virtualization.info Editors

One week ago virtualization.info published the results of its Virtualization Industry Survey 2008 about the Hardware Virtualization adoption.

Easy to guess, the responses for Q6 – What hardware virtualization platform do you implement? generated concerns among our readers, as Microsoft Hyper-V appeared “more adopted” than VMware ESX.
Some of you demanded a clarification on the methodology used to collect and validate the published data, others simply judged the whole survey as 100% useless.
A few noted that, differently from the usual behavior, there was no comment on the results. It was not a case.

Now that enough buzz was generated it’s time to disclose the real information we collected.

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In December 2008 virtualization.info launched a Call for Papers for the first edition of the Virtualization Congress in the United States.

The initiative was so wildly successful that we collected over 120 submissions (and despite the deadline was Dec. 31 we continue to receive new ones every day).

Today we are happy to announce the first round of breakout sessions that will make the Virtualization Congress 2009 agenda.

As you’ll see the sessions we’ve selected cover some of the hottest topics in which a virtualization professional can utilize in today’s market.
We believe that the level the contents and the height of the speakers is remarkable:

• Automating VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell
  Cody Bunch
  Virtualization Architect at Rackspace
• Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Large Scale Virtualization Projects
  Ron Oglesby
  Practice Executive, Virtualization at Dell
• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling you
  Richard Jones
  Service Director, Data Center Strategies at Burton Group
• Lessons from the Real World: Storage in Virtualized Environments
  Scott Lowe
  National Technical Lead at ePlus Technology
• Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro: The Complexity and Insecurity of the Cloud
  Christofer Hoff
  Chief Security Architect at Unysis
• Project Virtual Reality Check
  Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp
  Solutions Architect and CTO at PQR / Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants
• Simplifying Virtualization Management Using New Industry Standards
  Winston Bumpus
  President at DMTF
• Virtual Infrastructure Management: Challenges and Best Practices
  Gary Lamb
  Senior Director, Data Center Virtualization at INX
• Virtual Building Blocks: A Modular Approach to a Comprehensive Solution
  Jason M. Langone
  Director of Virtualization Services at Infinite Group
• Yes, Automation Does Make Life Better
  Stephen Beaver
  Virtualization Evangelist at Tripwire

The full abstract for each session, which is really worth to read, can be read at this page: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/sessions.htm

From this first round of sessions it should be clear how the Virtualization Congress is keeping its independence despite its joint location with the Citrix Synergy 2009.

As Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, said on his corporate blog at the beginning of the year:

Citrix has no influence or control over the Virtualization Congress program whatsoever. Alessandro and his independent program committee (which does not have any representation from Citrix), together with the readers of virtualization.info, will independently develop their agenda, select speakers and run the event.  Like other vendors, Citrix has submitted session proposals, but I have no idea whether or not they will be accepted.

P.s.: If you liked the sessions above wait to see the three panels we’ll have at the end of each conference day. Here’s the tentative titles:

• May 5 – I Was There when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream
• May 6 – Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds) 
• May 7 – The Future of Virtualization

Feedbacks about the breakout sessions and the panels are greatly welcome.

VMware Infrastructure 4.0, or vSphere as the company decided to call the platform now, will finally feature a version of vCenter Server (formerly VirtualCenter) for Linux.

This major new capability was not part of the features that virtualization.info published in September 2008 about the upcoming ESX 4.0. But the abstract of a VMworld Europe 2009 session (DC08 here) confirms:

Customer demand for vCenter Server running on Linux has been astounding. While the majority of the Code is inherently cross platform, getting vCenter Server to run on Linux in a manner compatible with the current set of features has its own set of challenges. This presentation will discuss the issues of cross platform development for vCenter, including issues regarding internationalization support, database support, multi-vCenter support, and image customization. The talk will conclude with a live demonstration of the latest development version of vCenter Server running on Linux.

Diane Greene, the former VMware CEO that was suddenly fired in July 2008, is now being accused of the violation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the breach of her fiduciary duties by making and/or allowing false and misleading statements concerning the company’s business, operations and prospects.

