virtualization.info Editors

virtualization.info has learned from different sources that VMware just acquired an application virtualization vendor.

There is no confirmation at the moment so what follows is pure speculation.

Among the many listed in the Virtualization Industry Radar, one company seems the best candidate for this acquisition: FastScale.

FastScale doesn’t provide application virtualization and streaming solutions like Softricity (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), Thinstall, Endeavors Technologies and others, but introduces a new approach: through its Composer, FastScale is able to track down which libraries and OS components an application requires, and assemble them in an autonomous package, freeing the software from the operating system dependency.

Only available for Linux systems at the moment, VMware is adopting the startup’s technology since a long time, much earlier than the official launch date in August 2007.

On top of that FastScale Advisory Board includes a VMware veteran, Al Pappas, former CIO, and VMware seems to prefer acquisition of former employees (Akimbi, Determina).

While VMware is not an application virtualization company, FastScale acquisition would fit its strategy, much focus on virtual appliances.

While the idea of a modular data center, through virtual appliances, is interesting and would bring in some notable benefits, it woudl also lead to some major issues. Most of them are related to security and manageability issues.

FastScale capability to deliver incredibly low-footprint virtual machines, tailored around a self-sufficient guest application, would solve part of the security problems, while the just launched Update Manager (integrated into VirtualCenter 2.5) would solve part of the management ones.

Update: While the rumors were right virtualization.info speculation was not. VMware just announced the Thinstall acquisition.

After releasing the long awaited VI 3.5 (and its linked ESX Server 3i), VMware is now focused on new products.

As expected after the Dunes Technology acquisition, VMware will enter the so-called VM lifecycle management market, which a horde of startups and consolidated players (Embotics, Fortisphere, ManageIQ, Platform and others) are preparing to invade.

The product, released by Dunes exactly the same day VMware announced the acquisition, was originally called VS-O Lifecycle: a workflow automation tool obtained shaping the well-known orchestration framework, VS-O, Dune’s flagship product.

But VMware is working on a second solution on the same space called Stage Manager.

Stage Manager is designed to manage the worklflow from taking an application from its initial testing, pilot, user acceptance face up to in-production.

Last but not least VMware is preparing a new product for the Apple market called Importer.

Easy to imagine, Importer will allow VMware Fusion customers to import virtual machines created with 3rd party virtualization products (read Parallels Desktop and Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac).

While this last product is already in beta phase (you can enroll for it here), both Dunes Lifecycle Management and Stage Manager are still in stealth mode, and will appear for the first time at VMworld Europe 2008, at VMware Hands-on Labs, as virtualization.info revealed last week.

As announced in September 2007, Microsoft is already preparing the second version of its System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) with a major, unexpected feature: the capability to manage VMware ESX Server and some Xen-based (probably the one from Novell) hypervisors.

The opening to 3rd party products is something uncommon in the Microsoft strategy, so why this decision? And why with a such popular market player like VMware?

One reason may be that this simplifies the migration of large-scale VMware deployments to Microsoft technologies once Hyper-V will be ready. A mandatory requirement for all the enterprises which adopt VMware Infrastructure today.

Another reason may be that Microsoft thinks it can do a better product than VMware VirtualCenter, looking at virtual infrastructure management from a different perspective. A confirmation of this comes from Rakesh Malhotra, Group Product Manager for SCVMM at Microsoft, which provides some details on his corporate blog:

…

At the end of the day, it’s not about managing virtual machines. It’s about managing applications and services and today, many if not most of those run on Windows. Understanding the application in detail is absolutely critical to making intelligent management decisions. For example, migrating a VM when the CPU spikes to 80% for 10 minutes is not a particularly smart way to make that decision but if the VM is a ‘black box’ to you, it’s the only choice that you have. With our management tools, you’ll be able to set policies and rules based on application specific criteria. For example, if the average amount of time it takes for your order entry system to process an order exceeds 10 seconds and CPU is the reason, add more CPU capacity to the VM. Our customers are telling us that this is much more powerful and relevant. We feel strongly that with Hyper-V, our platform and our management tools provide an excellent end to end solution. With that said, we know that you have investments in VMware but even in that case, our management ‘engine’ can make better decisions on the VMware platform. In addition, the System Center family of products gives you the ability to manage physical servers right alongside your virtual machines with a single set of integrated tools rather than creating a new silo or island within your organization…

