virtualization.info Editors

As usual, virtualization.info will provide a live coverage of the opening keynotes at VMworld.

The brand new VMware CEO, Paul Maritz, is on stage.

He starts with a short recap of the IT history, and of the VMware story, mentioning both Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, both out of the company, for their contribution (surprisingly, no applause from the audience).

To describe the evolution of VMware products over the last 10 years the slides show three branches that,  somewhere after 2008, will merge into a single thing.

Maritz introduces the three technology domains that VMware sees matching those three branches to become one: the Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS), the vCloud and the vClient.

To justify the need for a new software platform that is elastic, self-managing and self-healing, Maritz points out the impossibility to provision in a proper and prompt way the application workloads depending on the business needs.

The upcoming VMware’s VDC-OS depends on physical hardware capabilities (vCompute), Intel FlexMigration is mentioned, on virtual hardware extensibility (vNetwork), Cisco virtual switches are mentioned (we’ll cover the Cisco keynote later today), on storage availability and reliability (vStorage).

The Virtual Datacenter OS is made to run workloads of course, and Maritz describes how the company is moving from the Virtual Appliances to the vApps, an evolution of the pre-configured VMs that we have today, able to match security, manageability and availability requirements more easily.

The Virtual Datacenter OS and its vApps must be managed, so Maritz introduces the vManagement concept: an extensible management framework where 3rd party vendors (BMC, CA, IBM, etc.) can plug into to add value on top of Virtual Center.

Now VMware’s CEO move on the vCloud concept. He announces that over 100 service providers (including BT, Verizon, Sunguard and T-Systems) are working with the company to deploy federated vApps.

Demo time: a system administrator downloads a virtual appliance (vApp in the future) from the VMware Marketplace and defines a business policy for it before deploying: the SLA must be less than 4 seconds, if the condition is not satisfied then a cloud for that application must be built on the fly to address the workload demand in a transparent way.
The virtual appliance is loaded and put on heavy pressure until it surpass the SLA threshold. At that point the VMware Infrastructure spawns new instances of it to recover the performance level required.

Last part of the Maritz story: the vClient.

The company is working to move from the concept of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to a new thing called VMware View.

In desktop environments the end user experience and productivity is the key so VMware is working on something to define the OS, the applications and the storage of a desktop environment as user properties. These properties follow the user on any physical platform he uses (a thin client, a standard PC, a mobile device, etc.).

Demo time: an end user plugs a USB key into a laptop which boots the operating system inside it (it seems a Linux distribution). The minimal OS just launches a Virtual Desktop Manager client to reach a virtual workstation somewhere in the VMware Infrastructure.
Once there, the end user is welcome to launch a 3D game and enjoy a smooth rendering.

The visionary keynote is almost finished.
Maritz could just touch the fascinating, epic and extremely complex vision that VMware wants to realize. But what he presented is enough to reveal a profound fracture between his company and the current competitors: never like today VMware seems far, far away from the small business market and fully committed just to the highest-end of the enterprise segment.

Just to summarize: VMware is moving the current hardware, including servers, workstations and storage, to the cloud.
virtualization.info is suggesting that VMware would start moving to cloud computing as soon as Microsoft would enter the market for serious competition. Here we go now.

Now the question really is if the market is ready to follow.
For now the answer in not exactly positive:

The session is finished but virtualization.info will also cover some of the other sponsors keynotes (Cisco is one of them) due today.
Additionally, we’ll provide the coverage for tomorrow’s keynote, performed by Steve Herrod, CTO at VMware, and for the Paul Maritz Q&A session.

Stay with us!

This year the VMworld US conference broken all records for a virtualization conference: 14,000 delegates.

In front of them the new CEO Paul Maritz may have a hard time explaining why the company co-founder and Chief Scientist, Mendel Rosenblum, resigned or why the Executive Vice President of R&D returned to Oracle after less than one year or why ESX 3.5 Update 2 was mistakenly timebombed.

But Maritz may have something serious to distract the audience: ESX 4.0.

The product is currently in private beta and just a small, selected list of testers can access it.
Nonetheless virtualization.info has a partial list of the new, remarkable features included in the first beta build:

• 64bit kernel and console operating system (COS)
• clustered VirtualCenter Servers
• ESX hosts profile management
• cross-hosts virtual networking
• 8-way virtual SMP
• virtual machines fault tolerance across multiple hosts (the famous Continuous Availability presented last year)
• VMs and media library
• alarms on physical hardware faults
• access control on storage resources
• configuration change tracking
• full support for SATA local storage

We were informed that this is just a small list. And it seems already enough to keep the whole audience engaged for the entire event.

 

To help VMware in reducing to silence the rumor generated by Microsoft and its partners with the Monday launch of Hyper-V 1.0, Intel is expected to announce its six-core CPU, codename Dunnington (Xeon 7400), supported by the new ESX.

