virtualization.info Editors

On his corporate blog Richard Jones, Service Director of Data Center Strategies at Burton Group, comments the competition between Microsoft and VMware, finding analogies with the historical fight between Microsoft and Novell.

Two things are incredibly ironic: first one is that Microsoft and Novell are now strong partners on virtualization against VMware, second one is that VMware is compared to a loser against Microsoft for the second time in two weeks (last one Oracle CEO compared it to Netscape).

But Mr. Jones post is interesting for another reason: throught it the Burton Group takes a strong and neat position against Microsoft.

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You must realize that Novell’s wildly successful NetWare product of the late 1980’s and early 1990s was filling a void in the Microsoft eco-system. Granted, Microsoft had a LAN networking solution allowing for file and print in those days, but LAN Manager was poor compared to NetWare. LAN Manager didn’t scale, and performance was so poor, it really wasn’t usable for anything more than a handful of desktops.

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So how is history repeating itself, you may ask? So in late 2004, Microsoft acquired the virtualization assets of Connectix and launched Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. By comparison to VMware, it doesn’t scale and performance is so poor its not really useful to the broad market.

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Right now it seems that VMware is invincible (and I can remember back when it seemed Novell was invincible)…

This should provide VMware sales force enough marketing material for some months to come. Meanwhile Microsoft sales force may want to argue on credibility.

Besides founders keynotes and new products announcements, the first edition of VMworld Europe will feature a special facility called the Genius Bar.

Mimicking Apple retail stores, VMware will arrange a long desk and will pack it with company engineers and product managers, skilled on different topics. Several hanging monitors will advertise each expertise available, and attendees will just have to go and ask.

virtualization.info will be in Cannes to cover the event, and maybe will be able to discover something new from these guys.

Anyway we’ll provide live coverage of the keynotes and all the VMware announcements. Check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice (part 1 and part 2) and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.

At the event US product managers will be at the Genius Bar as well as on the stage, performing the sessions.

virtualization.info already published the introductory videos of Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement, Ashwin Kotian, Product Manager of Physical Virtualization and Bing Tsai, Staff Engineer.

This Friday virtualization.info welcomes Kit Colbert:

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Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

For his corporate blog Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization & Management Division at Citrix (and former XenSource CTO), publishes an interesting post about VMware hiring techniques:

Once again (it happens every 6 months or so) VMware’s press gangs have pushed the “send” button on their spam engine looking for talent. They have spammed the entire XenServer team, and probably the entire Xen community work list, with promises of fulfilling, gainful employment, and on open source to boot!

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I noticed some of your contributions to the Xen community. I work at VMware in Staffing for the Core Technology Group. I’m pretty sure you are not actively looking for a new position but I wanted to check with you to see if knew anyone that may be interested in interviewing to join our team. Most of what I look for in candidates is deep open source experience. People that know low level C programming typically do well here. We have an opportunity in one of our core R+D groups for someone that is open source savvy, can read low level C code, and is willing to handle Build Release for this group. I also have other opportunities that involve working with the open source community to help make Linux a better OS for virtualization. Ideally, these positions would be located in the US Palo Alto, CA or Cambridge, MA. For the Build release position, we may be willing to consider top talent being located in other facilities we have around the world. Again, I respect that you may not be looking for anything right now but if you’re interested of know someone who may be, feel free to let me know. I look forward to hearing from you…

It’s expected that VMware tries to hire away the brightest minds on the scene, and most of all those working for its competitors. Microsoft and Citrix probably do the same.

What sounds strange is that VMware head hunters don’t bother to have a personal, human relationship with someone as skilled as the Xen lead developer. At these levels hiring discussions should be more engaging than sending a predefined email template.

In its quarterly earnings conference call to investors, Citrix CEO, Mark Templeton announced that the XenServer department added 400 new customers during Q4 2007, and that the company expects a revenue of $3 to $5 million for the Q1 2008 (the expected revenue for the entire 2008 is set to $50 million).

Despite these results Citrix reports that its sales channel isn’t focused yet on the product line: the official introduction will arrive next week at Citrix Summit 08 in Orlando, Florida.

ClearCube is usually identified as a vendor offering a locked-in VDI solution, only working with company hardware. But this release introduces a major change of direction.

The new Sentral 5.6, ClearCube’s connection broker, features a vendor-agnostic approach, supporting VMware and Microsoft virtualization platforms (including the upcoming Hyper-V), as well as Xen.