Microsoft is clearly looking at virtual machines as applications containers, and aims at managing the entire virtual computing stack instead of just the hypervisor and the virtual hardware. Using the well-known products in its portfolio, System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), the company has a chance to provide a complete and unified management solution, a strategy similar to the one that VM lifecycle management startups (Embotics, Fortisphere, ManageIQ, Platforms and others) are building.

It’s yet to be seen if this will be enough to make the enterprises switch from ESX Server to Hyper-V.

Two months after leaving the stealth mode, Fortisphere is ready to release its first product, also the first release of 2008.

Fortisphere is one of the newest startup included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar, entering the so-called VM Lifecycle Management market.

Virtual Insight is the first module of an entire suite called Virtual Essentials, which introduces monitoring and inventory capabilities for virtual machines, from the virtual hardware to the guest OS applications.

As most VM lifecycle management solutions, this product offers virtual machines tagging and family tree tracking, along with a complete reporting system.

The next module, called Virtual Foresight, will instead bring in a complete policy management system as Fortisphere preannounced:

• Migratory Policy Enforcement
  Embedded policy management ensures enforcement travels with the VM throughout the lifecycle, regardless of origin, organization, location, owner or state.
• Centralized Policy Store
  Provides organizations with a central repository of operations, security, network, performance and management best practices.
• Policy Inheritance
  Ensures parent policies are automatically applied to clones and copies.
• Manual and Automated Response
  With built-in and extensible best practice policies, users can define a wide range of responses, from informational notifications to automated actions.
• Correlative Policy Engine
  Provides correlative analysis of virtual machine and hypervisor data to evaluate risks and compliance violations in a business relevant context. The powerful engine leverages real-time application, configuration, and network information for policy application, evaluation and enforcement.

Unfortunately there no release date has been announced for Virtual Foresight.

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

Sun recently published a very interesting 120-pages whitepaper which introduces to hardware virtualization and describes in details the architecture design of its existing and upcoming hypervisors: LDoms (for SPARC systems) and xVM Server (for x86 and x64 systems). It also includes an analysis of VMware ESX Server and a comparison with its architecture.

…”Virtual Machine Monitor Basics” on page 9 discusses the core of hardware virtualization, the VMM, as well as requirements for the VMM and several types of VMM implementations.
“The x86 Processor Architecture” on page 21 describes features of the x86 processor architecture that are pertinent to virtualization.
“SPARC Processor Architecture” on page 29 describes features of the SPARC processor that affect virtualization implementations….
“Sun xVM Server” on page 39 discusses a paravirtualized Solaris OS that is based on an open source VMM implementation for x86[6] processors and is planned for inclusion in a future Solaris release.
“Sun xVM Server with Hardware VM (HVM)” on page 63 continues the discussion of Sun xVM Server for the x86 processors that support hardware virtual machines: Intel-VT and AMD-V.
“Logical Domains” on page 79 discusses Logical Domains (LDoms), supported on Sun servers that utilize UltraSPARC T1 or T2 processors, and describes Solaris OS support for this feature.
“VMware” on page 97 discusses the VMware implementation for the VMM…

xVM Server is expected in beta before the end of this month, so this is recommended reading.

Read it here.

The upcoming VMworld Europe is not just the new edition of Technical Solution Exchange (TSX) with a different name. VMware has granted that is working hard to provide as much new contents as possible, including the keynotes, which will be performed by Diane Greene, VMware President, and Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist.

