virtualization.info Editors

Veeam entered the market over two years ago with Monitor, a performance analysis tool for VMware ESX.

The company is one of the few in the virtualization market that never received venture capital funding. Despite that, its product portfolio includes seven products (three of them are free of charge), its size surpasses 100 employees worldwide, and it even completed an acquisition (nWorks in June 2008).

With a R&D department in Russia and the other corporate offices in US, the company is ready to enter the European market, announcing the opening of its UK headquarter.

Thanks to its early product strategy, focused on releasing useful tools for daily maintenance of VMware infrastructures, Veeam is widely popular and its healthy status makes it a very interesting acquisition for bigger vendors.

As part of a creative marketing effort Sun and AMD are offering for free the book Virtualization for Dummies, written by Bernard Golden and Clark Scheffy and published by Wiley this year.

The 50-pages book (six chapters) is a special edition with some modifications at design and content level. For example the second chapter is totally dedicated to AMD-V CPU extension, the third chapter introduces to the AMD nested page tables technology Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and its I/O virtualization efforts, and the fifth chapter describes the entire virtualization portfolio that Sun just announced.

Overall it’s worth a look if you are real virtualization newcomers.

In August PHD Technologies, the US startup focused on virtual machines backup and recovery, secured an undisclosed amount of new funds.
Part of the money were used to appoint a new CEO and a new EVP of Worldwide Sales. Another part is now used to acquire the software department of Xtravirt, a consulting firm based in UK.

With this move PHD Technologies obtained a wide range of tool, covering several aspects of VMware infrastructures management: mass-configuration of ESX hosts, patch management, virtual machine backup and restore, and even a virtual SAN solution.

Additionally, the Xtravirt co-founder Alex Mittell joined PHD Technologies as Director of Research & Development.
Now the company has a chance to expand its business in many segments, mimicking the growth in popularity and size that companies like Veeam enjoyed so far.

Parallels and DataCore joined forces last month and are working now build a cost-effective solution which include virtualization and storage.

The press announcement doesn’t mention any product merge at the moment so this may start as just a bundle effort at the beginning.

It will be interesting to see how the Virtuozzo audience, which includes a lot of hosting providers, will welcome the new storage partner.

Parallels is clearly working to build a complete virtualization platform through exclusive partnerships and OEM agreements. 
The company already secured the VDI tier thanks to a deal with Provision Networks.
In the future Parallels may build more partnerships like this in new segments of the virtualization market to match the 360-degrees offering the VMware is preparing to launch with VI 4.0. 

Glasshouse Technologies, the IT solution provider that acquired RapidApp, another consulting firm solely focused on virtualization, in July 2007 has lost its Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services, Ron Oglesby, after just one year.

Oglesby is very popular in the virtualization industry because he co-authored two best seller books about VMware Infrastructure: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide.

Oglesby formally left the company last week and the most solid rumor say that he’s moving to Dell, one of the vendors that is most aggressive at the moment in hiring virtualization professionals.

Immediately after the last VMware VMworld conference something very strange happened: as a single, concerted effort worldwide online magazines started writing articles about the complexity behind virtualization, about its lack of tools, about the real costs of technology adoption.

Nothing wrong with it but still surprising: so far the press coverage has always been enthusiastic, giving so much space to any company using (and abusing) the term virtualization.
Now, altogether, every journalist raises concerns and offers warning. Few examples:

• The Dark Side of Data Center Virtualization
• Virtualisation ahead of predictions, but failing to reach potential
• The heartburn and happiness of virtualization
• Virtualization – Hot Tech or Hot Air
• Virtualization: silicon and software salvation or technological tower of Babel?
• Mix-and-Match Trouble with Virtualization, Cloud Computing
• Lowdown on virtualization hype
• Virtualization — Problem Solver and Problem

What happened? Over 14,000 delegates reaching Las Vegas for VMworld 2008 should have demonstrated that there is a real interest for virtualization and that, financial crisis or not, companies are committed to invest on it.

Despite that, a winding pessimism seems the main theme of the last two weeks’ articles. 
It’s unlikely that everybody, at the same time, realized that virtualization introduces new challenges, so what’s real reason behind this new wave of prudence?

The Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), officially launched in June, continues to raise a lot of interest because of the members that currently adheres it.

Cisco appeared in the list in August but so far nor the company neither Microsoft clarified the reason as Cisco doesn’t seem to have a hypervisor. But last week Cisco and Microsoft made a joint announcement unveiling Windows Server on WAAS.

WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) is a network appliance that Cisco offers since a while.
It’s designed to run at branch offices, offering optimization for most protocols (including mail, file transfer, web, backup, video streaming, etc.).

The newest version, 4.1, of WAAS, also introduces a hardware virtualization engine labeled WAVE (Wide Area Virtualization Engine), which places several instances of Windows Server 2008 Server Core into virtual machines (called Virtual Blades here).

The adhesion to the SVVP program allowed Cisco to run Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and Print Services roles as validated virtual machines on WAVE, but the company stay mum about what virtualization engine is really powering the solution.

In March Information Week suggested that Cisco was using the open source KVM (now indirectly controlled by Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet) to virtualize two redundant instances of the IOS inside the new ASR 1000 routers, but this rumor was denied by Cisco in the following weeks.

Maybe this time (even if it’s very hard to believe that Microsoft validated a Windows Server 2008 guest hosted by Linux and KVM)?

After the VMworld 2008 announcements (see virtualization.info summary here) VMware published some videos about key new features coming with VMware Infrastructure 4.0:

• Fault Tolerance
• vNetwork Distributed Switch
• Host profiles

They also offer a glimpse at the new vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 4.0 interface.
They are definitively worth a look.

After a process lasted more than one year, last month the DMTF finally ratified the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

Despite the announcement, the 1.0 document of specifications available here doesn’t seem to be definitive (document status: Preliminary Standard).

Definitive or not, a lot of companies are already supporting the standard:

• VMware (which supports it since Infrastructure 3.0 and even released a free authoring tool called Studio)
• Citrix (which will support it next year)
• IBM (which is maintaining open source authoring tools)
• Microsoft (even if there’s no official statement at the moment)
• Enomaly (supporting it since the earliest draft)
• ManageIQ (which supported it in its new EVM Suite 2.0)
• Fortisphere (which just announced the upcoming support)

All other virtualization vendors offering cross-platform management tools are expected to support it in the coming months. Hopefully the format of our virtual machines will be a problem that we don’t have to care of anymore.

Last month Microsoft announced the upcoming release of a third version of Hyper-V, specifically developed to address customers need for a lightweight hypervisor (and to compete with VMware ESXi).

The product, called Hyper-V Server 2008, has the smallest footprint because its parent partition it’s powered by a small subset of Windows Server 2008, even smaller than the Server Core edition.

Unfortunately the hypervisor didn’t lose just the weight.

Hyper-V Server 2008 doesn’t come with any OS license so customers must pay each guest OS they want to use (making the product interesting only for those companies that want to consolidate existing Windows Server 2003 boxes).

More than that, the new product has the same technical limitations that the Hyper-V edition included with Windows Server 2008 Standard has: it only supports 4 physical CPUs, 32GB of RAM and 128 virtual machines, plus there’s no support for clustering or quick migration.
This version doesn’t even have a local web management console, so each host must be initialized locally at the command prompt and then remotely managed with Hyper-V Manager (for Windows Server 2008 and Vista) or the upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.

The product is available free of charge here.
Microsoft also published a Configuration Guide to describe basic management tasks that must be executed at the command prompt for host initialization.

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