virtualization.info Editors

It’s not a secret that VMware is working hard to drop Microsoft RDP as its remote desktop protocol of choice in VDI environments.

At the end of 2007 the company was already part of the VESA committee trying to develop the new standard Net2Display (that never saw the day of light so far).
And then, at VMworld 2008, the company announced a technology partnership with the startup Teradici to develop a software version of their PCoIP protocol (which only works with dedicated graphic cards).

Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware was expected to show an alpha build of that software implementation but instead presented the existing Teradici solution.

Brian Madden and provided a good description of its upcoming features:

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As virtualization.info wrote many times, with VMsafe APIs VMware has the unique chance to shake up the security world.
But as long as VMware has this privileged position in the IT industry to drive innovation across so many market segments, its challenges and responsibilities are much bigger than the ones of many other vendors.

The VMsafe initiative was announced exactly one year ago. In these twelve months the only ones that could really see what can and cannot be done with the new APIs are a restricted number of security partners that VMware recruited.

Now that VMsafe is about to be released as part of the vSphere 4.0 platform, more details emerge and at least a couple of them may raise concerns.

The first concerning point is that the security vendors will not fully unlock the capabilities of VMsafe.

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At the end of January Citrix and Intel made a surprising joint announcement, revealing a major technology partnership to develop a client hypervisor based on Xen (codename Thunder Lake).

The agreement will have an impact on the market as this new platform will be integrated into upcoming Citrix products in H2 2009 and will be distributed through all the major OEMs.

Despite both companies abundantly clarified that the deal is non-exclusive, for some reasons VMware became nervous.

VMware and Intel always collaborated and most customers perfectly know how tight is the relationship between the two: Intel invested $218.5 Million in the virtualization vendor during its IPO, and for a long time there were rumors that the chip maker was contemplating the acquisition of VMware.

But that was not enough: last week at VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2) VMware felt the impellent need to announce its partnership with Intel on the upcoming Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).

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In October 2008 VMware acquired the security vendor Blue Lane Technologies, which offered an interesting inline patching technology for physical and virtual environments.
Rumors say that this was a very opportunistic acquisition considering the economical turmoil and the limited capabilities of Blue Lane to stay profitable.

True or not, the VMware desire to drive virtualization through security and become a leader in that market is evident.
The company already offers a software patching component, Update Manager (OEM’ed from Shavlik Technologies), but will also release a new host intrusion prevention system (HIPS) built on Determina technology, and all its products will benefit the revolutionary point of inspection/prevention that VMsafe APIs will provide.

Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware officially announced that the Blue Lane VirtualShield is now relabeled as vShield Zones.
The product will be available later this year, probably as part of the upcoming vSphere 4.0 platform.

For some reasons VMware is deeply changing the message associated to this product: instead of saying that vShield Zones can act as a proxy, intercepting, blocking and/or correcting several layer 7 attacks, the company is describing it more as a security wrapper (similar to VMware ACE) that can enforce the security compliance on any give virtual machine no matter the virtual network it is deployed into.

In other words VMware seems to suggest that this tool can compete and even replace traditional firewalls, making useless those network architectures that include DMZs. Uh-oh.

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Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware officially announced the new, much awaited high-availability module for its vCenter Server (formerly VirtualCenter).

VMware took forever to admit that vCenter is the weakest point of failure in its virtual infrastructure, despite its mission critical role:

It’s true that VMware HA can (partially) protect vCenter if it runs inside a virtual machine but 60% of the customers still run it on physical machines.

The lack of any native hot stand-by or clustering capability inside the management tier stimulated the growth of a small but lucrative ecosystem that the company sales engineers further promoted, suggesting several products from trusted partners: Double-Take, Steel Eye, CA, Neverfail Group and of course Microsoft Cluster Service.

Starting last week it’s no more the case: VMware is OEM’ing with an exclusive agreement the Neverfail technology under the name of vCenter Server Heartbeat 1.0.

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VMworld Europe 2009, a great event which has just ended, there is another one is about to start: the virtualization.info’s independent conference Virtualization Congress 2009.

The event is really shaping up.
We have already published the first ten sessions that will make the agenda.
We have two stealth startups that will launch their brand and products during the Call for Startups general session.
And very soon we’ll announce the members of our three hot panels:

• I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream
• Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds)
• The Future of Virtualization

If you plan to attend the Virtualization Congress, you will also be able to attend the Citrix iForum, the Network World Live! and the Geek Speak events as the four conferences will take place at the same time in the same location.

We are offering an All-Inclusive ticket that grants access to every keynote and breakout session. And hopefully the news of XenServer for free is teasing some of you to digg more into the Citrix offering.

Please note that the Early Bird for having $400 off ends tomorrow. Go register today!

