virtualization.info Editors

As unveiled by virtualization.info at the beginning of this week, VMware will disclose at least two new products at VMworld Europe 2008: Lifecycle Management and Stage Manager.

Additionally VMware will show another two new products previewed at VMworld US last year but still unavailable, Site Recover Manager (SRM) and VMware Operational Framework (VOF).

A further confirmation comes from some of the first sessions published in the agenda:

• BC01 – VMware Site Recovery Manager
  Learn about VMware’s coming DR automation product, Site Recovery Manager, and how it can lower RTO, improve reliablity, and lower costs by instrumenting the setup, failover and test of your VI-wide DR plan.
• RW04 – VMware, ITIL Service Management and all that
  Many customers have adopted Service Management processes around ITIL to better manage their provision of IT Services. As virtualization matures within the Data Centre, these practices need to be provided on the virtual platforms. Principal areas include Availability, Capacity, Incident, Problem, Configuration and Change Management. Richard will discuss how these processes affect virtualized servers, and how the many ISV players provide solutions to manage them. He will also discuss VMware’s application of ITIL and other processes in the VMware Operational Framework (VOF), and discuss how customers have improved and accelerated their VMware roll-out having adopted best practice.

virtualization.info will be in Cannes to cover the event, live blogging during the keynotes and reporting about these new products (check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco).

At the event several US product managers will perform the sessions. virtualization.info already published the videos of Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement and Ashwin Kotian, Product Manager of Physical Virtualization. This week instead our guest is Bing Tsai:

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Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

As experienced virtualization professionals know, the most critical tier of a VMware Infrastructure is not the virtualization host, ESX Server, but the management server, VirtualCenter, which provision, coordinates and moves all virtual machines. Despite that VMware offers some high availability capabilities for ESX Server but nothing to protect VirtualCenter.

Luckily VMware made VirtualCenter a cluster-aware application since version 2.0.1 patch 2, which allows customers to use industry standard products to achieve fault tolerance.

Next Monday The Neverfail Group, a VMware Technology Partner, will launch its own solution to the problem: Neverfail for VMware VirtualCenter.

The product is much more sophisticated than Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), monitoring the healt of the hardware, network infrastructure, operating system and the management service as well. As soon as the fault is recognized it fails over VirtualCenter on another physical host, without service interruption.

At the same time it’s less demanding than MSCS, not requiring a shared storage facility to work.

From its corporate blog Roger Klorese, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Citrix, reveals a major feature coming for XenServer:

There’s been a lot of noise recently about the complexities of patch management in a virtualized world — a lot of jockeying for last place, as it were, in the “Whose Patch Tuesday is Biggest” contest.

…

We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.

Pool-wide patch management has been integrated into the product, and, in conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, will allow you to:

• Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
• Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
• Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
• Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
• Apply the patches
• Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

Roger is referring to the virtualization.info post Patch Tuesday for VMware, which raised some concerns about the growing need for a hypervisor patch management strategy.

VMware is already addressing the issue with the launch of Update Manager, included the new VI 3.5.

With this feature Citrix starts to build those features needed to attract big customers and become more competitive on the enterprise market.

From the Xen-devel mailing list Keir Fraser, Project Leader at XenSource, announces release of new Xen 3.2 version.

This new build introduces some important features:

• Preliminary PCI pass-through support (using appropriate Intel or AMD I/O-virtualisation hardware)
• Preliminary support for a wider range of bootloaders in fully virtualised (HVM) guests, using full emulation of x86 ‘real mode’
• ACPI S3 suspend-to-RAM support for the host system
• Xen Security Modules (XSM)
• Configurable timer modes for HVM guests, depending on how the guest OS manages time-keeping

As usual source code is available here while binaries will be soon released here.

After achieving several IBM Server Proven certifications for its platform, Virtual Iron goes further and enters the IBM PartnerWorld program.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software, today announced that it has achieved advanced partner status within IBM’s PartnerWorld program. The membership advancement reflects Virtual Iron’s continued sales, marketing and product development contributions to IBM and the optimization of Virtual Iron’s solutions for IBM’s computing platforms including the certification of its software as IBM Server Proven, IBM System Storage Proven, and most recently, IBM Ready for Grid and IBM Ready for DB2…

This monday virtualization.info revealed that VMware is about to announce a new product called Stage Manager.

Now Duncan Epping just published additional informations about the product, also revealing that the beta program is expected to start next week:

VMware starts a new beta program the 21st of January, the product is called Stage Manager.