While some things will be completely new, others are being greatly improved, like the Hands-on Labs. This year attendees will be able to play with all companies products, each one in a dedicated lab:

• VMware Update Manager
• VMware Site Recovery Manager
• VMware Dunes Lifecycle Management
• VMware Stage Manager
• VMware Guide Consolidation
• VMware Consolidated Backup Integration
• Automating VMware with PowerShell
• VMware Lab Manager

Note that two new products appear: one comes from the Dunes Technology acquisition, the Dunes Lifecycle Management, while another is brand new: the Stage Manager.

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. Last week virtualization.info published a video of Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement. This week instead our guest is Ashwin Kotian:

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Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

After mastering OS virtualization with Solaris Containers (aka Zones) in Solaris 10, Sun is now approaching the hardware virtualization market, with its own implementation of Xen hypervisor called xVM Server.

Officially announced in November 2007, xVM Server will feature a Solaris kernel instead of a Linux one, and will be offered as stand-alone product.

Besides this hypervisor Sun will also provide an enterprise management solution called Ops Center, which will be able to handle large-scale deployments of physical and virtual machines.

On longer terms Sun may want to integrate these two products with another one: a connection broker for virtual desktop environments (VDI) called Sun VDI 1.0.

So far Sun only revealed a pretty general release date for xVM Server and xVM Ops Center, both planned for Q2 2008, but virtualization.info just received a detailed roadmap which unveils beta milestones for the hypervisor and its management solutions:

virtualization.info also learned that Sun is working on Solaris Containers 2.0.

All these components added to its hardware offering (servers, storage and thin clients) allow Sun to enter the hardware virtualization market as a major player, possibly the only one able to provide (and support) the entire computing stack for virtualization purposes.

Despite Xen powers several offerings today (Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell and Red Hat), the Sun one may have additional chances to get adopted.

CNN Money just predicted an upcoming IPO from SWsoft (soon to be renamed Parallels).

While this is just a speculation, virtualization.info heard several rumors during the entire 2007 about a SWsoft/Parallels IPO which was postponed several times.

The stellar IPO performance of VMware, last summer, may lead to think 2008 is the right year to go.

After the GlassHouse Technologies acquisition of RapidApp, this is the second time a consulting company gets acquired, confirming that virtualization services market is experiencing a healthy growth.

Despite the acquisition is uncommon for VMware, usually buying software development firms (Akimbi, Propero, Determina, Dunes Technologies) it may highlight the need for experienced workforce in a small amount of time, like emerged with Sciant acquisition.

Quoting from Reuters:

VMware Inc. has acquired assets of privately held information technology services provider Foedus, a spokesman for the business software maker said.

VMware spokesman Greg Eden said late on Wednesday that the deal had closed earlier this month, and 30 Foedus employees would move over to his company.

Eden declined to discuss financial terms…

After announcing the beginning of private beta phase, SWsoft (soon to be renamed Parallels) finally unveils a detailed feature list for its upcoming Server product:

• Dual architecture (hosted virtualization platform / hypervisor)
• Support for x86 and x64 architectures (only with Intel VT-x)
• Support for up to 64Gb of RAM at host level
• Support for Mac OS X Server as host and guest OS
• Support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris as guest OSes
• Support for 4-way virtual SMP
• Support for ACPI at guest level
• Experimental support for Intel VT-d
• Open APIs
• Remote management console

Despite the obvious interest in Mac OS X Server virtualization, a first in the virtualization industry, the most compelling capability is the dual architecture: Parallels Server will act as a hosted virtualization platform (like VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server) or as hypervisor (like VMware ESX Server or Citrix XenServer) depending on which configuration the customer choose.

So far the company didn’t provide much details about this unique characteristic so that virtualization.info reported the inability of Parallels Server to run a hypervisor. As soon as possible we’ll provide a deep analysis of the platform internals.

Even if the current beta is private SWsoft is now accepting new candidates for the program. Enroll it here.