Before closing we’d like to clarify the reason behind the choice to arrange the event in Las Vegas during this tough time:

• The MGM Grand room rate is only $174 a night plus 9% tax – one of the lowest tax rates in the US
• Direct flights to Las Vegas from over 140 cities have an average airfare of $240
• The MGM Grand is only one mile from McCarren International Airport, which means an inexpensive taxi fare of only $20-$25 (one-way) and an airport shuttle fare of only $7 per person (one-way)
• For staying at the MGM Grand you get a $25 credit to use at restaurants and bars (Starbucks, Diego, Grand Buffet, Studio 54, Tabu, etc.) within the hotel

This is a table of what would cost to attend the conference in any other major convention city in US:

Yesterday the VMware CEO Paul Maritz opened the VMworld Europe 2009 conference with a more concrete keynote compared to his first one given at VMworld 2008.

Besides a formal announcement of the vSphere 4.0 and the Client Hypervisor Platform (CVP), his speech highlighted a couple of key points:

• VMware is becoming serious and aggressive in its positioning on the cloud computing market: Maritz took a bold position saying that the Google approach to cloud computing is not really scalable without virtualization
• VMware won’t let any other virtualization vendor have a competitive advantage through its current partners: Maritz invited Intel on stage to announce a partnership on client hypervisors that sounds pretty similar to the one Citrix announced just one month ago

On stage today we’ll have Stephen Herrod, the company CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, who should provide a great amount of technical details about vSphere, vCenter Suite and some other technologies that VMware is expected to release during this 2009.

Stephen Herrod is on stage. His presentation is titled The Future of VMware Virtualization.

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This is the conference welcome is opened by Maurizio Carli, the former Google executive that became the new VMware General Manager of EMEA in December 2008.

He starts by saying that compared to last year (4,500 attendees) this year VMworld Europe scored 4,700 attendees despite the economical conditions (early reports were talking about only 3,000 attendees).

Just in case one of those 4,700 doesn’t know VMware, he goes on with some numbers about the company size:

• 6,300+ people worldwide, 1,300+ in EMEA
• 42% of customers choose to standardize their virtual data centers with VMware (were 25% in 2007)

Paul Maritz, the former Microsoft top executive that took the place of VMware’s founder and CEO Diane Greene in July 2008, is on stage.

Maritz starts with a breakdown of the IT budget spending, claiming an overwhelming complexity that slows down or makes fail many projects. VMware is working to transform the IT in a service through three initiatives:

• Virtual Data Center OS (VDC-OS)
• vCloud (private and public clouds along with federation across them)
• vClient (for a desktop as a Service)

So Maritz is probably going to replicate the presentation he performed at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

Now Maritz details how VMware realize its cloud computing vision: standardized hardware, scalable and highly available software (the VMware Infrastructure), security policies to grant compliance and a management layer that can enforce a SLA management model.
On top of this stack the existing applications will be placed, along with next generation applications designed to run and scale inside the cloud.

Then Maritz sends a message to all the other vendors out there trying to suggest a different cloud computing model: virtualization is the only viable way.
Google is clearly mentioned: they don’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware (it’s worth to remind that in 2007 Google clarified how hardware virtualization is definitively not its way).

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After the first day exclusively dedicated to its partners, tomorrow VMware will officially open the VMworld Europe 2009 to all its customers.
The first day will begin with a keynote from Paul Maritz, the CEO who replaced Diane Greene in July 2008, while the second day will begin with a keynote from Steve Herold, the CTO who replaced the Executive Vice President of R&D in September 2008.

This configuration was tested for the first time in Las Vegas for the VMworld 2008, replacing the historical duo Diane Greene and her husband (and Chief Scientist) Mendel Rosenblum.

As usual, virtualization.info will provide live coverage of both keynotes.

So stay with us as VMware may have a lot of things to tell tomorrow:

• how the cloud computing vision exposed last September will become a reality
• how the company is involved in the upcoming Cisco blade system California
• if and how it will deliver a new strategy for the SMB market
• how it will answer to the looming threat of a free enterprise-grade Citrix virtual infrastructure
• and more

Last week several bloggers and mainstream journalists reported a major news: Citrix is about to release XenServer for free.
Of course the lack of details generated a number of speculations and confusion that today the company clears up with an official announcement.

First of all Citrix is releasing for free the Enterprise Edition of XenServer.
This is not a scaled down, limited version of the hypervisor. From the end of March on, there will be only one edition of XenServer which will be free.

Secondarily, Citrix is giving away for free with XenServer a remarkable number of enterprise features, including the enterprise console to manage multiple hosts (XenCenter), the VM live migration (XenMotion) technology, the resource sharing (Resource Pools) technology and the enterprise storage management technology.

The comparison against VMware ESXi is immediate (and of course unfair):

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