This is the class-action lawsuit that Holzer Holzer & Fistel LLC is filing against Green and Mark Peek (the VMware’s CFO coming from Amazon).

The extended description is even more interesting:

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The just announced partnership between Citrix and Intel certainly raised some serious concerns among the many virtualization companies that are developing a client hypervisor.
At least one of the them may be safe anyway: Virtual Computer.

The startup founded by Alex Vasilevski, the founder and CTO of Virtual Iron, launched in September 2008 and its product NxTop, currently in private beta, is really overlapping the Citrix plans to deliver an end-to-end VDI solution.

Despite that, today the company announces Citrix, along with Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, granted a second round of funding for as much as $15 million.

It’s a bold move, considering the investment that Citrix already has in place with Intel, and it may imply a future acquisition.

The news also highlights how active Citrix is becoming in the virtualization market, investing in a number of startups (just ten days ago the company invested in Open Kernel Labs) that may provide innovative products in the next few years.

Without any clamor, last week Citrix released a web version of its virtualization management console XenCenter.

The product, called XenCenterWeb, has limited capabilities as it can’t do much more than list the avialable virtual machines and start/restart/stop them.

Rather than selling the product, Citrix is currently offering it as a Resource Kit component that any partner and customer can download free of charge.
The company doesn’t even support it in an official way.

Nonetheless the product is interesting and may turn into a major feature of future versions of XenServer.

Along with its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server, Sun is preparing to launch the third version of its connection broker: xVM VDI 3.0.
The Early Access program will be open within the end of this month.

The strange thing is that instead of supporting the upcoming bare-metal virtualization platform, Sun decides to introduce support for xVM Virtual Box, the hosted virtualization product for the consumer market that the company acquired from innotek in February 2008.

It’s unclear why a customer may want to use a hosted platform (which is definitively slower compared to a hypervisor) to run a resource-consuming VDI environment.
Hopefully Sun will share some performance comparisons to understand how many virtual desktops can fit inside a VirtualBox host.

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Last week Citrix almost silently released its much awaited orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.

The first news about the product emerged almost one year ago, but the company didn’t provide access to the bits before June 2008.

Workflow Studio is key piece in the Citrix virtual infrastructure vision as it delivers the mandatory automation layer that makes smart any cloud computing or dynamic data center environment.

This market segment is pretty empty: one of the few serious competitors was Dunes Technologies, which was acquired by VMware in September 2008 and that is about to relaunch as vCenter Orchestrator.

At its first version the product, built on Microsoft PowerShell, is able to automate a number of tasks in XenServer/XenCenter, XenDesktop, XenApp and NetScaler, through an intuitive GUI.
As some of these products supports 3rd party solutions (for example XenDesktop supports VMware ESX), Workflow Studio can automate some of their capabilities as well.

Additionally, any Citrix partner can further extend the platform providing its own automation script (as Workflow Templates and Tasks Libraries).

The product is available for any Citrix customer that has a Subscription Advantage.

Replicate Technologies is the latest virtualization startup emerged in 2008. Last November the company launched Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA), a very interesting configuration management tool.

The product obtained some consensus among the virtualization experts and Replicate worked hard to immediately improve RDA as the early feedbacks suggested,

The new 1.2 version released last week includes a new Knowledge Module, as they call it, that indentifies networking miconfiguration (for example around routing and subnetting).
The module can even operate at the virtual machines level, recognizing if a guest operating system has a network issue (like a duplicate IP address).

Besides this module, RDA 1.2 introduces support for VMware ESXi.

While waiting to replace Xen with KVM somewhere in H1 2009, Red Hat continues to improve its current virtualization platform.

In the new Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3, released this week, the company greatly extended the supported Xen limits:

• from 8 to 32 vCPUs
• from 64GB to 80GB vRAM
• from 32 to 126 pCPUs
• from 64GB to 1TB pRAM

Additionally the Xen included in RHEL 5.3 supports the Intel nested paging tables technology EPT featured inside the new Intel Core i7 (codename Nehalem) processors.