virtualization.info Editors

Ceedo is an Israeli startup focused on application virtualization.

The company, funded by Intel Capital, was founded in 2005 by Dror Wettenstein.

In November Ceedo launched a product for consumers, Ceedo Personal, which presents an unusual approach: instead of blending virtual applications in the operating system, it collects them in a dedicated menu, called Easy Access Menu, which mimics (but doesn’t replace) the Windows one.

The product supports Windows XP and Vista and can be run from a USB key. In fact Lexar resells the solution under the name PowerToGo.

Now Ceedo releases an enterprise version of its platform, which allows to deploy/update/remove new virtual applications or define virtual workspaces policies from a centralized management system.

The company pricing starts from $89 per seat (with a perpetual license).

Download a trial here.

Ceedo has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

The easy to say and to remember SoftGrid product, acquired by Microsoft in 2006, has now two names: the long one, Application Virtualization, and the new short one, App-V.

The use of category names for a product is already confusing enough: the newest application virtualization product from Microsoft is called Application Virtualization, while the newest virtual machines security wrapper is called Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (formerly Managed Workspaces, acquired from Kidaro in 2008).

But having two official names is even worse: App-V is a short and easy name which pairs nicely with the upcoming Hyper-V (which should be called HW-V at this point), and may be easily accompanied by a future OS-V (as soon as Microsoft will finally invest in the OS virtualization approach).

Obviously Microsoft is not the only one playing with generic names: VMware, Parallels, Veeam, Leostream and others are with the Redmond brand managers.

Isn’t virtualization a topic complex enough?

One of the biggest question raised after the Novell acquisition of PlateSpin in Februrary was: how much time the company will need to integrate the virtualization firm technologies?

PlateSpin products in fact are, as far as we know, 100% developed with Microsoft technologies which are not exactly easy to integrate with the Java-based enterprise management product ZENWorks.

While a code blend isn’t a mandatory step, it seems hard to believe that Novell wants to maintain .NET applications over the long term (even if it has a strong partnership with Microsoft).
Therefore a very long integration process is expected.

Now CRN publishes an article where Jill Henry, Director of UK Channel Development at Novell, reveals that the integration may complete by the end of this year.

She’s probably referring to the branding and sales channels only, so far PlateSpin continued to operate as an independent subsidiary, keeping its brand and its website. But it’s the first step for a complete technology integration.

With a huge delay virtualization.info reports the official release of the new VMware product Stage Manager 1.0 (build 1561).

The product was launched on May 30, with ten days delay on the announced date.

As detailed in previous posts, Stage Manager (VSM) adopts the same logic used in VMware Lab Manager (VLM) but for a different purpose (and in fact some VSM beta testers recognized the same underlying engine and the same agents in both applications).

The product offers the capability to control and authorize the virtual machine lifecycle in all the stages between the testing and the production.

In some ways VSM is the extension of VLM, and it’s not clear why VMware didn’t make a single product with two different modules rather than creating and maintaining two separate code branches.

VSM 1.0 integrates with VMware VirtualCenter and requires at least two ESX hosts and some shared storage to offer most of the features already found on VLM, like:

• Deployment of multi-VMs configurations
• Availability of a VM templates library
• Support for overlapping network configurations (fenced networking)
• Web management console

Download a trial here.

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

Eleven months ago Scalent released version 2.2 of its data center automation suite Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE). The release 2.0 was out almost two years ago.
Now finally the company releases a new update: V/OE 2.5.

The product, which already automates the provisioning of virtualization platforms on bare metal, now also offers physical to virtual (P2V) and V2P migration capabilities.

Additionally, the product now supports the Sun hypervisor for SPARC architectures: Logical Domains (LDOM).

V/OE is a very interesting product but one year of development to release a minor update seems a poor accomplishment.

So far Scalent secured three rounds of investments. The last one of $15 million arrived in January 2007.
The company hired a president in October 2007 and a CFO in January 2008, and closed partnerships with HP (in November 2007) and Enigmatic (in April 2008).

Hopefully all of this will help releasing the next version of V/OE earlier than 2009.

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

After 11 months, Trustware finally a new major version of its application virtualization platform BufferZone.

The only major feature mentioned in the official press announcement is what the company calls Privacy Zone: a way to save a list of trusted web sites in the same virtual layer where the browser is.
Hopefully the company has more than that to justify the 3.0 version numbering.

In April the company appointed a couple of new Vice Presidents, for Sales and Marketing, but this doesn’t seem enough to boost the company credibility: after almost one year of development the product is not even ready for Vista, a version which is still in beta.

Download a trial here (home edition) or here (enterprise edition).
Sign up for the beta program here.

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

As most virtualization.info readers know, Microsoft offers Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) and soon Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspaces) only through a special bundle called Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

The offering is peculiar because the MDOP is only available for those customers which agree to buy the Microsoft Software Assurance: a 3-years deal which allows to receive the newest version of a certain product without paying the software as brand new.

Obviously the Software Assurance comes as a premium service which some customers are not happy to pay.

Over the last two years virtualization.info collected a number of complains about the way MDOP is offered, and a superficial search on the Internet will return enough clarifications that a SMB company with no more than 50 desktops can’t consider the Software Assurance as the right option to go.

A further confirmation comes from CRN which publishes the testimonials of a couple of system integrators:

“The majority of my customers are not at all happy with Microsoft regarding the Software Assurance requirement on MDOP and Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop licensing (VECD),” said Chris Ward, senior solutions architect at GreenPages Technology Solutions, Kittery, Me.

…

“I understand that Microsoft is trying to add value to Software Assurance. But it’s a shame that really useful products are going that way, because SA isn’t right for all customers, particularly SMBs,” Sobel said.

“Microsoft is trailing VMware [in virtualization], so for them to take their useful innovations and make them not completely available to the whole potential marketplace to me is an unfortunate choice,” Sobel added.

How many Application Virtualization license could be sold without the Software Assurance lock-in?

SearchStorage.com just published an interview with Symantec CEO about the new Veritas Virtual Infrastructure platform launched Wednesday.

The interviewer mentions an interesting rumor:

SearchStorage: There is talk that VMware might be looking to replace VMFS with a different clustered file system. Is Symantec working with them on that?

Thompson: If they’re looking for that, we’re all ears.

If true this will imply a major change in the VMware strategy and its relationship with storage vendors.

One of the most valuable tool for virtualization is free and comes from Microsoft.
It’s called Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP), it’s a capacity planning product that supports hardware and application virtualization platforms, and it’s able to agentlessly discover and take into account over 50,000 computers.

The version 3.0 released in April supports both Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5.

The new version 3.1, now in private beta, is 64bit and supports Hyper-V.

Enroll for the beta program here.

In November 2007 Apple made a modification to its EULA to allow the virtualization of Mac OS X 10.5 Server. And in these months the two firms competing in this space, Parallels and VMware, worked hard to make it happen.

Parallels will probably offer Mac OS X Server support on its upcoming server virtualization product Server 1.0 (now in Release Candidate).

VMware instead just announced that it will offer that support on its upcoming desktop virtualization product Fusion 2.0 (now in beta 1).

Unfortunately nor Parallels neither VMware can offer a virtual machine with Mac OS X on an hardware which is not Apple branded.