virtualization.info Editors

By now it’s well-known that Phoenix Technologies, the historical BIOS manufacturer, is entering the virtualization market with its own hypervisor.

Despite that, so far the company didn’t provide many details about the virtualization platform internals.

Now the LinuxWorld keynote given by Simon Crosby, CTO of Management and Virtualization department at Citrix, unveils that the engine behind HyperCore is Xen:

The slide also reveals that other major vendors are using Xen for their upcoming desktop hypervisors.

One is Lenovo, which announced a generic hypervisor for its notebook in March. Other remarkable ones are Intel, HP and Dell.
As virtualization.info didn’t attend the presentation we can’t say if these companies are building their own Xen-based hypervisors like Phoenix or if Crosby included them in the slide for other reasons.

This post will be updated with more details as soon as possible.

Techcrunch published a new chart released by Gartner in July 2008 about the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

Cloud computing is reported in the diagram, rapidly approaching the highest point of hype and expected to reach the mainstream adoption in 2-5 years.

Interestingly enough, virtualization technologies are not included. 
Hardware virtualization can be safely considered a mainstream technology at this point but OS virtualization is still confined in the hosting niche, application virtualization is in early adoption phase, and storage virtualization is so vague that the industry can’t agree on its definition yet.

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

In January PHD Technologies, a US startup focused on virtual machines backup and replication, surpassed 1000 customers.

The extended user base, and an increasingly competitive segment, probably required a more articulated leadership as the company just appointed a CEO: Sridhar Murthy.

Murthy has over 18 years of leadership in high growth technology companies. For the past two years he served as chief operating officer and chief financial officer at TicketsNow.com. During his tenure, the company doubled its revenues. Prior to this, Murthy was chief financial officer and vice president of operations at Collabnet, a provider of hosted enterprise solutions for distributed and outsourced software development. Earlier in his career, Murthy held finance and operations leadership positions at Get2Chip, Ariba Inc. and Remedy Corporation.

The press announcement also mentions a recent equity investment but doesn’t reveal the venture capital firm behind it or the funding amount.

4sysops published an extensive, 9-parts article on different application virtualization products available on the market.

The piece covers the common features of all products listed in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar (plus the OEM’d LANDesk Application Virtualization), also reviewing a couple of them (Symantec/Altiris SVS and Xenocode Virtual Application Studio) in details.

If you are looking for an overview of this technology this article is a good start.

Over the last few months the speculations around Cisco entering the server virtualization market were supported just by rumors. Below a list of news related to the topic:

• March 2008 – Cisco puts KVM in its IOS (the company denied that this ever happened)
• April 2008 – Cisco or IBM may acquire Citrix
• June 2008 – Cisco doesn’t want to buy VMware
• July 2008 – Cisco may be interested in hypervisors more than what it seems

Rumors or not, today something concrete happened: Cisco signed as member of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program.

The program simplifies the relationship between Microsoft and the other members so that the software giant can easily support its products on participants’ hypervisors:

The Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) is open to any vendor who delivers a virtualization machine solution that hosts Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and subsequent service packs. The virtualization solution can either be hypervisor-based or a hosted solution.

Cisco doesn’t have any hypervisor so there’s no reason to adhere this program.

At this point it’s hard to believe that the company will stay away of the server virtualization market for much more.

In June 2008 Microsoft formally launched its Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to extend the support on its products when they run as virtual machines on 3rd party virtualization platforms.

Today the company announces that 31 back-end servers are now supported on Citrix XenServer, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron thanks to this program.

The effort that Microsoft put on this operation is remarkable and has been noted by many like Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at the Burton Group:

Other vendors should take note of Microsoft’s support model, as Microsoft supports more virtualization platforms than any other vendor by a hefty margin.

But this is not the most important part of the news: Microsoft has announced that two new vendors are participating this program: VMware and Cisco.

(note: VMware doesn’t appear nor in the press announcement neither in the official SVVP page because of a late confirmation)

While a notable achievement, the fact that VMware signed for the SVVP shouldn’t surprise anyone but the presence of Cisco is something truly unexpected.

