virtualization.info Editors

With the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008 Red Hat raised a lot of interest.
The customers that trusted the company when it was promoting its Xen implementation all over the place want to know what will happen to them.
The potential customers that are interested in an open source hypervisor but  dislike the idea of Citrix indirectly controlling how Xen, want to know how serious Red Hat is about KVM.

Last week, finally, the company announced its commitment:

• Next versions of Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will feature KVM.
  The exiting versions featuring Xen will be supported for the full lifetime of RHEL 5.
• Red Hat will release a brand new Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (a minimal version of RHEL only supporting KVM and a selected number of drivers).
• Red Hat will release a brand new Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting.
  This product will be able to manage both RHEL and RHEVH.
• Red hat will rebrand the Qumranet connection broker and management console SolidICE as Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops.

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After a long period of stealth activity around its hypervisor Oracle VM Server, Oracle seems getting ready to articulate its strategy and make it more competitive.

The latest version of its enterprise management platform, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5, can now use a new Oracle VM Management Pack, which includes all the features of Oracle VM Manager.

In this way those customers using Enterprise Manager will be able to manage physical and virtual servers as well as the application inside them from a single console.

The Management Pack brings in the following features:

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The application virtualization startup Trigence doesn’t exist anymore. Starting this month the company is called AppZero and has a completely new market strategy.

At launch time, Trigence was the only vendor in its market segment to offer an application virtualization solution for Linux and not for Windows.
To fill the gap, in just one month the company hired two former Softricity executives, as Vice President of US Sales and Chief Operating Officer.
The latter remained at Trigence for just one year and after just three months the company also lost its President and CEO.

In over one year (from June 2007 to September 2008) Trigence could only release a single, minor update for its platform, which didn’t help to make it more relevant.

Now the company, or what is left of it, announces a new corporate identity (AppZero), a new product name (Virtual Application Appliance or VAA) and a new CEO (Greg O’Connor, who was previously the founder of Sonic Software and pioneer of the Enterprise Service Bus, the foundation of Service-Oriented Architecture).

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Dell doesn’t seem interested in becoming a major virtualization player on its own but continues to stack up 3rd party solutions to build its product portfolio.

In September 2008 the company signed an OEM agreement with both PlateSpin (a Novell subsidiary) and Vizioncore (a Quest subsidiary), in December 2008 signed a similar deal with Egenera.

Now it’s the time of Reflex Systems, the US startup that changed its name (formerly known as Reflex Security) and go-to-market strategy at the end of last year. 
The OEM agreement only covers the new multi-hypervisor management tool that Reflex unveiled in November: Virtualization Management Center (VMC).

Definitively a good restart for a company that struggled to find success in the virtualization security market.

The startup Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave) is not ready yet to launch its search engine for virtual infrastructures, but continues to hire talented professionals.

The last one that joined the company is Andrew Kutz, the man that reverse engineered the VMware vCenter plug-in system and released a number of valuable, non-official and non-authorized add-ons like the SVMotion GUI.

Kutz recently announced a multi-hypervisor management tool for mobile devices, the Virtualization  Manager Mobile, and this may be one of the reasons behind the Hyper9 interest.

The company in fact may want to move beyond a search engine after collecting some popularity, and offer a fully-featured management suite. Kutz expertise may be very useful there.

No matter if the stage is in US or in Europe, the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz has the same message for his audience: VMware believes in cloud computing and believes that its virtualization technology is the only way to go there.
So if you already read the VMworld 2008 wrap-up that virtualization.info published at the end of September, you already know pretty much everything.

Anyway, compared to his US keynote, the European version of VMware message sounded a little more concrete, articulated and aggressive.
Paul Maritz already spent six months at VMware and seems now ready to take some risks:

• Google doesn’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware
• Even for Microsoft it’s not trivial to match our level of investment in the virtualization space

Like for VMworld 2008, the second day keynote, performed by the always great Dr. Stephen Herrod (CTO and SVP of R&D), reaffirmed the omnidirectional expansion of VMware.
During his keynote Herrod mentioned almost every new product that will come with vSphere 4.0.
The one-hour long overview painted the company bigger than ever, ready to slam its competitors with a massive product portfolio.
Inside the corporate data center or across solution provider clouds, on mobile phones or business laptops, this company wants to be there.
And it’s doing everything possible to provide all the tools that a customer may ever need so that he doesn’t desire to go back to the physical world.
Because of this, the overall impression is that VMware is a juggernaut that will morph, sooner or later, into the fifth biggest infrastructure management company.

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Ready or not, VMware is morphing into an infrastructure management company where the word “virtual” is an optional.

The number of products released in the last few years is impressive and it’s accelerating, the market segments where VMware is entering are multiplying, the vision that the company has of its role in the IT industry is deeply changing.

All these elements point to a single direction.

Of course VMware denies such ambitious project. Admitting today that within 5-7 years it will become the biggest competitors of its partners BMC, CA, HP and IBM is not a good idea.
But the reality is that the company wants virtualization to be ubiquitous and wants to satisfy every necessity its customers have inside the virtual sphere.

This is why VMware feels the need, for instance, to acquire B-hive and provide a performance analysis tool for the applications running inside its virtual machines.
Or why it feels the need to acquire Determina and Blue Lane Technology to stack up a number of security products.
Or why it has to deliver a patch management solution that does much more than just updating the ESX hosts.
The list may go on and on (and will do in the near future).

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One of the best part of the VMworld Europe 2009 last week (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2) has been an unannanced (and unplugged) Q&A session with VMware leadership: Paul Maritz (President and CEO), Tod Nielsen (COO), Stephen Herrod (CTO) and Maurizio Carli (GM EMEA).

The four executives addressed questions coming from the attendees via email and microphone.

Despite a shy audience, few questions were rather interesting.
The first, and probably most important one was: What VMware is going to do to keep ahead of Microsoft?

In normal circumstances the answer wouldn’t raise exceptional interest. What a VMware executive can publicly say about the topic is well-known. But in this case the answer was given by Paul Maritz, the former Microsoft top executive that replaced the company founder Diane Greene just six months ago.
Nobody inside VMware is more knowledgeable about the competitor and its strategies.

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Last week, while the European customer base of VMware was busy at VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), the company release the forth update for its management console vCenter.

vCenter 2.5 Update 4 (build 147704) extends the OS customization wizard to Windows Server 2008 guests and introduces a new plug-in, Performance Overview, which aggregates performance charts of CPU, memory, disk and networks.

Please note that VMware didn’t release an Update 4 for ESX 3.5.

How many virtualization.info readers remember Massimiliano Daneri?

Daneri was the brilliant creator of VMKB, the free Perl script able to perform live backup of ESX virtual machines (released in 2004), and VMTSPatchManager, the precursor of VMware Update Manager (released in mid 2007).

VMware hired Daneri in October 2007 and since then only few customers had the opportunity to see him in action.

He reappeared last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), where he presented his new work during a breakout session: PXE Manager for vCenter.

Basically the tool is Windows service that comes with a vCenter management plug-in to:

• automate the provisioning of new ESX and ESXi hosts
• backup and restore the host state
• select the ESX/ESXi build to deploy and its installation mode (diskless, unattended or manual)

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