virtualization.info Editors

Just two weeks ago Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron, surprising many industry operators that consider the virtualization vendor offering redundant to the Oracle VM and Sun xVM portfolios (Oracle acquired Sun just one month before Virtual Iron).

Oracle didn’t disclose the price paid for Virtual Iron, and Virtual Iron didn’t disclose its earnings in these years, so it’s impossible to say if the database giant decided to buy just to avoid a similar move from a potential competitor and because the deal was cheap, or if the Virtual Iron acquisition was a premium one because Oracle really needed its management stack.

Anyway the Virtual Iron financial situation was unveiled last week by the New York Times, so that any reader may draw his own conclusions:

David Bieneman, the man that founded Vizioncore, sold it to Quest in January 2008, and left just two months after the acquisition, is back.

Of course the strict agreements that regulate an acquisition prevent him from starting or working for a company that compete with Quest/Vizioncore.
So Bieneman is now moving in a new virtualization segment space with a startup called Liquidware Labs.

With him there is J. Tyler Rohrer, the former founder of Foedus, a successful consulting company that was acquired by VMware in January 2008.
Roher left VMware after working for almost one year and a half in the Enterprise Desktop team (the one responsible for VMware View).

The company tagline, The Art & Science of the Desktop, and the Roher profile on LinkedIn unveil that Liquidware Labs will be active in the VDI space, will address the PSO organizations, and that will leverage the technology of vmSight, recently acquired while in stealth mode for an undisclosed sum.

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Just two weeks ago, after one year and a half of silence, EMC (or better a couple of its top executives) decided to publicly criticize the Oracle support policy against its subsidiary VMware.

The trigger for such change of directions probably was the acquisition of Sun, which may transform Oracle in a dangerous competitor in the long term.
Rather than replicate on the corporate blog, Oracle answered with the acquisition of Virtual Iron, which is pretty much equal to a declaration of war.

While Oracle VM Server is being sold as a general purpose hypervisor that customers can use for any workload, a few are really using it to run any application but Oracle ones.
The acquisition of Virtual Iron, even more than the acquisition of Sun and its xVM virtualization portfolio, may change this perception and attract a different kind of customers that not necessarily use Oracle products.

So EMC is back on the topic, this time attacking the entire Oracle virtualization strategy.
Once again is Chuck Hollis, Vice President, Global Marketing CTO, to push the button on his personal blog:

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The list of executives that leave VMware gets longer and longer.
Maybe this is part of a plan defined by the new CEO Paul Maritz, who is hiring several experienced, old-school leaders from Microsoft, IBM, CA and Borland.
Or maybe this is the direct effect of the new culture that Maritz is spreading inside the company.
The result doesn’t change: VMware continues to replace its managers, and some of them are very high profile.

This time is the turn on the company CIO, Tayloe Stansbury, who left VMware this month to join Intuit as their CTO.
Stansbury has been in VMware for one year and a half, during which helped to clarify how VMware is using its own products internally.
VMware also lost Reza Malekzadeh, its former Sr. Director, Products & Marketing for EMEA.
Among other things, Malekzadeh is the man behind the organization of VMworld Europe 2008 and 2009.

The two executives joins the following (and probably many others that virtualization.info couldn’t track):

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In February 2009, during his first VMworld Europe conference, the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz decided to provoke Google on a terrain where the search giant is specially sensitive: cloud computing.
By saying that “…they don’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware” he ignited a serious reaction.

Considering the audience that Google can reach and the credibility it deserves, it’s safe to say that now VMware has an issue.
Now that cloud computing is the new mantra in Palo Alto, there’s no chance for VMware to let Google pass on this one.

So today Dan Chu, Vice President, Emerging Products and Markets, published a long answer to Google on the VMware executive blog, covertly suggesting that the search giant should do a reality check instead of trying to establish a monopoly (emphasis is ours):

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At the end of April, Citrix announced the upcoming features of XenServer 5.5 and Essentials for XenServer / Hyper-V 5.5, opening the public beta program.