Update: VMware officially confirmed its participation to the SVVP.

In the last two years Microsoft worked to release more virtualization-friendly license agreements.
The process has been slow but the results are remarkable: unlimited virtual servers paying one Windows 2008 Datacenter Edition, unlimited virtual databases paying one SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, up to unlimited virtual desktops paying a Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop license.

Now the company is taking further steps as its new hypervisor Hyper-V is out.

As anticipated last week, Microsoft has just announced that its licensing policy will change on September 1, 2008 to simplify the movement of virtual machines between physical hosts:

…

Microsoft is updating its software licensing terms for 41 server applications, including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Standard and Enterprise editions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise and Professional editions, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center products. With the new terms, the company is waiving its previous 90-day reassignment rule, allowing customers to reassign licenses from one server to another within a server farm as frequently as needed…

SearchStorage.com published a short blog article saying that Paul Maritz, the CEO that replaced Diane Greene on July 8, called the NetApp CEO, Dan Warmenhoven, on the phone the same day he was appointed.

During the call Maritz reaffirmed the relationship with NetApp and took some steps to further strengthen it.

Maybe this is a typical procedure for the new CEO of a key company like VMware, but this call was specially important: while VMware continues to operate as a totally independent company from its parent EMC, it’s clear that the storage competitors see the VMware-EMC relationship as a growing menace.

Because she founded and managed the company much before the EMC acquisition (and because her relationship with Joe Tucci was not exactly idyllic), the former CEO Diane Greene was a sort of guarantee that VMware would not facilitate its parent company.
Without Greene the risk that EMC competitors are penalized seems more concrete.
Maritz wanted to clarify as soon as possible that this is not the case and certainly he called also all the other vendors around VMware.

In 2006 VMware pioneered the idea of a modular data center by offering pre-configured virtual machines to its customers. The company called them virtual appliances.

For several reasons (security, manageability, performance tuning, portability, etc.) the approach didn’t take much traction among customers so far and only few vendors followed VMware in delivering virtual appliances.

It’s important to clarify that offering an evaluation or demo version of any product through a virtual appliance isn’t the same thing of supporting the technology in production environments.
In the last two years many vendors used the virtual appliances as a new distribution media for their trials, but just a bunch of them are really recognizing a VA like a physical installation.

The ISVs have good reasons to not do so: in a virtual infrastructure multiple virtual machines concur to have physical resources access, the more VMs are running at the same time, the more heavy workloads are being executed inside them, the more unpredictable is the performance of every guest OS.
In such scenario the 3rd party vendors can’t really grant the proper operation of their virtual appliance.

Of course, the most sophisticated hypervisors offer some resource management capabilities that can be used to grant a certain performance to a certain virtual appliance. But at the moment there’s no way for the ISVs to define any SLA into the VAs (the upcoming OVF standard will provide a way to do so).

Despite this issue (and others), some new vendors are now moving forward and began to offer production-ready virtual appliances:

• Microsoft is working to offer its Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 SP2 (an SSL VPN that sits on top of ISA Server) as a virtual appliance for Hyper-V.
• Check Point just announced that its flagship enterprise firewall VPN-1 is now available as a virtual appliance for VMware ESX and ESXi.

Diskeeper just announced that its deframenter is now certified for Microsoft Hyper-V.

Defragmentation is one of the first and most basic tasks in the computer maintenance routine, but when applied to virtual infrastructures it requires some extra effort.

Any virtual machine can be defragmented at the guest OS level, as any other physical operating system, but its container, the virtual hard disk, is just another monolithic file sitting at the hypervisor / host OS level, and it may be not defragmented as well.

So while the guest OS may be fully optimized, the underlying virtual HD could be not and the resulting disk I/O performance can be poor.

It seems that Diskeeper is the first company to support defragmentation at the host and guest level for Hyper-V, addressing the challenge.