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virtualization.info Editors Gartner released a new report about virtualization management firms, awarding few companies as cool vendors.
ManageIQ, a US startup focused on multiple hypervisors and VM lifecycle management (see virtualization.info coverage), is one of them.
The others mentioned companies are CiRBA, VKernel and Akorri, a startup focused on the so called storage virtualization.
During its development lifecycle, the brand new hypervisor that Microsoft is creating to compete with VMware suffere delays and major features loss.
The release schedule that Microsoft always provided was: within 180 days after the codename Longhorn release. And because of the issues mentioned above nobody is really expecting Hyper-V to come any earlier than August 2008 (180 days after the February launch of Windows Server 2008).
But Microsoft seems to have some surprises.
First it released the Hyper-V beta 1 in December 2007, one months ahead of its last schedule update, and now it launches the Hyper-V release candidate, which means that the product is almost ready.
Unless Hyper-V will have same destiny of Windows 2000 (which went through three RC phases), customers (and competitors) may now start to consider the hypothesis that Microsoft may go RTM earlier than August. Much earlier.
The Release Candidate that Microsoft offers today is, as expected, feature-complete.
It extends support to the following guest OSes:
The RC code should be available through Windows Update for those customers already adopting the beta 1 (despite Microsoft didn’t provide any fresh news about this).
Others that never tried the product before may want to do that downloading Windows Server 2008 here.
ETNews is reporting an interesting statistic about the diffusion of virtualization technologies in the Korean market: less than 0.5% so far, with VMware as the only player.
Both Microsoft and Citrix are approaching the country with their hypervisors so the market share is expected to surpass 1% (no mention of when this is expected to happen).
In the whole 2007 virtualization.info collected several feedbacks reporting that the whole APAC market may become a serious playground for virtualization between the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.
A confirmation of this may come from some key steps that some virtualization players took in these months like the Citrix OEM agreement with Lenovo.
Hopefully the Japanase edition of virtualization.info, launched last month, may accelerate the customers evangelization and technology adoption.
With a surprising move in November 2007 Oracle announced its own Xen-based hypervisor based: Oracle VM.
Along with it Oracle also clarified its support policy about virtualization, completely compromising the relation with VMware (despite the latter attempts to save all salvable).
The move wasn’t not exactly welcome by some analysts and customers.
Months after the announcement a security firm focused on continuous data protection (CDP) backup, InMage, is the first announcing its support for Oracle VM.
InMage is part of the Oracle PartnerNetwork since a while, so it’s easy to understand how easily they recognized the opportunity that Oracle lock-in offers.
Quoting from the ExaGrid official announcement:
ExaGrid Systems, Inc., the leader in cost-effective and scalable disk-based backup solutions with byte-level data de-duplication, today announced that it has become a VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) and has validated its product’s use within VMware virtualized environments.
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ExaGrid is uniquely suited for VMware environment backups for the following reasons:
- ExaGrid combines compression and byte-level data de-duplication to minimize the amount of data stored in each subsequent backup.
- Depending on the customer’s data, ExaGrid customers are achieving data de-duplication of redundant VMware virtual machine instances by a factor of 100s or even 10,000s to 1.
- Backup windows are also cut by as much as 80%.
- Restores do not require a SAN, are fast and highly reliable.
- The customer no longer needs to rely on tape for VMware environment backups and can eliminate tape management, handling and transportation costs.
- Entire VMware environments can also be replicated to an off-site ExaGrid via a WAN ensuring synchronized backups for Disaster Recovery purposes.
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Not even six months ago Sun was entering the crowded VDI market with its own connection broker: VDI 1.0.
Today the company already launches the version 2.0.
The most important feature offered in this new version is the support for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and the availability of template-based pools for specified groups of users.
Sun stays mum about when it will introduce support for its upcoming hypervisor xVM Server.
Sun VDI 2.0 starts at US$149 per concurrent user with basic support. A trial is available here.
At this point the Sun strategy on VDI is puzzling: instead of waiting for the release of xVM Server and deliver a VDI 2.0 that supports it, the company prefers to go to the market early supporting its future competitor VMware. (which already offers its own connection broker).
While the Sun connection broker may have valueble capabilities it seems very unlikely that an existing VMware customer snoob the recently released Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0 to adopt VDI 2.0.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
It’s not a secret that IT automation is going to play a fundamental role in tomorrow’s virtual data centers.
The VMware’s investments in this space (the acquisition of Akimbi in 2006 and Dunes Technologies in 2007, the launch of LabManager, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager) are a confirmation of this.
Therefore the BMC acquisition of BladeLogic for $800 million is particularly important, considering that both companies have a main role in the IT automation market.
At this point BMC, never been a major player in the virtualization scene so far, has the unique possiblity to become a leader for next generation virtual infrastructures. It will depends on how tightly the company will be able to integrate the automation framework with existing hypervisors.
Depeding on the long-term strategy, it’s not even excluded that BMC may want to further invest in the virtualization market and buy a hypervisor or a cross-hypervisor management platform.
In the Q4 2008 Intell will introduce its first six-core CPU based on Penryn architecture: codename Dunnington. After that step, in 2009/2010, Intel will begin the production of the Nehalem CPU based on a brand new architecture.
Nehalem will introduces major benefits for virtualization environments like the replacement of the bottlenecking Front-Side Bus (FSB) with the new QuickPath Interconnect, which integrates the memory controller onto the processor die, and the capability to run two threads at the same time for each core.
On top of that Nehalem CPU will also bring new virtualization extensions to further enhance hypervisors capabilities. One of them is the Extended Page Tables (EPT), part of the VT-x technology, which reduces the overhead caused by the page-table virtualization.
All major virtualization vendors (VMware, Microsoft, the Xen community and all the related commercial entities) are working to support Intel EPT in upcoming versions of their hypervisors since the performance benefits are expected to be remarkable.
At its conference BrainShare 2008 Novell revealed an unexpected evolution for its virtualization strategy: besides including the Xen hypervisor onto the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, the company also plans to release a stand-alone hypervisor.
Certainly based on Xen, this new platform will address several challenges: competing against VMware, Citrix and Virtual Iron which are offering their hypervisors through OEM agreements, replacing VMware ESX Server inside the just acquired PlateSpin Forge appliance, positioning the company as a more agnostic virtualization provider.
The company didn’t provide details about which operating system will be loaded into the Xen dom0 virtual machine. Probably it will be a special version of SUSE Linux with minimal OS footprint.
Update: PlateSpin contacted virtualization.info and stated that has no current plans to replace VMware ESX Server with the upcoming Novell platform inside Forge.
Fortisphere, the US startup launched in November 2007, continues to join strategic alliances: after joining the RSA Secured Partner Program last month and the PCI Security Vendor Alliance last week, the company now joins the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
Several other virtualization firms joined the DMTF, working to embrace the open standards for virtual infrastructure management that the group released in November 2007. Among them Microsoft, Virtual Iron and Fortisphere direct competitor ManageIQ.
True interoperability between virtualization platforms is far away but the Fortisphere effort in this direction is valuable. The company has now to show how these partnerships translate into concrete competitive advantages.