virtualization.info Editors

In just two days Microsoft completely reshaped its virtualization strategy. Yesteday:

• It announced System Center Virtual Machines Manager (SCVMM) capability to manage Citrix XenServer and Presentation Server
• It announced Hyper-V capability to use Citrix XenDeskop as VDI connection broker
• It announced acquisition of Calista Technologies to enhance its RPD protocol for VDI environments
• It announced virtualization of Vista Home Basic and Home Premium Editions
• It announced support for Office when virtualized through Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid)

But that’s not enough. Today Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, stated thatapplication virtualization is crucial for desktop and servers.
In other words Muglia announced that Application Virtualization will be available also for servers.

This position has a massive impact on the way virtualization will be sold and adopted by customers.

Despite support and licensing issues that slow down application virtualization adoption today, so far the technology has been pushed as a more efficient and less demanding approach than hardware virtualization for corporate’s clients. But when the technology reaches the corporate servers suddenly an overlap and a conflict with hardware virtualization appears.

Should I virtualized a database server with hardware virtualization (through virtual machines) or with application virtualization (thorugh virtual layers)?
The new Microsoft answer to this question is: with both.

If Microsoft releases Application Virtualization for Windows Server it’s not killing its Hyper-V strategy: it’s implicitly suggesting to use hardware virtualization for OS delivery and application virtualization for services delivery.
And the nested use of both technologies is a major step towards a dynamic data center which virtualization.info usually calls liquid computing.

At this point Microsoft only misses one layer between these two: the OS virtualization one provided by SWsoft. But Redmont giant may be working on this as well.

Among the many virtualization news included in yesterday announcement one is particularly important: Microsoft now officially supports Office when virtualized through Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid).

This is major and welcome move from Microsoft: just like for hardware virtualization, customers find a major challenge in application virtualization adoption because of the severe lack of support from ISVs (virtualization.info ranks lack of support as first challenge in today’s market).

The fact that Microsoft is finally supporting the ubiquitous Office suite in this scenario may persuade other vendors to do the same, leading to the same acceleration we are seeing in hardware virtualization market today.

With such announcement Microsoft also made clear that it’s finally ready to push for application virtualization: the company acquired the technology from Softricity in May 2006 and in almost two years never released similar support statements.

A reason for this unexpected change depend on VMware, which just acquired Thinstall.

Through a lock-in support strategy Microsoft may want to avoid a further growth of VMware in the application virtualization space: it will be hard for vendor’s customers to adopt its new product if Redmond giant doesn’t offer support for the scenario (kust like Oracle is doing right now with its database).

Despite the step in the right direction there is something that Microsoft is not ready to do: changing Office licensing to reflect the virtualized option.

In the last two years some early adopters raised concerns about the price a virtualized application should have: since SoftGrid technology allows to stream Office components just when they are needed by the end-user, this means that an application is not really always installed on a desktop like in traditional computing or in hardware virtualization. So customers wonder why they should still pay for everyday use when they don’t.

In other words companies are looking for a new pay-per-use licensing scheme. But it would imply a radical impact on the entire Microsoft business model and it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

So far Microsoft had a controversy position about Vista virtualization, changing its mind several times: only the Business, Ultimate and Enterprise editions of the client OS could be virtualized, generating much complains among students and many home users.

The announcement of Microsoft extended strategy for virtualization (now finally official after yesterday’s leaks) unveils a change of direction: both Home Basic and Home Premium editions can be finally virtualized.

This turn-around may depend on an upcoming major initiative in the VDI space, which just started with Calista Technologies acquisition and Hyper-V integration with Citrix XenDesktop.

If Microsoft wants to expedite the adoption of its client OS in different VDI environments (from corporate VDI infrastructures in SMBs to hosted VDI infrastructure for non-business uses) it has to offer the entire product line and not just the most expensive editions, which would negatively impact on costs.

Another possible explaination may be related to the wild success obtained by Apple and Parallels/VMware in spreading virtualization among the masses (and in many cases facilitating the migration to Mac OS X).

Until November 2007 Apple didn’t permit virtualization of its operating system, but with a sudden licensing change the company now allows Mac OS X Server in a VM (as soon as it stays on any Apple physical hardware).

This may be the first step before extending the same change to the client version of the OS, allowing Leopard to become the only platform where to run every virtualized OS. And just in case this happens Microsoft wants to be there with all its Vista editions.

At this point it’s worth to consider if Microsoft is regretting to have dismissed its Virtual PC for Mac.

While Quest moves in the virtualization space have never been too evident, in 2007 the company strategy began to emerge: besides its well-known control on Vizioncore, Quest first acquired Invirtus and then acquired Provision Networks.

