virtualization.info Editors

Our most loyal readers know how fast the virtualization market is expanding. Almost every month there is at least one new company announcement or an acquisition.
Tracking what each company is doing is a time consuming activity that no customer can do on daily basis, and yet there is a compelling need to recognize the players and the products they offer in different market segments.

For this reason we created a free database that lists all the companies that we track at virtualization.info: the Virtualization Industry Radar.
In no time it became the most visited resource we offer, both for the English and the Japanese version of virtualization.info.

Unfortunately the virtualization vendors extend their activity so fast that the current version of the tool is a bit limited. So today we announce a new, important update.

The Virtualization Industry Radar now shows the full list of market segments where a virtualization company operates and all products offered for each segment.

Additionally, it features a hopefully useful dashboard which provides a pretty good idea of how the market is evolving at first glance, showing the newest entries, the amount of tracked companies over the years and the distribution of these companies in the different market segments.

And last but not least the tool now has some filtering capabilities: companies can be filtered by their market segment, their rating or their status.

This is just the beginning: we’ll work to further improve the Virtualization Industry Radar to keep it the most valuable tool to track the virtualization market.
If you have suggestions to add more features we’d be happy to hear.

Go to the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar

Launched at the end of April, the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 beta didn’t support the latest build of Hyper-V, the Release Candidate 1.

Now Microsoft updated the SCVMM 2008 build to introduce the missing support.

Enroll for the beta program here.

After years of clandestinity Microsoft virtualization professionals will finally have an official recognition.

MCPmag.com in fact reports about a new certification exam currently in beta phase: 70-652: Windows Server Virtualization-Configuring.

Easy to guess, the test is about the upcoming Hyper-V and will probably ready by the launch time (expected no later than August).

But if there’s a Configuring exam it means that Microsoft is also preparing a much more interesting Designing and this implies that an entire certification track may be dedicated to virtualization, probably including exams about System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Terminal Services, Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) and the upcoming Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspaces).

Microsoft published a generic announcement which partially confirms this plan.

Over the last two years virtualization.info has been constant in repeating that support is the most challenging issue in any virtualization project.

Some companies are working hard to make their support policy more virtualization-friendly, while others are not even near the minimal level of commitment that the customers are demanding.

Today Microsoft makes a further step to simplify the process with the launch of a Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

The program is open to any vendor which offers hosted or bare-metal (aka hypervisor) virtualization platform that is able to run Windows Server guest OSes (Win2008/2003/2000 only).

Since Microsoft is not able to grant that its software will run as expected on any virtual stack and doesn’t want to lock-in customers like Oracle, is trying to solve the problem at the root, directly validating the virtual stack.

As long as the 3rd party virtualization platform is validated Microsoft will be sure that Windows runs correctly on its virtual machines and will provide the same support that it’s already offered for physical servers.

The virtualization providers that adhered the program so far are:

• Citrix
• Novell
• Sun
• Virtual Iron

a list easy to guess considering that Microsoft already has interoperability agreements with all of them.

At this point customers may wonder if VMware, which is very careful in tracking the Microsoft support strategy, will adhere the program as well.

Almost one year ago, much before the Citrix acquisition, XenSource signed an OEM agreement with Symantec to include Veritas Storage Foundation into the once called XenEnterprise platform.

Since that time nothing happened because the Citrix involvement implied a review of the whole deal.

Now finally the two companies are ready to go even if the final arrangement seems slightly different from the original plan. 
Is not the hypervisor (Citrix XenServer) that embeds the storage management console (Veritas Storage Foundation) but the other way around.
The resulting product that Symantec announces today is called Veritas Virtual Infrastructure.

It features a unified web management console to provision virtual machine and storage partitions, to monitor the relationship between VMs and physical storage, and to analyze the storage usage.

Additionally, backups can be performed at storage level with a block-based approach (which also supports Microsoft Volume Shadow Service), without requiring the an entire virtual machine snapshot.

Last but not least the integration between the two products allow to create or modify storage pools in a transparent way for virtual machines.

The solution is expected for this fall at the price of $4,595 per 2 socket server.

The name choice is interesting and seems to imply an intent to compete with VMware.
Symantec has now some serious tools to achieve the task: the application virtualization and streaming products acquired by Altiris (Jan 2007) and by AppStream (Apr 2008) may be integrated in future versions of Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, giving the company a platform that can compete with the VMware, Microsoft and Citrix ones.

It’s just surprising that Symantec, the undisputed leader of mergers & acquisitions (at least in the IT security world), preferred to adopt the Citrix hypervisor rather than buying its own.

