virtualization.info Editors

In an interview given to CIO.com, Chris Akerberg, President and COO of Vizioncore, reveals three major areas where the Quest subsidiary is looking at: capacity planning automation, monitoring of applications inside virtual machines and VM lifecycle management.

This last point implies that Vizioncore is working on correlates what happens at virtualization level and at the guest OS level, providing a better understanding of the virtual data center performance trends.

To do so Vizioncore will leverage the long-term Quest experience in applications, database and OS management that made the company famous, but will have to compete with other firms entering this critical space.
The long term partner VMware is one of them now that announced the acquisition of B-hive. Another one is eG Innovations with its VM Monitor.

The last and apparently most imminent news is related to the entrance of Vizioncore in the VM Lifecycle Management space, where the company plans to launch something this year.

Not too surprisingly, in the interview Akerberg also confirms that Vizioncore is having discussions with Microsoft and Citrix but at the moment they will stay focused on VMware support only.
We’ll see if this strategy will change as soon as VMware integrates the B-hive technologies.

One year ago virtualization.info published a report called Virtualization Industry Challenges, which describes the major issues that a customer has to address when embracing virtualization.

The very first one was (and still is) the lack of support.

Andrew Dugdell points at a critical VMware document which summarizes how customers can receive support for Microsoft software installed inside virtual machines. 
Reading it gives the impression that there are an endless number of restrictions but Microsoft actually is one of the best at supporting the virtual environments.

Obviously this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Some major vendors are so hostile to virtualization that have to invent their own hypervisor to allow their products inside VMs.
Others simply prefer to ignore virtualization completely.

It seems impossible that DMTF is working on interoperability standards to manage virtual machines when the market cannot even agree on a way to provide interoperable support for them.

virtualization.info has just learned that NetApp is aggressively distributing its storage in VMware briefing centers across the Europe.

The move is justified by the upcoming release of Site Recover Manager (SRM), the much expected disaster recovery product that VMware will launch next week.

SRM needs an enterprise storage back-end to work and NetApp has all the interests to demonstrate how its arrays and software (SnapMirror on top) integrates with the newest VMware solution. Better than the ones provided by the VMware’s parent company EMC.

Even if EMC acquired VMware in 2003, probably the wave of big storage investments in the virtualization market begins now.

So far VMware sold its virtual lab automation product, Lab Manager, charging the customers for the server product and each agent installed inside the ESX hosts.

Such model has been completely changed in mid-May as virtualization.info has learned: the new pricing scheme only counts the total number of CPUs inside the ESX hosts managed by Lab Manager.

The price per CPU is fixed at $1,295.
The server component is now free and customers can install in multiple instances.

Tripwire, the popular security company focused on host intrusion detection (subcategory: file integrity checkers), just released a tool called ConfigCheck.

The application, released free of charge, is for Windows only and remotely connects to ESX hosts, verifying their configuration against a specific security guideline that VMware developed.

Obviously Tripwire also has an enterprise version of this tool which sells through BMC since March.

Additionally, Tripwire offers a document that guides the administrators in correcting the configuration mistakes.

Download ConfigCheck here and the Remediation Guide here.

With an unsurprising move VMware just announced a deal with four key motherboards and computers manufacturers (aka Original Design Manifacturers or ODM): ASUS, Gigabyte, IESC and Tyan.

These companies will release 2-way, 4-way and blade servers certified for ESX and ESXi.

Such kind of deals are likely to became more frequent in the coming months: VMware has to put its hypervisor on as many systems as possible to counter the fact that the entire industry will be Microsoft Hyper-V ready from day one. And the choice to include the driver model in the hypervisor kernel severely slows down the process.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) efforts in the virtualization industry are well-known: the body is working to define the open new industry standards for virtual data centers.

In September 2007 the body started the evaluation of a common virtual machine format called OVM (Open Virtual Format), which is already supported by VMware and Enomalism.

In November 2007 the body released a standard for managing virtualized infrastructures, which is already supported by ManageIQ.

Today the DMTF goes a little further, accepting VMware as board member.
The company representative in the group is Winston Bumpus, the former Director of Open Technology and Standards at Novell and now Director of Standards Architecture at VMware.

Now most of the top virtualization members sit in the board: AMD, Broadcom, CA, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and VMware.
At this point the inclusion of Citrix seems almost inevitable.

In December 2004 VMware submitted ESX 2.5 and VirtualCenter 1.2 to Common Criteria, the international standard for computer security, obtaining the Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2 over two years later.

The company submitted VMware Infrastructure 3 as well, obtaining the EAL 4+ this week.

The EAL4+, which means that the product is methodically designed, tested and reviewed, is a high level in the Common Criteria ranking (reaching up to EAL7) but the certification value is really meaningful only when compared against a reference model, the Protection Profile, used to verify the functionality and security levels of a certain class of solutions, and a definition document prepared by the vendor, the Security Target, used to describe the security properties of the specific solution.
The protection profiles are written by the industry groups and a security target may use one of more of them as a template.

For example: to certify Windows 2000 Microsoft submitted a security target which used the Operating System protection profile as reference model.
The OS (without any security patches) was ranked EAL4+ in 2005, accordingly to these documents.

At today there is not a protection profile for the hypervisors or the virtual infrastructures, so that VMware has been free to shape the security target without any constrain and being certified for the definition it provided.
This doesn’t mean that the certification is useless, but that the EAL ranking alone doesn’t imply a secure product.

VMware already submitted VI 3.5 for the same EAL4+ certification.

Virtual Iron just closed a deal with 2X, a US company in the thin computing market since a long time, to develop a VDI architecture.

The company product that may act as a connection broker is the ThinClientServer, which centrally manage the remote desktop sessions to terminal services farms and keeps track of users activity. So 2X is probably working to extend this product’s capabilities and support the Virtual Iron infrastructure.

The press release doesn’t mention any timeframe for a product launch.

It’s interesting to highlight how Virtual Iron already had a major VDI partner: Provision Networks.
The two companies closed an agreement in April 2007, which allowed to bundle the hypervisor and the connection broker together.

Maybe the Quest acquisition of Provision Networks compromised the existing deal, obliging Virtual Iron to find a new partner.

Update: Quest reported to virtualization.info that the deal with Virtual Iron still exists and that the agreement terms didn’t change so far.

Sun just published a new document summarizing the corporate support policy for Java System products when used inside a virtual machine or an OS partition.

The policy covers the following virtualization platforms:

• Sun Logical Domains (LDOM)
• Sun Containers (for both Solaris 8 and 10)
• VMware ESX

and the upcoming Sun xVM Server.