virtualization.info Editors

When Citrix announced for the first time its plan to deliver an open source virtual switch for Xen and KVM, virtualization.info wrote that it could be the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Vyatta to compete against Cisco and slam it.

That virtual switch is about to be unveiled now but the two companies didn’t reveal if there’s a collaboration on this project.
Even if there’s not one, there may be in the near future as Vyatta just secured $10 million in its Round C funding, and Citrix is one of the investors.

The highly respectable Om Malik at GigaOM wrote that Citrix did so because it is losing ground to the VMware-Cisco Systems colossus.

Quite the opposite.

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In March the startup Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave) hired a well-known virtualization professional: Andrew Kutz.
At that time Kutz, who is now a Senior R&D Scientist at the company, was developing a management solution for multiple hypervisors that could be used on mobile devices that support Java: the Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM).

Easy to guess, Hyper9 didn’t just hire Kutz, but also acquired the intellectual property of VMM, and it’s now ready to launch the first release.

VMM 1.0 offers the following features:

• Monitor virtual machines, hosts or data centers’ CPU and memory consumption
• Manage virtual machines power and network state
• Support for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and vSphere 4.0, VMware Server 2.0, Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 and Citrix XenServer 5.0.
• Interface customization

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It doesn’t matter if we are talking about SaaS, PaaS or IaaS architectures. Customers have many reasons to not trust the cloud computing solutions that the market offers today and one of them is the lack of security.

Amazon has the oldest, most popular and very likely the largest cloud infrastructure existing today, and thus it must under continuous fire when enterprise customers evaluate its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

The company recently announced a series of initiatives to make EC2, S3 and the other Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities more secure, and to clarify the level of security currently in place:

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One of the oldest (and hottest) topic in the history of modern virtualization is if the Xen open source hypervisor can be integrated into the Linux kernel or not.

XenSource tried to achieve the goal for years (while VMware did its best to avoid it), but in December 2006 Linus Torvalds announced the decision to include another virtualization platform in place of Xen: KVM.

KVM was developed and maintained by the startup Qumranet, acquired by Red Hat in September 2008, and at that time was just 6 months old, much less mature than Xen.
Despite that and because of its architecture (at least this is the official reason), KVM has been included in the kernel since version 2.6.20 and Xen is not.

After this and after the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, the idea of Xen inside Linux seemed definitively archived. But the community is still debating about the topic.

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The new, much discussed Unified Computing System (UCS) is not here yet, but it’s clear that Cisco is very serious about becoming a major player in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

To further clarify its intention, the company announced that it just hired Christofer Hoff as the new Director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions.

Hoff comes from Unisys were he was the Chief Security Architect, but he’s mostly known because of his tireless evangelism activity on his personal blog, declared a Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info.
We had the pleasure to see him in action as speaker and panelist during the Virtualization Congress 2009 US, the virtualization.info’s independent conference about virtualization technologies.

Cisco has the appeal and the pockets to attract other major talents in the virtualization space, and build the dream team it needs to become a relevant and trusted vendor in a market that is so different from the networking one.

At his annual conference Synergy, Citrix unveiled its plans to release an open source distributed virtual switch that may compete with the just released Cisco Nexus 1000V for VMware vSphere.

A few details were disclosed about it, like the fact that it will be available for both Xen and KVM, and that it will support advanced networking management features (Netflow, SPAN, RSPAN, and ERSPAN) and some needful security features (ACLs and 802.1x).

Anyway we could be very near the full launch of the project as last week Simon Crosby, CTO of Management and Virtualization Division at Citrix, used his Twitter account to calls for beta testers of the “XenServer distributed virtual switch”.

The few vendors busy in the virtual lab automation space (which include VMware, Surgient, VMLogix, Skytap and the almost died StackSafe) may soon have a big, big problem called Microsoft.

After wasting years not leveraging its huge developers community to spread virtualization in every corner of the world, the company is finally moving on.

Announced in November 2008, the integration between Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Hyper-V 1.0/2.0 for virtual lab automation scenarios is now a reality called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

The product just entered the beta 1 phase and has the potential to become a huge hit in the .NET world.

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As virtualization.info readers now know by now, Microsoft will release the Hyper-V 2.0 RTM as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, both expected in late July for partners, and in late October for customers.

So it’s not really surprising to see that System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 hit the Release Candidate status during the weekend.
What is surprising is to see that the new build sports a big number of improvements in the storage area, like the support for Sanbolic and Symantec/Veritas solutions or the all new Quick Storage Migration.

Anyway at this point the product should be feature complete, so this is the list of the new capabilities that we’ll see in the RTM:

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Just last week virtualization.info pointed out the fact that Surgient is exposing some details about its health on the corporate website, unveiling that it has over 70 customers after five years of activity in the virtual lab automation space.

More information is provided now by Stateman Business Blog, which reports a 2007 revenue for the Austin company equal to $1 million per month.
The business publication also reveals that today Surgient had to cut 11 jobs to keep the costs low during the financial crisis.

After securing its second round of funds in May, VKernel is ready to grow and attack the market with a more articulated sales structure.

To do so the startup hired a new Vice President of Product Management and Marketing: Kevin Conklin.

Conklin comes from Mazu Networks, acquired by Riverbed Technology, where he was VP of Marketing as well.