virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the Provision Networks official announcement:

Provision Networks, a global provider of presentation and desktop virtualization solutions, announced today that its market-leading Virtual Access Suite has been selected by IBM for inclusion in its Virtual Client Solution (VCS) ecosystem. The two companies are collaborating in the field to promote widespread adoption of VCS.

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With IBM’s Virtual Client Solution, users are able to enjoy all of the benefits and personal control of a stand-alone desktop — functionality including print capabilities, USB drive support, and audio — while reducing many of the challenges related to current stand-alone desktop environments. These challenges include limiting susceptibility to theft and viruses, ease of deployment of new users, extended downtime during a hard drive failure, or having to rebuild their preferences and settings after each client “refresh.” …

Quest entered the virtualization market with popular Vizioncore, continuing with Invirtus acquisition, never confirmed so far (but recently indentified by virtualization.info).

Now, after a deeper research, virtualization.info found a new connection between Quest and a third company called Veeam, based in Russia.

Most recent Veeam news announcement mentions a link with Quest which starts in 2004, after Aelita Software acquisition.

Aelita CTO, Andrei Baronov, also worked as R&D Director at Quest and as CTO at Amust Software, which became, as he wrotes on his personal blog, Veeam Software:

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Because customers are different for consumer tools (something Amust Software is doing from the very beginning) and Virtual Infrastructure Management tools, we decided to have a new brand for the new direction. The name we settled on is Veeam Software. It is not a separate Company yet, but we might do a spin off in the future…

So far Quest decided to keep its name away from virtualization market, but the more we go the more connections we see.

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

Update: Veeam contacted virtualization.info and denied any relationship with Quest.

Veeam was founded as separate company after Aelita Software acquisition by Quest. After that, several former Aelita employees left Quest for Veeam.

So far Quest has no investments in Veeam.

After just one month since version 2.8, virtualization startup VMLogix launches today third major release of its lab management solution LabManager.

This new build mainly introduces support for VMware Infrastructure 3 and new guest OSes like Microsoft Windows Vista and Sun Solaris 10.

Download a trial version here.

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

One year after its launch, Qumranet finally arranged first conference about its virtualization platform, KVM, which is now part of Linux kernel since version 2.6.20.

KVM Forum 2007 will take place in Tucson, Arizona, from August 29 to 31, and will put on stage very intersting sessions, presented by speakers from Qumranet, IBM, Intel AMD and others. Among interesting sessions there are:

• KVM Lite, No Hardware Support, Fewer Calories
• VT Roadmap, Hybrid Virtualization, Power Management, Fat vs Thin Hypervisor
• Standards Based Systems Management Solution for KVM
• KVM Live Migration

Look at the whole agenda here. Register for it here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

This year IDG arranged a new event about newest technologies taking a main interest in moder datacenters, including virtualization, HPC and grid computing.

The event will take place in San Francisco, from August 6 to 9, and virtualization has a whole track with an exceptional keynote performed by VMware President, Diane Greene, and eight sessions:

• Improving TCO in NextGen Data Centers through Implementing Virtualization and Blade Servers
• Grid – Distributed Computing at Scale
• Case Study: Revolutionary Solutions for the Data Center of the Future
• Building a Roadmap to the Next Generation Data Center
• Global File Virtualization: Over 1 Billion Served
• Virtualization And Beyond
• Net-ing a Greener Data Center
• Pervasive Orchestration for the NGDC

Register for it here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

Quoting from the VirtualLogix official announcement:

VirtualLogix, Inc., the Real-Time Virtualization company, today announced that it has secured $16 Million in Series B financing. This funding includes participation from new investors, Esprit Capital Partners, who led the round, and Intel Capital. Current investors, Atlas Venture and Index Ventures also contributed to the Series B funding.

