Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors 
Sun releases today a new version of its desktop virtualization product: VirtualBox.
Despite the numbering this minor update introduces a couple of interesting improvements:
The product continues to stay free of charge and open source, a couple of things that grant Sun no less than 25,000 downloads / day. Get it here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
CohesiveFT is a company offering an online solution to assemble virtual machines and deploy them on cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon EC2. Additionally, it offers a web management console to administer them.
CohesiveFT competes with another well-known company in this space, rPath, and now both can offer support for Virtual Iron virtual machines.
The virtualization vendor partners with rPath since January 2007, and now do the same with CohesiveFT.
More than one year ago Egenera announced a major change in its go-to-market strategy, finally allowing some partners to OEM its cloud-computing-in-a-box software: Pan Manager.
The first and only company answering the call so far has been Fujitsu Siemens. But yesterday Egenera finally announced its second partner, and it is a really desirable one: Dell.
The two signed an OEM agreement for the North America (to be extended in EMEA and APAC during 2009) that rules the distribution of Pan Manager with a massive Dell rack featuring 192 CPU cores and 1536 GB RAM.
And this is just the beginning. Dell and Egenera are jointly developing a new solution platform that will launched in Q1 2009.
Yesterday VMware announced a major change for its European business: Maurizio Carli was hired as General Manager of the EMEA region.
This implies the responsibility of the strategic planning, business operations and management of sales, channels, services and marketing.
Carli come from Google, where he was the Managing Director of the Enterprise division for EMEA.
Before that Carli was Senior Vice President and General Manager for EMEA at Business Object and even before he was Vice President of the EMEA Software Group at IBM.
We’ll see if the “Don’t be evil” philosophy that Carli adopted at Google will help VMware in improving the relationship with its European channel partners, which is not always idyllic, and stay ahead of the competition against Citrix and Microsoft.
Today Phoronix broke the news that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics.
The little company is behind the development of hugely popular Linux graphics technologies like:
So far VMware didn’t confirm the news or unveiled the amount of the acquisition, but the news is reported on the official website of the new subsidiary.
It seems pretty clear that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics to power its upcoming client hypervisor, a key part of its pervasive VDI strategy vCloud, where every centrally-managed virtual machine can be checked out and executed locally.
Surprisingly enough, Microsoft decided to test large scale deployments of its new hypervisor Hyper-V pushing hard its adoption among hosting service providers.
It was clear that the software giant would had a hard time entering the enterprise segment with Hyper-V where VMware has ruled for the last years, but most hosting shops have been fascinated by Virtuozzo so far and Microsoft was supposed to start a deep partnership with Parallels to win them.
Anyway Hyper-V was not developed from scratch for hosting providers, so it doesn’t come with a user interface that can be used by customers to buy and maintain their VPS.
DotNetPanel is filling this gap by announcing an Hyper-V module for its control panel, already popular for its support to Virtuozzo.
In July 2007, when VMware was preparing its IPO, one of the most impressive in the IT industry history, Intel invested $218.5 million in the virtualization vendor.
What happened after that between the two companies is a secret.
The VMware co-founder and former CEO, Diane Greene, may have tried to sell her creature to Intel just under the EMC nose, and eventually failed.
What is known is that Intel is now it’s getting rid of its VMW shares.
In November the chipmaker announced the intention to sell 3.75 million shares.
500,000 of them were sold the same month to Cisco.
Now another 967,398 share are sold for a value of over $23 million.
The startup MokaFive loses its CEO, Bill Demas, after just one year of work.
Demas took the position in July 2007, in concurrence with the second round of financing secured by the company.
Under his management MokaFive changed name (it was formerly known as moka5) and strategy, shifting its focus from the consumers to the enterprises.
Demas left in August to join Turn, an advertising company.
He has been replaced by a top figure in the IT industry: Dale Fuller.
Fuller served as interim CEO at McAfee for 1,5 years, as CEO at Borland, as Vice President of Macbook division at Apple.
Additionally Fuller is in the board of directors of AVG, one of the most popular anti-virus engine around, and covered the same role in Phoenix Technologies.
After all MokaFive doesn’t seem to have lost its consumer vendor identity, and the appointment of Dale Fuller seems to confirm this.
The startup Virtual Computer is completing the last steps to officially enter the market.
Last week its hybrid VDI solution, NxTop, moved to private beta, and now the company appoints its Vice President of Sales: Sandrijn Stead.
Prior to joining Virtual Computer Inc., Sandrijn served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Reflex Security Ltd (now Reflex Systems). As the first employee for Reflex Security in the EMEA region, Sandrijn built the global sales, technical and marketing teams and created a stable channel across the globe, including 300 VARs and 16 distributors.
Sun has just temporary shut down its cloud computing facility at Network.com.
The online platform was launched in March 2006 and offered the opportunity to buy certain amount of processing cycles at $1 / hour through simple PayPal account.
The user just had to upload its application and specify in how much time he wanted the execution of a certain workload.
This approach was not very flexible, requiring the customers to develop (or re-engineer) their applications for parallel computing on UltraSPARC processors.
Over time the company tried to mitigate this remarkable cost of entry by offering pre-installed applications, like 3D rendering programs.
Despite that, Network.com never became as popular as Amazon EC2, who offers empty Xen virtual machines where customers can install Linux and Windows guest OSes.