virtualization.info Editors

It took almost two months to finally unveil the software layer that manages the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system, but Cisco finally made it.

On its corporate Data Center Networks blog Cisco shows the GUI details and workflow in two parts videos.

UCS Manager seems very complex and granular, it exposes the full hardware for each blade, it exposes the logical servers that you want to create aggregating multiple blades in the system, it exposes the networking and the storage layer, and of course it exposes the virtual machines inside each blade.

Each of these layers can be restricted by a role-base access control system.

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After trying for years to impose its high-performance remote desktop, Remote Graphics Software (RGS), the company has finally given up and will phase it out by the end of this year.

virtualization.info has learned from very trusted sources that HP will not only drop RGS but it will also exit the VDI market completely, stopping the development of its connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM).

Starting 2010 the company will rely on third party offerings provided by Citrix, VMware and Microsoft. HP is especially looking at two protocols: the Citrix Prism/HDX and the software implementation of the PCoIP protocol that VMware and Teradici are developing.
Same story for the connection broker: HP is working to adopt Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.
Of course HP will continue to develop thin clients/blade workstations for SBC/VDI environments where it has a serious profit.

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At the beginning of last week VMware announced the pricing and availability of its vSphere 4.0 platform, replacing the popular VMware Infrastructure 3.x starting May 21.

Much before that announcement VMware unveiled a long list of new products that will be released over the next months, covering pretty much every possible need that a virtual infrastructure administrator may have.
One of them is especially interesting: the vCenter Orchestrator.

The technology behind this product comes from the acquisition of the European startup Dunes Technology in September 2007.
Orchestrator is extremely interesting as it’s the building block of any highly complex automated infrastructure.

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It’s not a secret that Google is not crazy about hardware virtualization. They made it clear in June 2007, when the engineer André Barroso said:

“I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.”…

Having Google to endorse your technology is a big thing but so far virtualization vendors survived even without the search engine support.
But at the end of 2008 VMware decided to enter a domain where Google is a recognized leader, cloud computing, and this was enough to trigger a still very polite contrast between the two companies.

At VMworld Europe 2009, the VMware CEO Paul Maritz addressed the Google approach to cloud computing saying that virtualization is the only viable way.
Specifically he said:

they don’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware

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As announced a couple of weeks ago, just before its conference, the Synergy 2009, Citrix opens the new beta program for its free hypervisor XenServer.

Unlike we suggested in our previous article, the new version, codenamed Project George, is numbered 5.5 and not 5.1.

As already said the new product includes the following features:

• Active Directory integration. Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Workload balancing. Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.
• LVHD. Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs)
• Snapshot support in XenCenter. Create and manage disk snapshots from within XenCenter.
• StorageLink integration. CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with optional automated initiator/fabric/array management.
• Expanded guest OS support. RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.

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One thing Microsoft never made clear in the last few years was its virtualization strategy for the consumer market.
Yes, if we talk about the client side of an enterprise infrastructure, then we know that Microsoft has big ambitions, and it’s working to push both App-V (formerly SoftGrid) and MED-V (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspace) through its MDOP bundle for Software Assurance customers. But nothing has been said so far about what options will be available for the millions of consumers that want to run a virtualization product on top of their Windows Vista and Windows 7 boxes.

Yes, Microsoft offers VirtualPC, a product that is not seriously updated since a long, long time.
The latest version, VirtualPC 2007, is dated February 2007. To arrive there Microsoft took 4 years, during which it only released service packs for VirtualPC 2004 that introduced minor enhancements.
The company even cancelled the Mac editon of VirtualPC in August 2006.

It doesn’t surprise that prosumers look at VMware Workstation or Sun VirtualBox, and maybe Citrix XenWorkstation (if it really exists).

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The article appeared on WorksWithU may be the first documented case of a company deciding to adopt KVM instead of VMware or Citrix hypervisors.

To be fair the scenario described by the author is at the lowest limit of the SMB range: a mere two virtual machines for a single virtualization host.
Yet, it’s interesting to read the reasons behind the choice to go for KVM on Ubuntu rather than VMware ESX or Citrix XenServer:

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One week ago Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun surprising customers, partners, analysts and even the companies employees.
Many projects inside Sun are being discussed right now and some may be just cancelled.
Reading the messages flowing around social network sites like Facebook or Twitter, it’s easy to see how fear, uncertainty and doubts are spreading across the Sun ranks.

One of the most important projects that Sun has in place and that may be negatively impacted by this deal is the release of xVM Server, the Xen-based hypervisor that Sun originally announced in September 2007.

The launch of the hypervisor has been delayed several times. The last update from Sun suggested a tentative first release in Q2 2009.
Potential customers already know that such release would miss some key features like Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN support. For that Sun suggested to wait an update in H2 2009.

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Lately Parallels has been very silent. The company must be fully busy in developing the new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac to stop the VMware conquer of the Apple market share, and in finalizing the long awaited Parallels Server Bare Metal.

Anyway a major news about the firm was published earlier this week on Kommersant, a Russian business magazine.
The article (Google Translate from Russian to English) reports that the investment fund Almaz Capital bought 5% of the Parallels stake for about $11 million.
The stake was previously owned by Fund Insight but Parallels bought it back to sell it again to Almaz Capital.

The article also reveals three interesting additional details:

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As we said in the previous post the Speakers, the Agenda and the Panels, the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress will happen in just one week in Las Vegas, co-located with the Citrix Synergy 2009 at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.

As some readers may remember, the conference program will include a particular general session on May 6.
During this slot we’ll present on stage up to six early stage start-ups that just came out of stealth mode or that just released their first product on the market.

Following the successful approaches used by Demo and TechCrunch conferences, we asked these companies to briefly present on stage their brand and then show the juice technologies they are about to offer.
For the attendees, it’s a great opportunity to see what will come out in the coming months and to reconsider their virtualization strategy accordingly.

Today it’s a great pleasure for me to announce that Data Gardens will launch and present on stage its first product for this first edition of the Virtualization Congress: Syntropy.

DataGardens changes the way businesses provide IT services across multi-site data center environments. Its products reduce the cost of IT provisioning and administration, while increasing productivity, utilization, and resiliency. DataGardens software systems extend conventional virtualization services including virtual machine migration, high availability, and load balancing, so they can be leveraged across multiple distributed sites. This unique capability enables DataGardens to offer solutions for remote IT provisioning, multi-site resource sharing, business continuity, and consolidated multi-site backup.

If you didn’t check the agenda it’s definitively time to do it and book a last minute flight to join us there.
(and just in case you need some help to justify the trip, here’s a toolkit ready for you)

See you in a week!