Now Quest adds a further step:

Quest Software, Inc. today announced it has completed the acquisition of Vizioncore Inc., a leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management. Initially acquiring a controlling interest in Vizioncore in 2005, Quest broadened its virtualization product portfolio in 2007 with the acquisitions of Invirtus, a provider of virtual machine optimization, conversion and automation products, and Provision Networks, a leader in virtual client and desktop management solutions. As part of the company’s plan to support increasing customer needs for managing their virtual environment, acquiring the remaining equity of Vizioncore marks the latest step in Quest’s effort to strengthen its position as a leader in software that enables companies to manage and enhance their heterogeneous IT infrastructure.

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Quest also announced that Matt Dircks, recently named General Manager of its virtualization business, will initially focus on the Vizioncore product line as he develops the go-to-market plans for Quest’s growing portfolio of virtualization products.

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He added that Quest has also added industry visionary Scott Herold to the virtualization business as its Lead Architect…

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

Microsoft acquisition of Calista is not the only news that was leaked today. The entire press announcement describing the renewed Microsoft virtualization strategy was just published by ZDNet and DABCC (with many others following).

Among others, the announcement unveils major interoperability between the Microsoft and Citrix virtualization offering. The partnership between the two on virtualization goes well beyond granting smooth performances for Windows virtual machines and adopting VHD for future products.

Today (tomorrow actually) Microsoft announces that both Citrix platforms, XenServer and Presentation server, will be managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). At the same time Citrix announces that its new connection broker, XenDesktop, will support upcoming Hyper-V as virtualization host. Additionally Citrix announces that it’s working on a V2V migration tool able to seamless move virtual machines between Hyper-V and XenServer.

A major news for Microsoft customers considering that SCVMM will also manage VMware platforms.

Over time it appears evident how the Microsoft strategy is to surround VMware through massive partnerships focused on virtualization: with Novell, with Citrix and recently with Sun. Maybe this is why Oracle CEO says VMware is the next Netscape.

With a terrible gaffe Forbes just broke the news of a new acquisition by Microsoft, to be officially announced tomorrow.

The company is Calista Technologies, a stealth startup focus on what is called today presentation virtualization (aka desktop remoting). Few details about its solution, Calista Virtual Desktop (CVD), are available at today beside the list of supported hypervisors, VMware and Citrix ones, along with Microsoft Terminal Services platform.

On the paper CVD has some real potential, also able to impact the growing market of multimedia thin clients (like NEC VPCC):

CVD provides support for 100% of all file and streaming media types available for a modern Windows desktop experience without the need for dedicated hardware or software on the client. Specifically, CVD eliminates the need for media player software and software codecs that increase client management costs, and which impact client interfaces when media codecs are not available for a particular application or client platform.

CVD optimizes the RDP protocol to drastically reduce network bandwidth requirements and improve the user experience in bandwidth-constrained and high-latency environments. For example, CVD’s patent pending, visually lossless compression algorithm achieves data accelerations of as much as 20x supporting a high quality standard business desktop usage, including rich media, at 1Mbit/s per user…

So while VMware acquires Thinstall, invading a space, application virtualization, where Microsoft is dominant, Microsoft acquires Calista, preparing to invade a space, VDI, where VMware is traditionally the leader.

But there’s another interesting perspective: while Microsoft is implictly admitting that its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is not optimized for multimedia streaming, with the acquisition and future integration of Calista CVD the company is going to overlap Citrix ICA more than ever.

Startup founder, Neal Margulis, provides some additional insight about its technology:

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Well, think of us as the people that have set out to create technology which, when IT departments deploy centralized desktops and applications, ensures that users will enjoy the same rich user experience as with a locally executing desktop: Full 3D graphics with support for DirectX, Vista Aero and WPF applications, full frame rate video with 100% coverage for all media types, and fully synchronized audio. Except that “their” desktop is actually running in the data center, and they are accessing it remotely using Microsoft’s remote desktop protocol (RDP)…

Is Microsoft turning its partnership with Citrix on virtualization in a competition? It doesn’t seem so: the two just announced full interoperability between hypervisors, management tools and connection brokers.

Update: Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, just clarified that Calista technology will be integrated in Microsoft RDP protocol, serving for both VDI and standard terminal services environments.

In October 2006 virtualization.info broke the news of a new hypervisor, HyperSpace, integrated in upcoming Phoenix BIOS, which was officially confirmed in November.

Now Phoenix is finally ready to unveil its virtualization strategy, which involves HyperSpace as part of a new platform called PC 3.0:

Phoenix Technologies Ltd. , the global leader in core systems firmware, announced today that Rich Arnold, the Company’s COO and CFO, will be presenting to the investment community on January 31, 2008, at the Southwest Securities Small Cap Growth Conference in Dallas, TX, and on February 19, 2008, at the Roth 20th Annual OC Growth Stock Conference in Dana Point, CA.

