Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
At the end of September this year, Robert Passmore working for Gartner published an article with the title: Storage Best Practices for Hosted Virtual Desktops. The article discusses how features provided by some storage arrays can enhance Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) implementations.
The paper tries to answer the following questions:
Besides its cloud computing strategy, Microsoft unveiled a lot about System Center at its TechEd Europe 2010 conference a couple of weeks ago. For example, the audience has been informed that Opalis, the orchestration framework acquired in December 2009, will hit version 3.6 in one week or so, while its integration in System Center won’t happen before 12-15 months.
Even more interesting is what Microsoft said about System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012. Marcel van den Berg provided a lot of details about the upcoming feature set, developed to manage private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds:
In November 2008 VMware announced the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, a startup focused on hardware virtualization for embedded devices.
At that time the company also announced its plan to deliver a mobile hypervisor called Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).
VMware remained mum and under the radar about MVP, also because its initial plan to deliver by the second half of 2010 doesn’t seem feasible anymore. The cellphone industry radically changed in the last two years, with new forces and platforms dominating the market. These changes may have obliged VMware to completely reconsider its go-to-market strategy and the timing to execute it.
The company also made significant changes in the MVP architecture as reported by virtualization.info in mid September:
…the MVP architecture has been radically changed compared to the original plans: in its early demos VMware suggested that the mobile hypervisor (a type-1 VMM) would run side by side two VMs with real-time operating systems (RTOS).
The new architecture instead adopts a hosted virtualization platform (a type-2 VMM) that runs on top of the native RTOS installed on the phone. This one is considered the “personal environment” while the VM running on top of it contains the “business environment”…
Now, additional detalis are coming from the VMware’s major competitor in the mobile virtualization arena: Open Kernel Labs (OKLabs), which is coincidentally funded by Citrix.
VMware posted on its website a paper titled: Interpreting esxtop 4.1 Statistics. esxtop is an utility provided by VMware which can be used to perform monitoring and collection of data for CPU, memory, disk and network. This document provides in depth and extensive information on how the statistics of esxtop can be interpreted and used.
The output of esxtop can be viewed in different types of screens one each for CPU statistics, memory statistics, network statistics, disk adapter statistics, disk device statistics, disk VM statistics and interrupt statistics. esxtop also provides a batch mode, where data can be redirected to a file for offline uses, or to use by other utilities.
November 17 (in Milan) and November 24 (in Bologna) I’ll be at the VirtualDays 2010 conference, performing the opening keynote about the state of the virtualization industry and the emerging trends.
In20 already hosted a VirtualDays event in Florence, which has been pretty successful considering it was at the end of July.
Compared to that event, the one in Milan tomorrow will have a different format, with the presentations taking place in the late afternoon, with an evening cocktail at the end to do some networking.
During the afternoon the three major virtualization players will introduce their vision: looking at the agenda for tomorrow, it seems that VMware will have a primary focus on private cloud computing, that Citrix will be all about desktop virtualization, while Microsoft may have a broader vision about IT management in general to communicate.
If you plan to attend feel free to stop by after the lecture.
Alessandro
Veaam has released a white paper titled: VMware Data Protection Report 2010, The Survey of 500 Enterprises. The report, which was written by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research organization and contains 19 pages. The paper contains key findings from a worldwide survey held with 500 CIOs from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France with more than 1,000 employees.
This document gives great insight in the current challenges companies face when adopting virtualization, overall conclusion is that virtualization requires a change of mindset compared to traditional non-virtualized environments.
Hyper9 has released version 3.0 of its Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) solution, this version is the follow-up of Hyper9 VEO version 2.5 which was released in April this year. The product is provided as a Windows installation or a Virtual Appliance which runs on VMware.
VEO is a search engine that integrates with vCenter and indexes the information stored inside the VMware Infrastructure inventory. Once the index is build, Hyper9 allows to find any detail about your virtual infrastructure (VMs, virtual networks, data stores, applications inside the Guest OSes, etc.) through a search engine interface. VEO is also capable to provide performance tracking, capacity planning, configuration management and chargeback automation.
Just one month after releasing two new products, VMTurbo Planner and VMTurbo Watchdog, VMTurbo now announces the release of VMTurbo Host Resolver and VMTurbo Storage Reporer. Both new tools will be included in the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) based virtual appliance and are part of the VMTurbo Integrated Management Suite for VMware virtualization platforms.
At its TechEd Europe 2010 conference, Microsoft spent a lot of time talking about its progress in cloud computing. Among the other things, it announced a set of programs dubbed Hyper-V Cloud to accelerate the adoption of private and virtual private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
A key piece of any cloud computing infrastructure, and next-generation virtual data center, is the orchestration framework. Microsoft must be convinced of this, as it acquired Opalis Software in December 2009. In March the company confirmed that Opalis was being integrated with Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), but admitted that it won’t be part of System Center before some time in 2011.
Now we have more specific dates thanks to the brief report published by Bink.nu:
For years now, the virtualization community has discussed the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft around virtualization, started when the former acquired XenSource in August 2007.
At the end of last week, Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center & Cloud division at Citrix, published a new post on his corporate blog, trying to clarify, once again, the dynamics of this partnership.
Compared to the past attempts, the go-to-market strategy detailed in this new post is more explicit than ever (emphasis our):
…Neither company [Microsoft and Citrix] wants to monetize the hypervisor.
…The Citrix position is that the role of XenServer is to offer a compelling feature set that permits Citrix and Microsoft to compete successfully with VMware…
…If a customer chooses XenServer today because it offers features not present in Hyper-V, (such as IntelliCache) the customer can be sure that Citrix has no interest in locking the customer to that choice: XenServer is 100% compatible with Hyper-V and if the customer replaces XenServer with Hyper-V in the future, we have no issue with that whatsoever…