virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from Computer World:

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“Midrange servers are experiencing a period of short-term investment this year, partly as a result of firms adopting some larger systems with a view to the rollout of virtualization,” according to the report. “This adoption of virtualization, however, will be an inhibitor over the longer term as the overall server market struggles to maintain growth rates of more than 2% annually through 2011.”…

Read the whole article at source.

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

Quoting from Business Journal:

Former Amazon.com Inc. executive Mark Peek has joined VMware Inc. as chief financial officer, the company said Thursday.

In his new role, Peek will lead VMware’s finance, IT and facilities teams.

The Palo Alto-based company said Peek has more than 25 years of industry experience, including as Seattle-based Amazon.com’s chief accounting officer and senior vice president…

Read the whole article at source.

Considering this one as last step before its Initial Public Offering, there’s a chance VMware decided to launch IPO at VMworld 2007, in early September, instead of this summer as initially announced.

Quoting from InformationWeek:

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Virtualization has thrown us for a loop, quite honestly,” said Shannon Poulin, Intel enterprise marketing manager, last month at an IDC conference on virtualization. Two years ago, less than 5% of the data center had been virtualized. By 2010, Intel projects that 25% of enterprise data center servers will be running in virtualization mode. Server design is trying to catch up with the trend, Poulin said.

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“The virtualized environment is the Wild West when it comes to performance benchmarking,” he noted.

“I think we’re only in the infancy” of designing servers for virtualized operation, he added.

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Intel’s Poulin said future Intel motherboards for four-way servers will contain a “Flex” feature to assist in the migration of virtual machines across different servers.

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Poulin said Intel’s second generation virtualization hooks will let a virtual machine migrate across all Intel chips and breach the Intel/AMD barrier…

Read the whole article at source.

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

Allen Stewart, Principal Program Manager of Windows Server Division at Microsoft, wrote a short but interesting piece on one serious problem companies embracing virtualization have to face: change of IT administration model.

…there does not seem to be a consistent model some companies have taken the approach of keeping things the same way as the physical environment, others have created a virtualization group and assigned them the task of managing the virtual world.

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So in the centralized approach Tier 1 and Tier 2 have complete rights to the environment and handle activities like VM creation from templates, deleting VM’S, starting/stopping, workload migration. The Engineering team handles, virtualization product evaluation, environment build out, creating standard VM builds/templates.

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Certain environments like branch offices and test/dev labs may dedicate a different model where Virtualization tasks and activities are delegated to business units or IT in branch offices…

Read the whole article at source.

VMware is finally approaching final release of its first virtualization product for Apple desktops: Fusion.

In this last build (50460) VMware introduces some interface improvements (including Unity experimental support for more Windows editions) and a memory optimization control system.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Quoting from the IGEL official announcement:

IGEL Technology today announced the inclusion of a Leostream client in the latest version of its Linux firmware.

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IGEL offers VDI compliance in addition to all the other digital services available in its Linux firmware. This includes terminal emulation, Citrix ICA, NoMachine NX, VoIP, Java and native SAP.

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VDI compliance will be available across all IGEL Linux thin clients from July 27th 2007…

After announcing a revamped Virtualization Industry Radar, virtualization.info launches today a new tool: Virtualization Industry Predictions.

Virtualization Industry Predictions collects all forecasts major analysis firms publicly disclosed since 2003, providing customers, system integrators and investors another effective tool to research and track virtualization market evolution.

Virtualization Industry Predictions is available at this address: https://virtualization.info/predictions

Just two weeks ago SearchServerVirtualization published first vague informations about an upcoming lite version of VMware ESX Server, featuring hardware integration at some levels.

Now website News Director, Alex Barrett, is back on topic revealing Dell will be VMware partner offering this solution in a new server line called VESO:

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VESO, according to a large Dell customer who was briefed on the product, will be available in the second half of this year, and will have extended memory and I/O capabilities, simplified iSCSI boot functionality, physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration services, and an embedded hypervisor, most likely ESX Lite.

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The addition of an iSCSI boot option suggests that ESX Lite may come in multiple versions. An embedded version residing in memory would be more of an OEM offering, the source said, whereas booting off iSCSI storage rather than a flash drive or firmware could lay the foundation for larger, richer hypervisor environment…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from ComputerWeekly:

Gartner fellow, Brian Gammage, said, “Microsoft’s licensing terms for Windows Vista running in VMs are unjustified; in addition, these terms are widely perceived as being designed to delay market adoption of competitive virtualisation software.”

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Gartner expects Microsoft to release a hypervisor for Windows Vista by mid-2009, which would lead to a rapid increase in the number of virtualised installations. Gammage said, “To accommodate this change, Microsoft will need to make a number of adjustments to Windows licensing and product use rights.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Putting aside predictions, it’s true Microsoft has to do something for its desktop virtualization strategy. So far in fact company only talked about Windows Server Virtualization (WSV, formerly codename Viridian), which will be a bare-metal hypervisor solution.

No words have been spent to address desktop virtualization need for customers which saw few and non-competitive improvements over years on Virtual PC.

Possibly Microsoft wants to approach virtualization in two different ways: hardware virtualization with WSV on server-side, and application virtualization with SoftGrid (acquired in 2006 from Softricity) on client-side.

If Microsoft decides to offer hardware virtualization also for desktop instead, it has three choices: continue improving Virtual PC, which seems unlikely considering investments made so far in WSV, adapt WSV to work with Windows Vista, which could require long time before seeing a working product, or buy a vendor already offering a competitve solution in this segment (e.g.: Parallels, innotek).

Parallels acquistion woudld imply SWsoft acquisition as well, which makes sense, considering Microsoft willing to offer OS virtualization beside hardware and application virtualization.

In all cases Microsoft has to clarify strategy as soon as possible and deliver it without further delays to avoid VMware taking unrecoverable market shares.

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

With an email to its beta testers VMware announces availability of release candidate (build 397) for its upcoming Lab Manager 2.5.

Company doesn’t detail which improvement are in place for this new build and beta program is declared closed.

VMware also discloses RTM version will be available in early July.

Since Lab Manager 2.5 introduces support for ESX Server 3.0.2, this minor verions for ESX is expected as well in the near timeframe.

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