virtualization.info Editors

LANDesk Software, founded in 1985 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah , provides systems management, security management, service management, asset management and process management solutions with a strong focus on the physical world.

AppSense, on the other side, is a niche player in the virtualization market, baked by a number of former Citrix employees, with many ups and downs, especially in the last few years.

On Monday LANDesk announced to have signed a definitive agreement to acquire AppSense with the goal to expand its portfolio of endpoint management solutions to virtualized endpoints.

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Last week open source giant Red Hat announced the availability of version 3.6 of its KVM-based virtualization platform Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

While this new release provides the expected improvements from a technical standpoint adding things like:

• Hotplug memory support provides dynamic, one-click memory scaling, working with underlying infrastructure to give an application more memory “on the fly” while avoiding disruption to the application runtime.
• PCI device assignment enables administrators to directly assign a physical adaptor or device to a virtual machine, allowing for near bare-metal performance for graphics and networking-intensive computing.
• Host Update Manager: Streamlines the patch release process across the virtualized environment through integration with Red Hat Satellite, a systems management solution used by half of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers.
• Object Health Status: Provides visibility into external system health events, such as issues with storage, CPU, server or hard-drive performance, via the Red Hat Enterprise VIrtualization interface. This feature alerts admins to events that may cause downtime or negatively impact virtual machine performance, so they can proactively manage risk and potential downtime.

What catches our eyes is the newly integrated V2V tool aimed to simplify the migration from VMware to Red Hat’s platform.

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Yesterday Docker announced to have acquired a semi-stealth startup called Conductant, focused on workloads orchestration.

Both Conductant’s founders, Bill Farner and David Chung, have significant enterprise experience coming from the technology provider space and their experience will be spent on a commercial distribution for Aurora and its integration with Docker Swarm.

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Log Insight is a log aggregation, management and analisys tool, that VMware first introduced in 2013 and now is fiercely competing against Splunk.
Today the company announced Log Insight 3.3 that will be released shortly.

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Ansible is an IT automation tool especially popular within the developers’ community, thanks to its simplicity and agentless nature.

Three months away from its acquisition by Red Hat the company announced the general availability of Ansible 2.0.

This new release is aimed to ease the development of playbooks (Ansible’s automation scripts) and tasks, and expand platforms support with a new set of modules for OpenStack, Amazon AWS, VMware, Microsoft and Docker.

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Nutanix is a provider of converged infrastructure, basically a physical server containing both compute and storage driven by an Installed Hypervisor of choice, this server, called a node can be stacked allowing storage to be shared in a single storage pool. Nutanix was founded in 2009 and since then was funded for a total of more than 312 million dollar. The latest funding round was in September last year where Nutanix raised 140 million dollar. Besides Nutanix also SimpliVity and VMware with its EVO:RAIL solution provide similar solutions.

Despite the rumors of its acquisition by Cisco and other statements made this May, today the company kicked off the process of going public. The initial public offering should be of about $200 million in shares, traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol NTNX. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are the lead underwriters of the deal.

As mentioned before Nutanix has long been expected to go public, but an official date isn’t available yet, given that we are at the end of the year we expect it to happen during the first IPO window of 2016.

virtualization.info has been following Virtualization Matrix since its early steps and we recently wrote about its crowdsourced-powered heir: WhatMatrix.

Today we are happy to report that its community, formed by a number of well known IT professionals, officially launched the website in GA.

WhatMatrix.com provides a comparison engine that, once populated with datapoints by its community members, offers the audience a tool to make IT purchase decisions, create solution proposals and perform technical product research. WhatMatrix currently include comparisons for the following areas: virtualization, Cloud Storage Gateways, End User Computing, Backup for Virtual Environments and SDS & HCI but, because of its crowdsourced, community base is actively seeking new members to further expand.

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As you may have heard, Microsoft recently announced its “historical” partnership with Red Hat, something that a number of analysts already claimed as a milestone for both companies but especially for their customers.

Although this partnership has been presented as a “cloud space deal” it touches a number of different technologies but, obviously, the most acclaimed news is the highly anticipated availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Microsoft’s public cloud offering Azure.

You can see that as a step forward towards an OS-agnostic Azure, but among the reasons behind this move there is that RHEL has been a first class citizen on AWS for a long time and because most enterprises are big shops of both Microsoft and Red Hat its absence has been highly noticed.

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Today Red Hat announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, provider of an IT automation tool popular especially within the developers’ community.

The acquisition is rumored to worth around $100M and expected to be closed by the end of this month.

Ansible is one of the four main players in the automation market, younger then the well known Chef and Puppet, has been launched in 2013 in Durham, N.C..

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Dell today announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire EMC Corporation for a total of $67 billion, making it the largest ever acquisition in the technology industry so far. Until now the largest acquisition was the $ 37 billion Avago paid for chipset maker Broadcom in May this year. The transaction is expected to close in the second or third quarter of Dell’s fiscal year ending February 3, 2017.

EMC offers data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products. VMware, which is a subsidiary of EMC after it was acquired by EMC in December 2003, will remain an independent, publically-traded company allowing Dell to receive equity in order to finance the merger as suggested by Reuters. VMware stock went down around 10% showing both a low confidence in how Dell operates when it comes to VMware and a “technical” assessment due to the acquisition strategy that Dell will put in place (selling “tracking stock” to pay part of this acquisition).

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