The new 45nm CPU will have a monolithic design and a much bigger cache (3MB Level 2 and a shared 16MB Level 3) to boost performance, Intel says close to 50% increase, and serve more virtual machines at the same time.

Last but not least, Cisco may have something really big to say to close any discussion. 
(please note that his last point is totally unconfirmed at the moment)

Over one year ago, in time for the the VMworld 2007, virtualization.info published an article about the upcoming release of 3rd parties virtual switches for VMware ESX.
Following the rumors from trusted sources, it seemed perfectly logical that Cisco would be interested in releasing a virtual version of its Catalyst that customers could plug into ESX to enhance the limited networking capabilities that VMware offers today.

So far nor Cisco neither other networking vendors ever released such virtual equipment, but just two days ago an interesting comment appeared on our one-year-old post:

Will be announced on sept 16th. It will run NX class software and will offer cross host virtualization. 

It may be just a rumor or a prediction but Cisco actually has a keynote scheduled for Sep. 16, and in the last period it acted in a pretty strange way.

We’d suggest to keep an eye open on them while at VMworld.

Despite Quest is not a company directly focused on virtualization, its acquisition of Provision Networks didn’t swamp at all the small startup focused on desktop virtualization and VDI.

Au contraire: after the acquisition, Provision Networks continued to achieve remarkable successes like signing a major OEM agreement with Parallels in June or releasing the first connection broker supporting Microsoft Hyper-V in July.

It’s clear that the company aims at becoming the cross-platform VDI leader, but to do so has to provide  something really innovative to overcome the well-known technical issues plaguing any virtual desktop infrastructure.

Provision Networks starts from the inadequacy of the current remote desktop protocols, releasing a performance enhancer for Microsoft RDP.

Delivered through a Desktop Optimization Pack, this new software accelerates the multimedia tasks and reduces the overall connection latency. Additionally it provides bi-direction audio.

The company claims a 8x compression factor for RDP sessions.
The videos are pretty eloquent so Provision Networks may have something serious to discuss with Microsoft now.

The pack is available now as part of the refreshed Virtual Access Suite (VAS) 5.10 originally released in July.

Just two days ago Dell took the stage announcing a number of new product and services focused on virtualization.
Easy to imagine, the most interesting piece of their news release was about a new feature called Auto-Snapshot for VMware Infrastructure, a VirtualCenter plug-in available at the end of the month for free to any EqualLogic SAN customers.

Of curse EMC, fully committed to invest on its own subsidiary VMware, had to answer in an appropriate way: the company announced a new version of its Replication Manager for VMware Infrastructure.

…

With the latest version of Replication Manager, management of copies and complete recovery of both physical and virtual environments is handled through a single console.  Now, the EMC data protection software provides integrated array replicas at the VMware virtual machine level and integrates with VMware ESX Servers and Virtual Center APIs to ensure virtual machine consistency.  This streamlines virtual machine file system (VMFS) replica management by providing near-instant, virtual machine consistent backup and recovery of VMFS delivered via EMC’s array based snapshot and clone technology.

This new functionality can be used for direct integration with VMware VMFS providing instant VMFS level backup and virtual machine level restore.  Automating and scheduling VMFS replicas has become much easier through intuitive easy-to-use wizards and a point-and-click user interface.  Customers can leverage replicas created by Replication Manager for a single virtual machine level restore through VMware’s VirtualCenter management software…

The new version of the product, Replication Manager 5.1 Service Pack 2, is available now.

Looking at the latest announcements It’s clear enough that virtualization is not only boosting the storage sales. It’s also exacerbating the competition as the storage layer will become one of the key differentiation in a world where the hypervisor is a commodity and the customers look for VDI and data center automation.

Along with the new Auto-Snapshot capability for VMware Infrastructure (implemented in its EqualLogic storage arrays) and a bunch of other products and services focused on virtualization, Dell also signed two key OEM deals.

The computer giant will integrate in its offering both PlateSpin PowerRecon and PowerConvert, for inventory, capacity planning and P2V/V2P migration, and Vizioncore vRanger Pro, vCharter and vReplicationro for backup and recovery as well as performance tracking.

Another major achievement for both these successful companies after the acquisitions by Novell (for PlateSpin) and by Quest (for Vizioncore).

After an unexpected delay, Microsoft finally released the much expected Linux Integration Component for Hyper-V.

Without them any Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux guest OS (the only supported) running on the new hypervisor wouldn’t really perform at its best.