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As part of the investment, Tom Bradley, partner at Esprit Capital Partners, will join the Board of VirtualLogix and John Mascarenas, from Intel Capital, will join the Board as an Observer. VirtualLogix has raised a total of 28 million dollars to date with investors that include Atlas Venture, Cisco Systems, Esprit Capital Partners, Intel Capital and Index Ventures…

Quoting from the Invirtus official announcement:

Invirtus, Inc., a premier provider of virtualization management software, today announced the appointment of Andy McCartney as Vice President of Marketing.

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McCartney joins Invirtus from Atlanta-based OpenSpan where he was vice president of marketing. In this role he was pivotal in establishing the company’s pioneering position and marketing function in the high growth application integration and automation space, where virtualized desktops were increasingly critical to end-user productivity. Prior to OpenSpan, McCartney led channel marketing at Atlanta-based Vocalocity, a software innovator in the telecommunications and VoIP marketplace, where he was responsible for establishing relationships and enablement programs for OEMs, ISVs, SIs and VARs. McCartney was also director of entrepreneurial services at eHatchery, an Atlanta-based high-tech incubator for technology companies where he advised startups with their IP development, go-to market strategy, fundraising and execution. He originates from the UK, and has enjoyed many dynamic marketing roles for European and US software companies large and small, including a global product marketing role for executive information systems at Information Builders, Inc. in both London and New York…

While the company pushes news about new Vice President of Marketing, it stays silent about its new Vice President of Product Engineering, Scott Herold, leaving Vizioncore and confirming tight relationship between these companies and Quest.

Quoting from the Veeam official announcement:

Veeam Software, an innovative provider of software for managing virtual servers, has appointed industry veteran George Sidoris as worldwide vice president of sales.

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Most recently, Sidoris led direct sales and systems integrator programs for the Federal Government sales team at Quest Software. He came to Quest through its 2004 acquisition of Aelita Software, where he worked with both private- and public-sector accounts. During his tenure at Aelita, Sidoris more than doubled revenue, created and led the public sector sales organization, and was personally instrumental in securing multi-million-dollar transactions. Earlier, Sidoris built and led sales teams at a number of small technology organizations, as well as at Computer Associates International (CA). He began his career in information systems operations management with several Cleveland-area companies…

Starting with VMware Workstation 6.0, VMware is introducing new capabilities in its virtual infrastructures. One of them allows virtual machines to exchange data without using guest OSes network-based approaches like FTP, NFS, NetBIOS, etc.

This capability is granted by a new experimental interface called VMCI:

The Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) supports fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host.

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Without VMCI, virtual machines communicate with the host using the network layer. Using the network layer adds overhead to the communication. With VMCI communication overhead is minimal and different tasks that require that communication can be optimized…

This interface allows transmission of small messages between VMs, as well as sharing of complex data like guest OSes memory.

This opens new possibilities in solving old problems like high availability: think about a virtual cluster where nodes are no more required to communicate by network to share data and activate fail-over.

At the same time, capability to share with host OS, makes VMCI suitable for solving new class of problems, like efficient security check of virtual machines: think about a virtual infrastructure where anti-virus, host intrusion detection systems, endpoint security agents, etc., are controlling guest OSes integrity from host level, without the need to install same agent software inside all virtual machines.

Considering such opportunities, once this technology will be available on VMware server-class products it may allow new generation of security tools.

Read the whole VMCI documentation at source.

This is possibly what Steve Herrod, Vice President of Technology Development at VMware, was referring to in his keynote at Symposia 2007.

Quoting from ITPro:

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At a VMware event in London IDC analyst Chris Ingles said that virtualisation is increasingly being used for core business processes.

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Ingles said he expects the number of physical servers which are virtualised to jump from seven per cent this year to 50 per cent in 2011. “That may be a little bit conservative,” he said…

Read the whole article at source.

This month IDC also predicted that physical server market will hardly grow over 2% annually through 2011 because of virtualization and that virtualization services market will reach $11.7 billion by 2011.

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