virtualization.info Editors

VMware continues to roll the Update 3 for its flagship product: VI 3.5.

At the beginning of October the patch was made available for vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 2.5.
One month later the Update 3 hit ESX 3.5. And now it finally reaches the free version of ESX: ESXi 3.5

But unlikely the other products this fix doesn’t just fix the bugs and extends the hardware support.
The ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (build 123629) introduces a full set of APIs.

The VMware documentation doesn’t mention this aspect but Rich Brambley reported the major improvement: so far the only way to automate the management (for example through PowerShell) of this free hypervisor was to pass through vCenter and use the VI SDK.

Now vCenter can be skipped and ESXi directly managed in a programmatic way (or through free/low-cost vCenter alternatives that may bring in some sort of innovative features).

As consequence of this, the Update 3 brings in a read/write Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI), meaning that finally the customers will be able to change the hypervisor settings without using the vCenter Client.

Virtual Iron finally found a replacement for Mike Grandinetti, former Chief Marketing Officer, who left the company in May.

Susan Roberts replaces him as Senior Director of Marketing.
She comes from Dassault Systems where she was Director of Global Branding and Marketing Communications and Paxonix where she was Director of Marketing.

She holds a U. S. Patent (pending) for interactive consumer instruction and her work has been recognized by numerous regional and national award committees including the prestigious Clio Award for Best Interactive Television Service, as well as the Business Marketing Association Silver Award for achievements in database marketing and  the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in Exporting.

Stephen Pollack, the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February) seems more busy now than when he was leading his own company.

Just two weeks ago Embotics, the Canadian startup focused on the VM lifecycle management area, announced the appointment of the successful entrepreneur as Advisor.
Now Enomaly, another Canadian company strongly refocusing on cloud computing, is doing the same.

Immediately after Pollack joined Embotics the company raised $4 million in a Series B funding.
We’ll wait to see what wonderful things will happen to Enomaly.

In September Citrix silently released the first minor update for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The new XenDesktop 2.1 becomes a serious multi-hypervisor connection broker, as it introduces the support for Microsoft products (both Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008) that goes side by side with the existing support for Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX.

The product also includes the new Provisioning Server for Desktops 5.0.

To celebrate Citrix has released an interesting evaluation guide: Citrix XenDesktop 2.1 with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

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

Yesterday Symantec announced a new partnership with VMware to integrate its much appreciated Veritas Cluster Server with VMware Infrastructure.

As first step Symantec has enhanced VCS to cluster vCenter.

Additionally, the two companies may bundle together VCS with Site Recovery Manager (SRM) as the announcement mentions a very vague complementary HA/DR solutions as part of the joint operation.

The VDI market gets more crowded every day. All the biggest players in the space are developing, releasing, or rearranging their solutions to offer an end-to-end VDI platform to make the client consolidation through virtualization a viable option.

This is a space where Citrix, VMware and Quest/Provision networks lead, followed by aggressive newcomers like Red Hat (which acquired Qumranet and plan to use KVM), Pano Logic (which has its own platform), Leostream, Ericom (which supports many hypervisors but seems to bet on Oracle VM), Propalms and more.

Each one is trying to working to offer some sort of performance booster for the RDP protocol (while we all wait for Microsoft to enhance it with the technology acquired by Calista), or to completely replace it.

HP has some technology to push in this space so yesterday with a notable marketing exercise it relaunched its offering under the name of Virtual Client Essentials.

Read more

In June Veeam completed its first acquisition: NWorks, a company focused on management plug-ins for enterprise management systems like HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).

After six months the company is ready to release the first rebranded version of NWorks technology under the new name of Veeam Management Pack for VMware 4.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

Beside the fact that maybe Veeam has to work a bit on the name, the new release is interesting because it gives to SCOM a much detailed visibility of the VMware Infrastructure 3 environment.

The biggest change is that now the product allows ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 host hardware monitoring through VMware Virtual Infrastructure SDK.

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DynamicOps releases today the first minor update of its Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) 3.0.

VRM is a VM lifecycle management product that offers self-service provisioning capabilities, resources tracking (including abandoned virtual machines) and chargeback, and policy compliancy enforcement.

Following a questionable trend, the company jumped from VRM 1.0 (released in June) to this 3.1 in just six months.

Nonetheless this new version introduces a couple of key features:

• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V
• Support for Citrix XenDesktop (including its Provisioning Server component) and VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) connection brokers
  (support for the new VMware View 3.0 will come in early 2009)

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Tripwire is an old and well-known security vendor focused on host intrusion detection (specifically file integrity checking).
Over one year ago the company saw an opportunity in virtualization and joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program.
In June 2008 they release a free tool (and a blueprint developed in collaboration with VMware) to verify the ESX configuration.

The product was so successful that Tripwire must be in the process of reconsidering its corporate mission. Today in fact it was announced the recruitment of a well-known virtualization expert: Stephen Beaver, former System Engineer at the Florida Hospital in Orlando.

Beaver will work at Tripwire as Virtualization Evangelist and will write on a new blog that the company will formally launch on Dec. 15.

In the last period Virtual Iron lost a number of key executives: the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Strategy Officer (still working as consultant), and the Director of Corporate Marketing.
Even before this, the company decided to not show up at industry events like the VMware VMworld for a couple of times.

Considering these facts the impression is that Virtual Iron is trying to contain the costs and avoid to burn the $65 million that raised in five rounds (the highest financing ever in the virtualization industry, excluding VMware).

Virtual Iron may not have another chance to collect capital, so it must to gain a more significant market share (Gartner reports no more than 1%) or to be acquired.

While there’s obviously no news about an acquisition, the company revealed some information about its growth: 130% revenue increase from Q3 2007 to Q3 2008, and 2,000 customers worldwide.

While these are great numbers the real problem is understanding if they are great enough to survive against the competition with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Sun and Parallels (and probably more coming).