Despite capacity planning is one of the most critical phases of any virtualization adoption project a limited number of customers know that VMware offers a solution for it.

The product, acquired by AOG in 2005, is called Capacity Planner and has a unique capability: after monitoring the workloads performance on physical servers it can compare them against a big database of known values so that customers can recognize if an application has an abnormal behavior before running a P2V migration.

The product is available only through the VMware partners, which have to purchase a license (which expires after six months) to use it at customers site.
Only some customers recognize the value of capacity planning and are glad to pay for it because the operation implies an investment just to understand if virtualization makes sense or not. So the consulting firms sometimes have a hard time to sell the service.

But VMware is about to dramatically change the process: virtualization.info has learned that Capacity Planner will be available free of charge starting on July 1st.

Partners will not be required to buy any license anymore (even if they will still have to attend a classroom course that doesn’t come cheap). They will just have to login on the online portal, create a new profile and start monitoring the customer’s infrastructure.
The data will stay online for six months and then will be archived.

This move will create serious problems to competing companies like CiRBA and Novell (through PlateSpin) which obviously target the VMware customers.
It’s very likely that these companies will shift their focus on Microsoft and Citrix audience very soon.

Stratus Technologies is a well-known company for its 99,999% fault-tolerant hardware, ftServer, which is made by a couple of identical machines that act as one, providing out-of-the-box HA capability.

Stratus ftServer isn’t exactly a cheap solution so the company today launches something completely different: a software-only HA solution for SMBs called Avance.

To achieve fault tolerance Stratus integrates Citrix XenServer and requires its customers to run their applications inside virtual machines.
The Avance platform has a web management console which allows to create new VMs with a very easy interface.

Once the VMs are in place Avance will take care of replicating them on all nodes, without the need to have any shared storage (FC or iSCSI SAN).

Any application supported by Citrix XenServer will be automatically supported by Stratus as well.

By design the product only supports two nodes, but Stratus doesn’t exclude the possibility to extend the number of nodes in future.
The product is currently certified to run on Dell servers only but the interesting thing is that the two nodes are not required to be identical machines.

The price for Stratus Avance is $2,500 per node (so the minimum price is $5,000 for each twin) and includes the Citrix XenServer license.

The introduction of virtualization platforms on mobile devices has been advocated by vanguards like VirtualLogix, Trango, Open Kernel and SYSGO since few years. But unless a few conditions happen it’s unlikely that the technology will become as popular as inside the data centers.

The first condition is having a concrete reason to bring virtualization on mobile devices.
The second, mandatory one is having a mobile device enough powerful and usable to make really useful a virtual machine.
The third one is having a major virtualization player that announce the plan to go mobile.

A good reason to bring virtualization on mobile devices could be the need to have the home or corporate desktop available anywhere.
The VDI startup Desktone made the first step, signing an agreement with Verizon, one of the biggest US phone carrier, and VMware may do the rest with the OnDemand streaming technology that it’s developing since a while.
It’s easy to imagine the popularity that virtual desktop streamed on mobile devices could have among business users.

The just announced iPhone 3G (and the horde of competitors that will come) may be powerful and friendly enough to run virtual machines.

The last problem is which major platform will be the first to land on phones. It may be KVM.

LinuxPlanet published an article by Dor Laor, Software Director at Qumranet, where says that the virtualization platform is ready for embedded devices.

It’s probably the first time that a major virtualization vendor clearly states its intention to go on mobile and may mean that the time for embedded and mobile virtualization is coming.

VMware just announced that the acquired Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite, now dubbed ThinApp, will be available within July 10.

The price is set at $5,000 and includes a copy of VMware Workstation and licenses for 50 clients.
Any additional client will cost $39.

A free limited edition would be greatly appreciated, mostly now that Endeavors Technologies just released a free edition of its new Application Jukebox.

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

Endeavors Technologies, one of the companies recently involved in the Microsoft SPLA-gate, just completed the release of Application Jukebox, its the next generation of its application virtualization and streaming platform.
Application Jukebox replaces the existing AppExpress despite the company doesn’t detail which are the new features included.

The product was announced in October 2007 and partially released in April 2008, but only now all the three versions are available: the SaaS edition, the Enterprise edition and the Lite Edition.

With the Lite edition Endeavors breaks the common marketing model used by many application virtualization companies, which allows to download a bunch of pre-virtualized programs to taste how the technology works (something that even Endeavors does on the Stream24-7.com website).
Application Jukebox Lite is a fully functional product which lets the customers virtualize and stream the software they like.
The only limitations are: a maximum of 25 concurrent sessions and the single-server installation (no multi-tier setup).

Download the free Lite edition here.

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