This critical feature and puts ClearCube in the crowded space of VDI vendors, along with VMware, Quest (through Provision Networks acquisition), Leostream, Ericom, the just entered Sun and Qumranet, and soon even Citrix.

Both the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

Since the beginning of the Hyper-V public beta, Microsoft is slowly releasing details about which features its new hypervisor will offer.

Three of them have been recently detailed:

• Multiple snapshots
  Hyper-V introduces the concept of virtual machine snapshots – which is to say point in time images of a virtual machine that you can return to at any stage. These snapshots are implemented in the virtualization layer – and can be taken at any time with any guest operating system (even during an operating system installation). Snapshots can be taken whether the virtual machine is running or stopped. If the virtual machine is running when the snapshot is taken there is no downtime involved to create the snapshot.
• Operational roles
  By default Hyper-V is configured such that only members of the administrators group can create and control virtual machines.
  Hyper-V uses the new authorization management framework in Windows to allow you to configure what users can and cannot do with virtual machines.
• WMI calls
  The WMI provider for virtualization and the hypervisor API enable developers, and scripters, to quickly build custom tools, utilities, and enhancements for the virtualization platform. The WMI interfaces can manage all aspects of the virtualization services.

Thanks to Ben Armstrong for the news.

Quoting from the Endeavors official announcement:

Endeavors Technologies, the pioneer in application streaming and virtualization technology, and its parent company, Tadpole Technology plc, today announced Wallace Systems has incorporated AppExpress into its Logibanque software distribution and management system.

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Logibanque is a modular solution that utilizes Endeavors’ AppExpress to stream applications for on-demand delivery to users. The solution also provides sales process management, including bill generation, automated bank transfers and user/reseller activity reporting. Logibanque enables ISVs and content providers to smoothly migrate to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model…

Hardware virtualization allows an unprecedented level of flexibility in modern datacenters which can be combined with many degrees of automation. Depending on the purpose this automation is shaped in different tools for different markets.

The very first application has been the so called Virtual Lab Management, a segment where VMware, Surgient and VMLogix are busy today. But a second one is emerging these days: the VM lifecycle management.

On the long term it’s easy to imagine how the today’s Virtual Lab Mangement vendors will start offering VM Lifecycle Management solutions and vice versa.

A recent set of patents secured by Surgient seems to confirm this vision:

Surgient, the market leader in virtual labs that power solutions for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it has been awarded three new patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Reinforcing its technical leadership in the virtual lab management market, the three new patents cover technologies that enable Surgient customers to better allocate, manage and organize virtualized resources used to accelerate the software development and delivery lifecycle.

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The three patents were awarded during the past year. The technologies covered by the patents were developed entirely by Surgient’s research and development team. The patents include:

• US Patent #6,990,666
  “Near Online Server”-Describes a method for providing fractional burst capacity in delivering virtual computing resources from a centralized, shared server resource pool.
• US Patent #7,257,584
  “Server File Management”-Describes a method for providing portability of virtual server “snapshots” across physical server hosts. One of the underpinnings of Surgient’s library management server, this patented technology provides greater flexibility when developing, managing and deploying virtual machine images.
• US Patent #7,287,186
  “Shared Nothing Virtual Cluster”-Describes a method for organizing virtual machine resources for rapid recovery, such as that required by advanced disaster recovery, reduced power consumption or business continuity scenarios. Enables virtual machines to dynamically move across physical hosts without requiring data to be moved or copied.

Quoting from the PHD official announcement:

PHD Technologies, Inc. (PHD), the leading innovator of backup and replication solutions for VMware Infrastructure 3, has announced that more than 1,000 enterprise customers have selected esXpress v3 to manage backup, restoration and disaster recovery of their data centers. PHD added significant customers this past quarter to surpass the 1,000th customer milestone including ADP, Barnes&Noble.com, Siemens, Tyco and U.S. Food Service…

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, Inc., the leading provider of server infrastructure repurposing software enabling real-time infrastructure for large enterprise data centers, today announced the appointment of Karen Randig to the role of CFO. Randig brings to Scalent a wealth of experience in managing finance, accounting, legal and human resource teams.

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Randig’s distinguished career in corporate finance and administration spans more than 20 years, including interim CFO for several venture-backed companies in the enterprise software, internet, and medical device industries. Previously, Randig was CFO at BizGenics. She also served as vice president of Finance at diCarta. Prior, she held positions at Dun & Bradstreet in the Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions group and as vice president of Finance for the Information Warehouse Solutions group…