Last week during the Synergy conference, the company clarified which features will be included in the free XenServer and which ones will be part of Essentials:

Citrix also announced the general availability date, June 16, and the recommended price for Essentials: $2,500 per server, regardless of the number of processors.

But the less the most interesting feature has yet to come: a pluggable, open source virtual switch for Xen

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It doesn’t matter if you are a loyal customer of VMware, Citrix or Microsoft. Anytime one of these three vendors (or any other in the market) mentions its effort in the cloud computing space using virtualization the comparison term is Amazon.

Amazon has been the first to develop a general purpose cloud computing infrastructure and offer it to the general public. The company launched the (beta) service in August 2006, adopting the open source hypervisor Xen as virtualization engine of choice.
So far their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is the biggest and most mature Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture existing on the market.

During the last three years Citrix acquired XenSource, the leading company for the Xen project, and released the commercial implementation of Xen, XenServer, free of charge.
Amazon doesn’t reveal anything about its Xen implementation, but it’s same to assume that the company engineers had to develop a lot of tools and features on top of Xen.
Now the company can have for free enterprise management, virtual machines live migration, resource sharing, integrated storage management and, at the same time, can count on the enterprise support that Citrix now offers.
This must be a tempting proposition to lower the EC2 maintenance costs.

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In the past months virtualization.info highlighted several times how Cisco is silently using KVM as an alternative virtualization platform to VMware.
We always wondered why, considering the investment that Cisco made on VMware.

Now, finally we have an answer to give: Cisco invested in Qumranet too.

Qumranet is the startup that developed and maintained KVM up to the moment it was acquired by Red Hat.
And that’s why Red Hat had a minor but very relevant position during the launch of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) despite its virtualization offering is pretty weak now.

The fact that Cisco invested in Qumranet is not widely known and we had to admit that even virtualization.info overlooked this key information so far.
How the investment links Cisco to Red Hat is not clear but it’s easy to guess that the upcoming Red Hat new virtualization portfolio based on KVM will have an early chance to be bundled with UCS.

Now VirtualLogix, the mobile virtualization startup where Cisco invested along with Intel, is the next most interesting company to watch.

Less than one month ago Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, closing one of the most strategic deal of the last ten years.
With Java, Solaris, MySQL, Oracle also inherited the entire Sun xVM virtualization portfolio.

Oracle has its own Xen-based hypervisor, Oracle VM Server, and its own management console, Oracle VM Manager, but it’s reasonable to believe that these two products will merge with Sun xVM Server and Ops Center in the coming months.

Any customer at this point would assume that Oracle has enough resources, engineers and developed code to release a strong virtualization product against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.
It seems that this is not the case.

Today the company announced a second, major acquisition in the virtualization space: Virtual Iron, for an undisclosed sum.  
This confirms the rumors that virtualization.info reported in March.

So far Virtual Iron raised $65 million in five rounds of investment, one of the highest sum ever granted to a virtualization vendor.
In the last couple of quarters the company reported a healthy growth: 130% revenue growth in Q4 2008 and 65% growth in Q1 2009.
During the last year anyway, many of the original executives left the company, including the founder and CTO Alex Vasilevsky who is now heading the startup called Virtual Computer.

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Citrix doesn’t seem happy enough to give away a free server hypervisor (XenServer) and its management console (XenCenter). Now the company wants to give away for free also that client hypervisor that will be so important in next generation virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI).

During his opening keynote at the Citrix Synergy 2009, Mark Templeton announced that the much discussed Project Independence (developed in collaboration with Intel) is now called XenClient, and that Citrix will offer it for free.
Duding the second day keynote, Ian Pratt showed XenClient in action on a PC and, with much surprise on an Apple hardware. It’s not clear what kind of agreements exist between Citrix and Apple but so far the Cupertino company never allowed a type-1 VMM (aka hypervisor) to run on its computers.
The complete recording of the demo is available here.

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