• You can easily boot shadow production servers
• Create test environments for infrastructure changes
• Build complex pre-production environments
• Systematically propagate complex system changes through development, testing, staging and user acceptance phases before committing systems into production
• Get a better grip on your change, configuration and release (CCR) management processes

Read the whole article at the source.

On his personal blog Duncan Epping just published an interesting news about a new upcoming certification from VMware: the VMware Certified Design Exper (VCDE).

A new advanced certification for design architects of enterprise deployments, VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDE), will be in beta toward the end of November. The VCDE measures the consultants ability to design, implement, document and test a VMware Infrastructure data center for the enterprise. Requirements for the VMware Certified Design Expert include:

• VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3
• Pass a VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise level exam and a VMware Infrastructure 3 design exam
• Submit, present and defend a successful virtual infrastructure design plan

Read the whole article at the source.

This is a welcome addition considering the growing need of high-level architects, able to consider all the complex aspects impacted by virtualization (networking, storage, security, performances).

VMware also announced the update of its flagship certification, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), to include VI3.5 topics by March 2008.

Since the day Apple changed its licensing to allow virtualized copy of Mac OS X Server on its own hardware, the competition between Parallels and VMware reached a new level.

The first support statement came from Parallels which will provide Leopard Server virtual machines on its upcoming Parallels Server.

Few weeks after also VMware is ready to confirm the same feature coming:

…

Today, we are pleased to say that VMware is able to virtualize Mac OS X Leopard Server on Apple hardware using VMware’s proven Mac virtualization engine. We will be demonstrating this achievement with our “Mac OS X Server in a Virtual Machine” Technology Preview…

And since Mac OS X Leopard has moved to 64-bit, we are able to leverage VMware’s proven 64-bit support to run Mac OS X Server at it’s full potential, a feature that has been a VMware exclusive for more than three years.

…

The one question we know we will get asked is will VMware support Mac OS X Server on non-Apple hardware. While this is only a technology preview today, VMware works closely with Apple and respects their licensing policies and as such Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine will only be supported on Apple hardware per Apple’s license agreement…

What VMware doesn’t explicitly say is which product will allow Mac OS X Server virtual machines and speculations about a possible Fusion Server (aka VMware Server for Mac) are already all around.

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

SWsoft today announced that Mark Zbikowski, a former Microsoft Architect and pioneer software developer, will serve the company as Senior Technical Advisor. In this capacity, he will assist SWsoft as a resource to the development team and advisor to senior management.

While at Microsoft, Zbikowski led efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. In 2006, he was honored for 25 years of service with the company and the first employee to reach this milestone other than executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Zbikowski designed the DOS executable file format, used in MS-DOS executable files, and his initials “MZ” grace the headers of that file format. He is one of the main architects and developers of Windows NTFS, the most popular file system in use.

Zbikowski expertise is very interesting considering its new role in SWsoft. It’s evident that the OS virtualization vendor is working on a much deeper integration with Windows.

On top of that it’s worth to remember that SWsoft already includes several former employees from Redmond.

Last but not least there always is the long-term plan of acquiring an OS virtualization company for Microsoft, something that Bob Muglia said very clearly in June 2006.

Considering all these facts, it’s possible that Microsoft is preparing to acquire SWsoft (before its supposed IPO).

Just yesterday virtualization.info published the news about a possible acqusition of VMware in the application virtualization market, speculating that the acquired firm could be FastScale.

The official announcement comes today, clarifing the actual acquired company and the company strategy behind the move:

VMware, Inc. , the virtualization software leader, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualization software company headquartered in San Francisco. VMware is acquiring Thinstall to expand its desktop virtualization capabilities which help customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the current fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed…

The acquisition of Thinstall and its use for VDI scenarios extended the competition front with Microsoft (which acquired Softricity application vendor in June 2006) and Citrix, and brings the company a notable set of OEM partnerships: with LANDesk (March 2007), with Provision Networks (July 2007), with BMC (September 2007) and with Macrovision (October 2007).

Given the strong focus of Thinstall on Microsoft platforms, the acquisition seems to validate an important point, often emerging in surveys: large majority of virtual machines contains Windows guest OSes.

At the same time this acquition validates once and forever the fact that application virtualization is considered one of the next mainstream technology for most major players: before VMware, Microsoft acquired Softricity, Citrix acquired Ardence, Symantec acquired Altiris and even Google acquired GreenBorder.

Thinstall is the 7th acquisition for VMware. Before it the virtualization player acquired Akimbi (June 2006), Propero (April 2007), Determina (August 2007), Dunes Technologies (September 2007), Sciant (October 2007) and Foedus (January 2008).

If the trend continues VMware will acquire a new company per month.

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