virtualization.info Editors

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that IBM is in acquisition talk with Sun and considering the source this is very unlikely just a rumor:

If the deal does go through, which could happen as early as this week, IBM is likely to pay at least $6.5 billion in cash to acquire Sun, the people said. That would translate into a premium of more than 100% over Sun’s closing price Tuesday.

The impact of such merge would be huge. Of course the big question is what will happen to the many overlapping business units and offerings (servers, storage, management software).

One of the things that IBM may want to save of the current Sun identity is the upcoming and so much delayed server virtualization portfolio dubbed xVM, which includes a bare-metal hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), an enterprise management console that can perform VMs live migrations and resource pooling (xVM Ops Center), a VDI connection broker (xVM VDI), a hosted virtualization product (xVM VirtualBox) and a cloud computing facility that can rival with Amazon EC2 (depending on the recently acquired Q-Layer technology).

So far IBM has been happy in its role of virtualization distributor, despite the company invented the technology in the ‘60s. But Cisco is invading the server space and has a relevant interest in VMware. Not enough to buy the virtualization vendor but enough to keep a leadership position in the fastest growing IT market today.

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At the beginning of this week Cisco finally announced its long awaited blade system once known as California.

The company unveiled an impressive list of partners (VMware, EMC and BMC are the key ones) that will provide the building blocks of this new platform called Unified Computing System (UCS), and provided some scarce information about some of its hardware components. But it didn’t unveil anything about the most important part of the system: its control center, the UCS Manager, that will have to integrate everything in a seamless way.

Anyway in the last three days a lot of information about the platform were leaked.

Scott Lowe summarizes some of them in his last post:

…there are three different CNA families targeted at different markets: high-performance Ethernet, compatibility with existing driver stacks, and virtualization.

…

[the virtualization CNA] will utilize SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization), a PCI SIG standard for allowing a physical network adapter to present multiple virtual adapters to upper-level software, in this case the hypervisor. This eliminates the need for the hypervisor to manage the physical network adapter and allows VMs to attach directly to one of the SR-IOV virtual adapters.

It will utilize Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (Intel I/OAT) to minimize bottlenecks in the hardware and allow the server to better cope with massive dataflows like those generated by 10GbE adapters.

It will use Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) to improve traffic management within the server and decrease the processing burden on the VMM, i.e., the hypervisor…

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VKernel continues to release little, useful and often free tools for the virtualization community, mimicking the successful marketing approach of Veeam in its early days.

This time the startup launches SnapshotMyVM, a simple utility to automatically document the details (and the performance history) of any VMware Infrastructure 3.5 virtual machine.

The product interacts with vCenter and allows the administrator to select one or more VMs at the same time.
As soon as the process starts, SnapshotMyVM collects all the VM details and populates a report that can be manually modified to improve its accuracy and then exported in XML format.

At that point the report can be imported inside Microsoft Excel or any other tool that can read and manipulate XML sources:

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It’s nice to see that Leostream is finally taking a new direction. Their flagship product is still seriously in need of a major upgrade after one year and a half of hibernation but at least the company is closing new valuable partnerships every two months or so:

• a reseller agreement with IBM in September 2008
• a technology partnership with eG Innovations in October 2008
• an OEM deal with BOSaNOVA in February 2009

and now another technology partnership with NoMachine, to support their NX remote protocol on Connection Broker. 

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In March 2008 Microsoft acquired an interesting startup called Kidaro, which was focused on the corporate virtual machine security segment (something we call “platform wrappers” in the Virtualization Industry Radar).

The original product, Managed Workspace, was renamed in Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), and relaunched as a beta in January 2009.

Microsoft plans release the product in H2 2009 as part of the much hated software bundle called Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which means that no potential customer will ever see it unless it has an enterprise license agreement with the Software Assurance.

The company insists to claim MDOP a smart and successful product but the reality is that an endless number of customers have complains about the bundle and can’t access both MED-V and App-V because of it.

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Microsoft is currently publishing multi-part webcast to introduce and deep dive the capabilities of its hypervisor Hyper-V.

So far the company published seven parts:

• Part 1 – Server Virtualization (42:09 min)
• Part 2 – Installing, Configuring, Managing Hyper-V (17:35 min)
• Part 3 – Understanding Integration Services (7:43 min)
• Part 4 – Exports & Snapshots (5:33 min) 
• Part 5 – PowerShell Management (11:03 min)
• Part 6 – Configuring Failover Cluster (16:46 min)
• Part 7 – Failover & Migration of VMs (14:04 min)

If you never saw Hyper-V in action this is probably the best thing after a classroom course.

Skytap (known as Illumita during its stealth mode) is a US startup that entered the (almost empty) virtual lab automation market segment in April 2008 (see virtualization.info coverage).

While one of the leaders in this space, Surgient, was moving away from the hosted infrastructure approach, Skytap was offering its technology as Software as a Service (or virtual lab automation in a cloud if you like).
The only other virtual lab automation firm that is pursuing this business model is StackSafe, another startup launched in January 2008.

In over one year nor Skytap neither StackSafe have impacted the development & testing market in a significant way.
In part this depends on the ubiquitous presence of the worst possible competitor, VMware, and in part on the fact that the cloud computing excitement doesn’t equally apply to every aspect of the IT.

Anyway now Skytap has secured an additional $7 Million round of funds from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation.
Of course investing this money despite the tough economy makes sense as Skytap, more than others, has a chance to get some serious exposure at the peak of the cloud computing hype.

VMware continues to reshape its leadership outside North America, choosing key figures with a certain background and culture.

In December 2008 the company appointed its new General Manager for EMEA, Maurizio Carli, who opened the VMworld Europe 2009.
Carl was the Managing Director of the Enterprise division at Google EMEA, but more importantly he was, for a long time, Vice President of the EMEA Software Group at IBM.

Yesterday the company appointed the new General Manager for APAC: Andrew Dutton.

Dutton comes from Computer Associates where he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of International Business.
Before CA, Dutton covered positions at BEA System, IBM and Visa.

If there’s a path here, it seems that the new CEO Paul Maritz, the former top executive at Microsoft, is bringing inside VMware all the knowledge needed to compete with the big four infrastructure management behemoths.

The startup Pano Logic continues to extend its executive team with experienced leaders in the IT industry.

The first one was John Kish, the former President and CEO of Wyse Technologies, that joined the company in October 2008 for the same role.

Then, in February 2009, Pano Logic secured Brian Cox, the former Vice President of Sales Operations at EqualLogic, that covered the role of Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations.
Before his job at EqualLogic, Cox was the Vice President of Worldwide Sales Strategy and Field Programs at VMware.

And now the company hires Jeffrey Page, the former Vice President of Finance and Operations at Firetide, a provider of multi-service mesh networks for industrial and municipal applications.
Before that job, Page was the Director of Sales at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.

Finally, after more than three months since virtualization.info broke the news, Cisco is ready to unveils its much rumored blade system codenamed California, dubbed as Unified Computing System (UCS).

The announcement was made a few minutes ago by John Chambers, Cisco CEO, and top notch executives from Intel (Paul Otellini, CEO), VMware (Paul Maritz, President and CEO), EMC (Joe Tucci, CEO), BMC Software (Bob Beauchamp, CEO) and Microsoft (Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business).

For Cisco “unified computing” means data center networking, unified fabric as well as private and extranet-intranet clouds (Cisco calls this “inter-cloud).

To deliver this architecture the company is calling a number of partners, not just the ones above: Accenture, BMC Software, CSC, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, Net App, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, SAP, Tata, VMware and Wipro.

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