The components included in this first package are:

• Driver support for synthetic devices
  The Linux integration components include support for both the synthetic network controller and synthetic storage controller that have been developed specifically for Hyper-V. These components take advantage of the new high-speed bus, VMBus, which was developed for Hyper-V.
• Hypercall adapter
  The Hypercall adapter is a thin layer of software that translates the Xen-specific virtualization function calls from a Xen-enabled Linux kernel to Microsoft Hyper-V hypercalls. This results in improved performance for the Linux virtual machine.
• Fastpath Boot Support
  Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance.

The support for the Integrated Mouse is still missing.

Download the Linux Integration Components here.

Now that Red Hat acquired Qumranet, the maintainer of KVM, the interest around the open source virtualization engine included into the Linux kernel is raising over the top.

Those customers considering the product should be happy to know that the newest version, KVM 75, introduces the memory ballooning.

The ballooning is the most common approach to achieve memory overcommit, a feature available only in VMware ESX at today.

While the real value of ballooning has been questioned several times, it’s really notable to see that the youngest newcomer in the virtualization arena is already stacking up the right features to compete with the most mature products.

Of course KVM is too new and its diffusion too limited to really prove its reliability against the well-known competitors. With or without cutting-edge features, Red Hat will have to work a lot to build confidence in the new platform.

After raising an undisclosed amount of money in August, PHD Technologies continues to expand its leadership team.

In August the company hired Sridhar Murthy as CEO, now it’s the turn of Igor Saulsky, as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales:

…As part of his more than twenty-five years of technology sales experience, Saulsky spent nine years at Symantec/Veritas Software, during which time the company’s sales grew from $70 million to $2 billion. Saulsky held a variety of instrumental sales roles, including managing the worldwide sales launch of Veritas’ Storage Virtualization and Computing Utility solutions, and leading the Symantec/Veritas sales integration in the New York region.

More recently, Saulsky led sales organizations at Ingres and Quest Software, where he was responsible for recruiting, training, and managing regional enterprise sales teams. He joins PHD Technologies from Sunpower Corporation where he engaged Fortune 500 customers to develop large-scale solar power projects…

Today virtualization.info hits its 5th anniversary and would like to celebrate in a special way.
Before that anyway, we are proud to highlight how nice the website is growing.

At the moment virtualization.info scores:

• between 6,500 and 18,000 page views / day
• more than 8,000 news feed subscribers / day (over 2,000 of them read our daily newsletter)
• a readership that includes at least 20% of the Fortune 100 and at least 10% of the Fortune 500
• over 50,000 inbound links (as Google stats reports) from all over the Internet
• a healthy 50% growth year over year
• a position in the top 10 results for the keyword virtualization in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live search engines (and without using any SEO unfair trick)
• 20 virtualization vendors that sponsored the site over the last two years
• a just-born Japanese translation with over 1,000 page views / day and almost 500 news feed subscribers / day

We don’t celebrate alone: over 1,700 virtualization professionals joined our LinkedIn network: the virtualization.info Vanguards community.

Note that I use “we” instead of “I” because over the years virtualization.info morphed from a single-man website maintained by Alessandro Perilli to an articulated project that a (small) team of very passionate and talented people keeps alive. 
We have a superb web designer, a great partner and coordinator for the Rent-A-Lab facility, an irreplaceable event manager and her staff for our upcoming Virtualization Congress, and a number of collaborators for other projects that we’ll launch before within this year and the next one.

Of course we want to grow up even more: for the first time virtualization.info is looking for one editor and/or one columnist. If you are interested let us know.

And now the juicy part.
As you know we are arranging our own independent conference in London, the Virtualization Congress 2008, gathering together some top-notch speakers, most popular European influencers, virtualization leaders, brilliant startups and successful venture capitalists at the ExCeL Conference Centre for Oct. 14-16.

The first two readers leaving a comment will win a free ticket each to attend the event (be sure to specify your email address).

Thanks for your support so far and happy birthday!
Alessandro

Today Sun formally presented (video recording) its upcoming Xen-based hypervisor called xVM Server, but instead of announcing the immediate availability as many had hoped, the company said that the product won’t be available for at least another two months.

On his corporate blog Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM products family, reported a short Q&A detailing the current roadmap: within 30 days the Early Access build will be open to general public and within 60 days we’ll have the release candidate.

There’s a major, positive news anyway: the large majority of xVM Server will be released with a GPL3 license at no cost.
Few components will be available at no cost as well but through different licenses that Sun didn’t clarify yet.

The product will be manageable through a web console, a full set of web management APIs, or through the xVM Ops Center 2.0 that Sun plans to release with the hypervisor.

Additionally, in time for the general availability, there will be paravirtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes, something easy to do thanks to the current interoperability agreement with Microsoft.

Sun wants to cash in with the support subscriptions but offers them at a very aggressive price: $500 / year per physical machine (up to 4 CPU sockets, no matter how many cores).

While waiting at least for the beta code, users can check a bunch of new screenshots of the management console and the architecture diagram of the hypervisor.

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