Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors 
After the precious article about how Microsoft IT department internally uses Hyper-V, the TechNet library exposes another key resource: a list of all possible errors returned by Hyper-V.
The troubleshooting guide, called Hyper-V Health Model by Microsoft, is still a draft (last update was on April 7) but it’s already very detailed.
It divides the events and errors in five categories:
Just a few months after its strategy change, Reflex Systems (formerly Reflex Security) was able to secure its first round of funding.
RFA Management Company, an Atlanta-based private investment firm, provided $8.5 million.
Maybe the previous effort to lead the market as a virtualization security company consumed all the money and now Reflex needs more cash for its second attempt.
Maybe Reflex tried to raise some money in the early days but VCs didn’t want to bet on a virtsec startup.
Maybe the OEM agreement that Reflex signed with Dell last month increased the confidence in their new solution.
Anyway the company now has the help it needs to compete against the crowd in the virtualization management space.
Just last week virtualization.info covered the new product that FastScale is launching and that seems to bring the company away from its original strategy.
The CEO, Lynn LeBlanc, answered on this point in the comments section, but there was at least another interesting comment (unfortunately anonymous and so not verifiable):
I had heard that they were shopping themselves (SUN, HP/Bladelogic, VMware) with tepid interest because venture money has dried up. Must be even tougher to raise funds in this market with no customers.
As an answer to this assertion, today FastScale announces its second round of funding.
ATA Ventures provided them $5.5 million to continue to virtualize the connection between the application and the operating systems components (no, its a different approach from the application virtualization that we are used to).
Citrix has just opened the beta program for the next version of XenServer, which is and will be free as everybody knows by now.
The new product is codenamed Project George (but the final name will be XenServer 5.1 according to our sources), and features some interesting capabilities:
Citrix says that the RTM code beta will be open for the end of April. It’s clear that the company is anxious to have it ready for the Synergy 2009, to be held in Las Vegas in early May.
Even if the amount of technical details about the upcoming Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system are scarce, it’s clear that Cisco has a plan.
And this plan doesn’t contemplate to just sell x86 servers against HP, IBM and Dell.
It doesn’t matter what Cisco believes it can deliver on the market, the hardware part doesn’t seem the most relevant thing.
The biggest question about UCS is how the network vendor is gluing together BMC and VMware products with its UCS Manager.
Whatever is the the method, Cisco has already found it cause UCS is set to be launched this month, very likely the same day of VMware vSphere 4.0, expected for April 21.
So why Cisco has to buy Tidal Software for $105 million in cash and retention-based incentives?
Tidal does job scheduling, application performance management, and automation software products. But these things should already come with BMC and VMware products.
|
|
|
|
Who better than a virtualization vendor to show a successful case study to convince prospects to buy?
In May 2008 Microsoft published some details about how it’s using Hyper-V to serve MSDN and TechNet IIS7 web front-ends.
Nor VMware neither Citrix or other vendors ever published any information about their in-house implementations.
Anyway juicy additional details recently emerged about both the Microsoft and the VMware data centers.
How Microsoft is really using Hyper-V
The MSDN and TechNet case studies were interesting but lacked many details. A new document published in January 2009 on the TechNet library now tells a much clever (and in some cases concerning) story:
In early March virtualization.info broke the news that Citrix was about to release a hosted version (aka type-2 virtual machine monitor) of of XenServer, called XenWorkstation, that could compete with VMware Workstation, Parallels Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox and so on.
There are good reasons for Citrix to do so, and the impressive number of visits we received on that article confirms a great interest about such product.
XenWorkstation was not launched the week of March 9 as we speculated.
While some people (including ones that claim to be Citrix employees) reported that this product doesn’t exist, our sources tells us that Citrix decided to postpone its launch.
True or not (virtualization.info long time readers know that our sources are very reliable), Citrix just released to the Xen community the open source code of a type-2 VMM version of Xen, currently called KXen.
HyTrust is the latest US startup to enter the virtualization market, specifically invading the access control and configuration management where Catbird, Configuresoft, ManageIQ, Veeam and Tripwire are busy.
The company was co-founded in late 2007 by Eric Chiu, who was Vice President of Sales and Business Development from 2005 to 2007 at Cemaphore Systems.
With Chiu, who works as CEO, there was Boris Strongin, the former Vice President of Engineers at SeeContro and Director of Engineering at Determina (now acquired by VMware).
Strongin is working as Vice President of Engineering.
The third cofounder of the company is Renata Budko, the former Director of Product Management at Cemaphore and former Manager of Solutions and Technical Marketing at VMware.
Budko now works as Vice President of Marketing.
The leadership team also includes Rober Hammer, the CFO, and Hemma Prafullchandra, the Chief Security Architect.
Prafullchandra was the Vice President of Advanced Products and Research at VeriSign from 2005 to 2007.
On top of this the company advisory board features the VMware Director of R&D, Vikram Makhija, the Symantec Advanced Technology Group member Slava Kritov, and a security expert coming from NSA, Rebecca Bace.
Earlier this week FastScale Technology, the US startup that launched in Q2 2007 (see virtualization.info coverage), announced a new upcoming product called Stack Manager Workstation Edition.
This new tool, now in public beta, can be considered an appliance builder that uploads on Amazon EC2.
It works on CentOS and Red hat Enterprise Linux (both 4 and 5) and produces virtual machines in AMI format.
The product builds the appliances using its Composer Suite technology, which tracks how an application interacts with its OS and encapsulates in a special package (the DAB) only the relevant libraries, services, etc.
The application inside the DAB doesn’t see a stipped away OS anyway. Composer virtualizes the location of every piece, and if the application needs anything that is not inside the DAB, it will be promptly retrieved from a central repository.
|
|
|
|
Less than one month ago The Wall Street Journal broke the news of an ongoing acquisition talk between IBM and Sun.
virtualization.info reported about the early involvement of Cisco in the bid for Sun, a rumor never confirmed by other sources.
Earlier this week the New York Times reported that the discussion between IBM and Sun has ended and that IBM withdrew its $7 billion offering.
If Cisco was really interested in Sun, now it may be a good moment to reopen the negotiations.
As many pointed out, if Cisco really wants to emerge as a leading player in the server market, it needs all the experience, the credibility and the customers that it can have.
Building all the three things from scratch may take several years, even for a giant like the networking vendor.
Sun can provide all and a virtualization portfolio that may become useful if, for any reason, the intimate partnership with VMware gets compromised.
And by the way, after this failed bid, acquiring Sun is probably much cheaper than one month ago.
Update: It seems that the discussion is still open between Sun and IBM.
