2 open source software.

When EMC, the VMware parent company, signed a 3-years alliance on virtualization with Microsoft virtualization.info wondered if the hell was frozen (not the case as the two companies seem to call this co-opetition), but this goes much beyond that.

To be credible in the enterprise Microsoft has to support Linux inside its virtual machines. And Linux has to deliver enterprise-grade performance.

To achieve the goal the company releases the Linux Integration Components as a free stand-alone package since September 2008.
Through them Microsoft supports Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise as guest OS, which is a first step in the right direction but certainly not enough to satisfy the many customers that have more than one Linux distribution to consolidate.

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Last month virtualization.info announced a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
The webcast shows a live configuration and/or management of a popular virtualization product among the ones that we daily track in the news.

There are no slides at all. Everything is performed live and directly on product consoles.

Our first show featured the configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays, something that is not exactly easy to test without the proper lab equipment.

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For months now HP had to tolerate the coverage that press, blogs, forum and newsgroups dedicated to the Unified Computing System (UCS) that Cisco officially launched in March.
Even virtualization.info, which never considered the blade technology as strongly related to virtualization, has closely followed the UCS announcements, believing to see a new paradigm of integration between a virtual infrastructure (VMware vSphere in this case) and the physical layer below it (but this is something that Cisco still has to demonstrate).

Cisco just entered the x86 server market, and while it already appears in a very strong position thanks to its partnership with VMware and EMC, it still is a newcomer,
No customers would easily jump on the new bandwagon without a careful evaluation of the Cisco strategy, capability to execute, technology value and ROI.

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Oracle continues to stay mum about its integration plan for Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron hypervisors, but don’t hold anything when it’s time to talk about the new competitors.

Just two months ago the company dismissed the VMware virtual appliance initiative and its Marketplace, saying that it doesn’t contain anything but toy appliances.
One month later Oracle decided to clarify how the word co-opetition is not in its vocabulary, modifying the support policy to exclude every virtualization vendor that offer a hypervisor for x86/x64 architectures.

Today it’s time to hit Red Hat (and by some degrees Novell).
On its corporate blog last week Oracle highlighted its commitment to Xen and the open source:

…Oracle’s Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Not only does Oracle run the whole business on Linux, but also run the base development on Linux for all our products. Today Oracle has over 9,000 developers working on Linux and provides Global Linux Support in over 100 countries…

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Yes, Oracle is slowly increasing the frequency of its incursions in the virtualization world.
Now that the company controls three hypervisors (its own Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron) it’s expected that a master plan comes out sooner or later.

For now Oracle just shows a little piece of it, by announcing its paravirtualized (PV) drivers for Windows guest OSes.

Oracle offers them for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as for Windows XP and Vista. For each one there’s a 32bit and a 64bit version. Of course they are only available for the Oracle VM hypervisor.

The paravirtualized drivers improves the performance of virtual machines when there’s no chance to leverage the capabilities of hardware-assisted virtualization technologies like AMD-V RVI (available in the Quad-Core Opteron CPUs since September 2007) and Intel EPT (available in the new Xeon 5500 CPUs).

While enhancing the performance of Windows guest OSes, the PV drivers that Oracle is shipping also imply some limitations: once installed them, the virtual machines state can’t be saved and restore anymore and live migration is no more available.

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After a short public beta program, Vizioncore released the fourth major release of its vRanger Pro.

As detailed in the previous post, the product is evolving into something articulated, a Data Protection Platform (DPP) as Vizioncore calls it, that will be released in three phases.

During this first phase the company delivers the new pluggable architecture called Direct-To-Target.
Direct-To-Target allows to extend the product with additional components that provide support for multiple protocols and storage targets.
It’s likely that the company will release these components in the second or third phase, and that will offer them as a-la-carte options. For now vRanger Pro 4.0 supports SFTP and CIFS repositories.

The virtual machines backup and restore now happens without the need to plug into VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), going straight from the virtualization host to the backup repository and vice versa.
vRanger is also able to perform multiple ESX backups in parallel.

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