virtualization.info Editors

At least three things seem true in the virtualization industry:

1. It doesn’t matter how many times a vendor repeats that free stuff doesn’t compete against a feature-rich end-to-end solution, it will end up offering a free hypervisor
2. It doesn’t matter how many surprises a vendor can pack for its premier conference, its competitors will do their best to steal the thunder
3. It doesn’t matter how many NDAs a vendor puts in place to embargo its most amazing announcement, the news will leak out even before hang up the conference call

Today is one of those days when the three rules above are true at the same time: Stephen Vaughn-Nichols unveiled on his personal blog the news that next week (Feb 23), during the VMware VMworld Europe 2009 conference, Citrix will give away for free its XenServer hypervisor.

Vaughn-Nichols doesn’t refer to a scaled down version of XenServer. He’s reporting that the Enterprise Edition with all its features will become free (but not open source).

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In October 2007 Citrix closed a major agreement with HP to resell XenServer Enterprise Edition on ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

In March 2008 the two companies took a step further, launching a special version of Citrix hypervisor called XenServer HP Select Edition which comes pre-installed in selected servers and offers a free management console called ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC). 

In May 2008, when Citrix launched its new end-to-end VDI solution XenDesktop, HP was there once again confirming support for the product on ProLiant and Compaq thin clients.

The love story continues today with HP announcing that its Blade PC systems will be sold with the just released Citrix XenDesktop 3.

At the moment there are no details about the configurations, pricing or availability. It’s likely that HP will unveil the product at the upcoming Synergy 2009.

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So far BMC did very few things to ensure a relevant position in the virtualization market.

Sure, the company supports VMware technologies in many of its products and even acquired BladeLogic in March 2008, but nothing suggests a strong commitment on virtualization beyond that. Till today.

VMware customers shouldn’t be surprised if in the coming weeks and months their resellers start to push the BMC Service Automation solutions like never before. There’s a good reason.

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The first forecast of the year comes from Gartner, which predicted an increase by 43% of virtualization software revenue during this year, moving from $1.9 billion scored in 2008 to $2.7 billion.

In particular the analysis firm expects that revenue from VDI solutions will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009 while revenue from server virtualization management software will increase 42% from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009.
Last but not least, the revenue from server virtualization infrastructure will grow 22.5% from $917 million in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.

Gartner is also saying that VDI solutions already represent 11% of the current virtualization software revenue market.

Even more interesting than that, Garner predicts that Microsoft will challenge the VMware leadership by 2013.

This last one sounds like the most pessimist estimate about Microsoft released so far: in 2007 Forrester predicted that the Redmond giant wouldn’t impact the virtualization market until 2010, while IDC, just two months ago, suggested that Microsoft would turn the hypervisor market upside down this year.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

In the endless war for the best performance, VMware releases today a new, interesting analysis.

The company run the SPECweb2005 benchmark on a single HP ProLiant DL 585 G5 system with 16 cores and ESX 3.5 Update 3.

The industry standard platform simulates three typical workloads:

• a number of customers accessing accounts at a given time via HTTPS
• a number of customers accessing an e-commerce retail store via HTTP and HTTPS
• a number of users acquiring patches and downloads from a support website via HTTP

In the first scenario ESX 3.5 could support as much as 80,000 concurrent accesses (equal to 143,000 HTTP operations per second), in the second one almost 70,000 and in the last one 33,000.

The aggregated and normalized metric is equal 44,000, which is the highest score ever recorded with a 16 cores system.

It’s more than clear that Microsoft is betting on hosting providers to demonstrate how well Hyper-V can perform on large scale virtual infrastructures.

The company is so committed to win the hosting market (something that Parallels should carefully watch) that just released a (much needed) licensing guide: Hyper-V Hosting Guidance: Using and Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Hyper-V Virtual Hosting Scenarios

The 28-pages guide covers every scenario, including:

• Unmanaged dedicated server with Hyper-V
• Virtual dedicated server (VDS) for Web scenarios (using Windows Server guests in anonymous mode)
• Virtual dedicated server with line-of-business (LOB) scenarios (using Windows Server guests in authenticated mode)
• Use of virtualization in shared hosting scenarios
• Desktops as Hyper-V guests
• End customers running Microsoft products using the customers own licenses on the guest OS

As the Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) is not exactly an easy reading this additional help is recommended.

The security vendor Altor Networks released yesterday version 2.0 of its Virtual Firewall (VF).

This new version is able to write the security policies using the virtual machines UUIDs rather then their ever-changing IP addresses.

Additionally VF 2.0 monitors traffic to/from the weakest par of any VMware Infrastructure: the ESX COS.

Overall the company is doing a good job in the integration with the VMware platform (the new installation wizard is really easy to use) but the key part of this integration is still missing: the support for the VMsafe APIs.

VMware is taking forever (so far it’s one year) to release the long-awaited security interface so Altor Networks and its competitors can’t do much more than what they already do to differentiate themselves from a traditional security vendor that distributes and supports its products inside a virtual machine.

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VKernel released yesterday a couple of minor updates for its performance monitor Capacity Analyzer and its chargeback tracker Chargeback.

Capacity Analyzer 3.1 doesn’t include any relevant new feature while Chargeback 1.4 adds the capability to track unexpected runtime errors in the UI and additional currencies for the reports.

The US startup Desktone launched in April 2008 signing impressive partnerships with Verizon, with SoftBank Telecom, with HP and with IBM.

Then the company returned to silent mode until yesterday when it announced a new technology partnership with vmSight.

vmSight offers a performance monitor focused on applications response time in a virtual environment which may be particularly useful in a VDI environment.
DABCC.com published a detailed review of the product that is worth a read.

Desktone will offer the vmSight Center console to its hosted VDI (or Desktop as a Service, DaaS, as they like to call it) providers so to understand which customers are abusing the system and which ones are having a poor experience.

vmSight has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

The young application virtualization startup InstallFree (launched in April 2008) must be really interesting if it was able to hire away a former Thinstall executive from VMware and a former Kidaro executive from Microsoft.

The first one is Jean Morain, who served as Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Thinstall before the VMware acquisition in January 2008.
Prior to Thinstall, Morain was at BMC Software, Inc., where she was senior manager of the Configuration Automation Products Group.
Morain will cover the role of Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances at InstallFree.

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