virtualization.info Editors

It really seems like Sun has serious issues to deliver its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server, in time.

The product, along with the enterprise management console Ops Center 2.0, was initially expected for September 10, 2008 but that day Sun, unable to release in time, just re-announced the product line (the first announcement was published in November 2007).

During the second announcement Sun suggested that its virtualization offering may be released within two months (meaning November 2008) but once again the milestone was missed.

Last week, without any press release, Sun decided to release Ops Center 2.0 anyway, despite xVM Server is clearly unready.

At the same time the French magazine LeMagIT (which usually makes great newsbreaks) confirmed that the hypervisor is in late, and that its release is now postponed to Q2 2009.

LeMagIT also unveils that the first edition of xVM Server will not support SAN and iSCSI storage facilities.
For that, customers will have to wait a subsequent release scheduled for H2 2009.

Last week the public companies busy in the virtualization market (VMware, Citrix and Microsoft) reported their Q4 2008 results. While it’s not possible to make a comparison, as both Citrix and Microsoft businesses are not solely depending on virtualization, it’s yet interesting to have an aggregated view of  how they performed.

VMware

• Revenues for the fourth quarter were $515 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $102 million, an increase of 34% from the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $135 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $111 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, compared to $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $142 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, compared to $103 million, or $0.26 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007. 
• Revenues for the full year 2008 were $1.9 billion, an increase of 42% from 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $313 million, an increase of 33% from 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the year 2008 was $469 million, an increase of 39% from 2007.
• GAAP net income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $290 million, or $0.73 per diluted share, compared to $218 million, or $0.61 per diluted share, for 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the year 2008 was $416 million, or $1.05 per diluted share, compared to $295 million, or $0.82 per diluted share, for 2007. 
• Cash was more than $1.8 billion and deferred revenue was $870 million as of December 31, 2008. Since the beginning of 2008, cash increased 50% and deferred revenue increased 57%.

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As most virtualization.info readers know by now, VMware is preparing to change the name of its flagship product bundle: Virtual Infrastructure.
The new name that emerged at the end of December 2008, during the beta phase, is vSphere.

Despite this plan the company may have some issues in using this name as it’s a copyrighted term, registered by a US company called Surface Optics Corporation.

One of the company employees informally highlighted the possible (and future) copyright violation by commenting a post on the Jason Boche blog, a well-know VMware expert.

It’s unclear if the threat is concrete or not, but possibly vSphere was just the name used during the beta, so there’s no risk of copyright infringement at all.

Cisco isn’t ready yet to call its virtual switch for VMware ESX 4.0, the Nexus 1000V, out of beta, but one of its employees already published a pretty detailed diagram of its architecture.

Besides the diagram, the entire blog post is really interesting as it details how the virtual switch will work:

• The Nexus 1000V software on the physical server acts like a line card of a modular switch, described as a VEM (virtual ethernet module)
• The Nexus 1000V VEM is a direct replacement of the VMWare vSwitch function
• The Nexus 1000V VSM (virtual supervisor module) acts like the supervisor engine of a modular switch
• One Nexus 1000V VSM instance manages a single ESX cluster of up to 64 physical servers
• The form factor of Nexus 1000V VSM can be a physical appliance or a virtual machine
• The network administrator manages the Cisco Nexus 1000V (from the VSM) as a single distributed virtual switch for the entire ESX cluster
• Each virtual machine connects to its own Virtual Ethernet (vEthernet) port on the Nexus 1000V providing the network administrator traffic visibility and policy control on a per virtual machine basis.  Virtual machines can now be managed like physical servers in terms of their network connectivity
• …

Thanks to Scott Lowe for the news.

Right after releasing the first beta of Hyper-V 2.0 (with Windows Server 2008 R2 and without it), Microsoft continues to feed the potential customers with details about the badly wanted live migration capability.

Last week the company published a couple of interesting resources:

• a Hyper-V Live Migration Overview & Architecture whitepaper
• a Step-by-Step Guide to Using Live Migration in Windows Server 2008 R2 article

Both are worth a check if you plan to test the feature against VMware VMotion, Citrix XenMotion, etc.

The hardcore part of the VMware community got pretty excited last week when the company officially released the new version of its Powershell-powered SDK for VirtualCenter: VI Toolkit 1.5 (build 142961).

The new package includes 32 new cmdlets and several enhancements.
To demonstrate the new features the development team published 6 videos which are worth a visit:

• HA and DRS in VI Toolkit 1.5
• Managing Storage with VI Toolkit 1.5
• Some important fixes in VI Toolkit 1.5
• Get-Stat Improvements in VI Toolkit 1.5
• Resizing Guest Disks with Invoke-VM Script

Download the new SDK here.

Last week the Canadian company CiRBA released a minor update for its capacity planning tool: Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

DCI 5.1 introduces three interesting additions:

• a new Capacity Status Analysis module that continuously assesses the virtual infrastructure to ensure that it can meet the capacity planning requirements defined at the beginning of a project
• a collaboration module which allows members of a project to review and approve the actions suggested after a what-if analysis
• the capability to customize the dashboard depending on the job role of the user, and the capability to integrate the reports into corporate intranet portals

Last week Reflex Systems (formerly known as Reflex Security) updated its new management tool for multiple hypervisors: Virtualization Management Center or VMC.

Nobody knows what’s the current version of the product (it should be somewhere in 1.x branch) as the company barely clarifies what’s new: a performance monitor module.

It’s not clear what aspects of the virtual infrastructure VMC can now monitor, or which hypervisors (Reflex currently supports VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V) can benefit of this new module, but the company claims the capability to correlate configuration changes with performance changes, which is pretty interesting.

The US startup Neocleus is getting ready to expose its client hypervisor to the largest part of the market, as it’s finally spending some of its $16.4M (the Series B round happened in June 2008) to build a marketing and sales infrastructure.

The first executive joining the company is Bill Corrigan, as Chief Marketing Officer.

Corrigan was the Vice President of Product Management & Marketing in Softricity before the Microsoft acquisition, and once in Redmond he was Director of Product Management in the Windows and Enterprise Management Division.

Last week Sun released a maintainance update for its desktop virtualization product VirtualBox.

The new 2.1.2 version introduces a number of bugfixes but also adds the full support for Microsoft Windows 7 beta 1 as guest OS.

As usual the product is open source and free of charge. You can download it here.