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The presentation will also include the Company’s vision for PC 3.0 based on Phoenix HyperSpace(TM), an innovative platform the Company believes will ignite a PC revolution by transforming the personal computing experience. The recently announced HyperSpace platform is enabled by an efficient hypervisor also from Phoenix, called HyperCore(TM), a lightweight Zoned Virtual Machine Monitor (ZVMM) that virtualizes the PC platform to offer specialized services for PC users, side-by-side with Windows…

The presentation will be available here.

As virtualization.info readers know since last week, today VMware opens the beta program of a brand new product called Stage Manager (VSM).

Stage Manager streamlines and rationalizes the deployment process of a new virtual machine in production environment: through well-known manipulation tools like multiple snapshots, clones, VM templates, customers can track their virtualized servers during all pre-production phases, rolling back at any point if something goes wrong.

In details Stage Manager is able to:

• Rapidly create new multi-server software configurations (services)
• Monitor resource usage on a per-service, per-stage and per-instance basis
• Easily perform operations on a complete service (e.g. cloning, deploying, archiving, etc.)
• Marshall changes across the service lifecycle, interacting with external process management/workflow system to ensure compliance with service transition policies
• Maintain an archive of past service configurations supporting compliance and recovery operations
• Maintain an auditable history of software configuration changes
• Manage storage behavior on a per-stage basis to maximize storage efficiency
• Control access to services on a per-service, per-stage and per-instance basis
• Inherit then deploy services to resource pools created within VMware VirtualCenter

An even more detailed list of features is available here.

In many ways Stage Manager seems a VMware Lab Manager applied to production environment instead of development & testing ones. In fact both products often overlap goals and share some features like a VM library and the so called Network Fencing technology.

It’s surprising that VMware didn’t build a unique product merging both approaches. At least a basic integration between Lab Manager and Stage Manager is expected at this point.

In any case the product is very welcome considering the endless possibilities to further simplify some risky and very frequent operations like patching production servers or deploying updated applications.

It’s worth to note how aggressively VMware is approaching the VM lifecycle management space from different angles: first Lab Manager, now this one and in a near future also the Lifecycle Management product acquired from Dunes Technologies.

Newest startups just entered the space (Embotics, Fortisphere, ManageIQ) will have a hard time providing additional benefits for VMware customers. The easiest strategy for them will be offering same products for other virtualization platforms like Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Quoting from Financial Times:

As the boss of the hottest company to emerge from the software industry in 2007, Diane Greene has had to deal recently with a familiar rite of passage: the jibes of Larry Ellison.

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Mr Ellison has been characteristically dismissive. He recently compared the company to Netscape, and predicted that Microsoft would quickly eclipse it as it did the browser pioneer. For good measure, he added that the base layer of software on which virtualisation depends, called a hypervisor, was so simple that his cat could write it.

Ms Greene’s tart response, delivered during an interview with the Financial Times at VMware’s Silicon Valley headquarters: “If his very smart cat could write it, my very smart tortoise could write his database.”…

Read the whole article at the source.

SAP is one of the latest companies which officially announced support for VMware environments.

Now from his corporate blog Michael Hesse, responsible for the technical side of the SAP Alliance, publishes a useful guideline to install SAP inside ESX Server VMs:

1. Use the latest processor generations due to their enhanced support for virtualization.
2. For optimal results use virtual machines with one or two virtual CPUs. It is possible to use four virtual CPUs if your workload requires more processing power, but performance-wise two virtual machines allocated two vCPUs each will give better throughput.
3. Follow the SAP rules for setting up file systems for your database installation.
4. Don’t over-commit memory! With VMware it is possible to assign more virtual memory to the virtual machines than there is physical memory available in the host. This practice is not recommended at all with SAP solutions. SAP allocates memory permanently and does not release it again. To enforce this policy, we recommend setting the “Memory Reservation” to the amount of memory configured for the virtual machine. This will ensure that the virtual machine with the SAP instance will always have the full amount of memory available. The same can be done for the “CPU Reservation,” but we recommend enabling this only in case of performance problems, since the reserved resources are not available to other virtual machines any more.
5. Install VMware Tools to avoid time conflicts.
6. If you are using SQL Server as the database, use “fixed memory allocation” to avoid the allocation overhead of “dynamic” memory allocation.
7. For CPU-bound systems with sufficient memory resources, use the SAP flat memory model with memory protection (mprotect) switched off.
8. For memory bound systems, use the classical SAP view memory model.