virtualization.info Editors

By now every virtualization.info reader should know that Cisco is about to enter the x86 server market with a brand new blade system codenamed California.
We broke the news in early December 2008, unveiling that the product will feature a massive hardware set and an unprecedented (for the company) unification of server, networking and storage resources.

Anyway so far nor virtualization.info neither the mainstream press that confirmed the news really clarified how this unification is implemented and why Cisco should be especially relevant in the virtualization industry.
Bundling the new blade system with the upcoming VMware vSphere 4.0 and the upcoming virtual switch Nexus 1000V is notable but not something the company could call Unified Computing like it’s doing since months now.

There’s a good chance we’ll know next Monday, when Cisco is expected to announce its new strategy. But for now we can speculate on what codename California will really be.

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Normally virtualization.info doesn’t cover customers case histories but in this case we’ll make an exception.

SAP as a software is one of the most important mission-critical applications in the world.
SAP as a company is one of the savviest companies in the industry about virtualization: during 2007, the company fully embraced hardware virtualization, supporting VMware, Xen (both Novell and Red Hat implementations) and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.
They even have a 3-days conference called Virtualization Week.
But most of all SAP is one of the key partner of VMware as the company demonstrated at the recent VMworld Europe 2009, when Paul Maritz granted SAP no less than 30 minutes of his opening keynote.

The fact that SAP is virtualizing around 500 servers with XenServer is remarkable.
It really validates the Citrix hypervisor.

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In the last two years Virtual Iron has been frequently mentioned as an acquisition target in rumors about Novell, Symantec and other big IT vendors.
The last one comes from Jeffried & Co. analyst Catherine Egbert who suggested that Virtual Iron is being acquired by Oracle.

The rumor was picked up by several news sites, including LocalTechWire, ITBusinessEdge and The Register.
virtualization.info reached out both companies but, as expected, Oracle answered that the company doesn’t comment on press stories while Virtual Iron didn’t answer at all.

Does Oracle need Virtual Iron? If we listen to Larry Ellison the answer is no.
But it’s not because Oracle is not interested in becoming a global virtualization player. Quite the opposite.

The Oracle CEO once said that his cat could write the VMware hypervisor and to prove it in November 2007 his company released its own virtualization platform: Oracle VM.

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Last week virtualization.info published an article titled VMware is becoming an infrastructure management company, suggesting that the virtualization vendor is morphing into something much bigger, getting ready to compete, over the long term, with the big four infrastructure management companies: BMC, CA, IBM and HP.

Peter Spielvogel, Product Marketing Manager of Operations Center at HP, believes that this scenario is worth at least some discussion and mentions the article on the corporate blog.

He’s quick and subtle in remarking that HP current leadership in the infrastructure management depends on the strategy to support physical and virtual servers in the same way, no matter what the vendor is.
But how hard would be for vCenter to manage 3rd party hypervisors and physical servers?

Isn’t true that VMware already offer some interesting and innovative management capabilities for physical servers like Distributed Power Management?
Isn’t true that VMware already offer some basic hardware monitoring capabilities for ESXi hosts through the new Common Information Model (CIM)?

While a new startup works to unofficially open source the VMware VMFS, Citrix has officially open sourced its implementation of the Microsoft VHD format.

Citrix and Microsoft adopt the same virtual hard drive format since September 2007, when they closed a deal to adopt VHD in all the upcoming products.

In over two years Citrix has developed an optimized implementation of the product and it’s now giving it back to the open source world by submitting its code to the Xen community for inclusion in the hypervisor code base under the BSD license.

If approved, Citrix partners and competitors that adopt Xen (like Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun, etc.) will be able to use it side by side with QEMU Copy-On-Write (QCOW).

A couple of weeks ago a new company called fluid Operations raised some attention in the virtualization community because of their new open source VMFS driver.

The driver, which is actively developed and hosted at Google Code, allows to mount and read (no writing capabilities for now) partitions formatted with the VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) version 3.
The VMFSv3 partitions can be accessed from a Linux, Windows or Mac OS host using a WebDAV client.

VMware doesn’t provide the VMFS specification so fluid Operations reverse engineered the on-disk format.
In the near future, unless VMware stops them, the driver will have the capability to modify the existing data inside the VMFS partition, but writing new files and folders is much more complex and this is why the company is calling for some help.

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By now it should be clear that Citrix will do everything possible to keep its leadership in the application virtualization space and increase its relevance in the hardware virtualization space.

The first step was giving away XenServer (with Live Migration, Resource Pools and much more) for free.

The second step will be releasing a free virtualization platform for the desktops: XenWorkstation.

Please note that this has nothing to do with the client hypervisor that Citrix is developing with Intel.
This is a type-2 version (or hosted VMM) of Xen that will run on consumer hardware, exactly like VMware Player/Workstation/Fusion, Parallels Workstation/Desktop, Sun VirtualBox or Microsoft Virtual PC.
And Citrix may release it as soon as next week according to virtualization.info sources.

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A big part of the Veeam success depends on its winning early-days strategy, when the company became popular thanks to several free, efficient tools solving daily administration duties.

Veeam is no more a startup but continues to give away quality tools for free.

Today the company announces the third version of its FastSCP, the free file management tool that released as second product in October 2006.

FastSCP 3.0 introduce support for ESXi (both commercial and free edition) and can perform ESXi-to-ESXi copies.

Available for free here.

At the end of December virtualization.info highlighted how Vizioncore, the most loyal VMware partner, is taking a new direction.

Its opening to other virtualization vendors in part depends on Quest, which is a management company close to Microsoft, Oracle and others, in part depends on the VMware behavior, in part depends on the new opportunities that Hyper-V and XenServer can offer (there’s a reason if Quest hired the Citrix VP of Product Development).

Besides the evidence we collected anyway, Vizioncore never offered a clear indication of where it’s going. Something that was probably expected by many customers after Quest completed its acquisition in January 2008.

Last week the company finally made its new strategy clear announcing a couple of upcoming products: vControl and VESI.

vControl is an enterprise management product that will support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
It will provide a self-service provisioning portal for end-users and task-based automation tools for administrators.

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In December 2008 Novell announced its plan to rebrand ZENworks Orchestrator as PlateSpin Orchestrate.
It was a good move considering the potential that ZENworks has in the virtualization space and the brand awareness that PlateSpin was able to build before the Novell acquisition.

Three months after, the first version of the rebranded product comes out: PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0.

Novell is marking as new features things like:

• Support for VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Xen
• Native VMware ESX support (no need for VMware vCetner)
• LDAP support
• Automation based on user-defined events and triggers

but as far as we remember pretty much everything was already included in ZENworks Orchestrator.

More concrete is instead the release of ZENworks Application Virtualization 7, the application virtualization platform that Novell  is OEM’ing from XenoCode.

The new version, which is probably based on the recently released XenoCode Virtual Application Studio 2009, offers the integration with ZENworks Configuration Manager.

Now virtualized applications can be packaged and published in a specific Configuration Manager zone directly from inside Application Virtualization.
At the same time administrators can restrict virtualized applications from running on devices that are not registered with Configuration Manager.