History

While busy speaking at the Symposium ITxpo 2010 this week, Gartner analysts are also blogging and sharing some details about their presentations. The most interesting one comes from Thomas Bittman, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, the firm’s front man for virtualization and cloud computing research.

Bittman reports three key details (emphasis our):

1. Virtual machine penetration has increased 50% in the last year. Gartner believes that nearly 30% of all workloads running on x86 architecture servers are now running on virtual machines
2. Penetration of virtualization in midsized enterprises (100-999 employees) will exceed that of the Global 1000 within the end of this year
3. Hyper-V is under-performing (compared to Gartner’s expectations)

Bittman says:

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Yesterday VMware held its quarterly earnings call, announcing a new record for revenue, non-GAAP operating profit and trailing 12-month free cash flows.

Revenues for the third quarter were $714 million, up 46% from a year ago. $343 million come from the license revenue, an increase of 43% from Q3 2009. 
US revenues are equal to $362 million. International revenue is $352 million. In Latin-America Mexico, Brazil and Argentina scored over 100% year-over-year growth, while the APAC region grew more than 50% year-over-year.

Globally enterprise license agreements (ELAs) were 20% of total Q3 booking.
Software maintenance and support revenue was $314 million, an increase of 48% from 2009.
Customers continue to buy on average more than 2 years of support and maintenance with each new license purchase, but Q3 back maintenance was slight down from 2009 and VMware predicts this trend to continue in Q4.
Professional Services revenue was $57 million, an increase of 55% from last year, thanks to acquisitions and vSphere training.

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In January VMware released a new product for SMBs called GO: a hosted web-based console that can be used to manage on-premises vSphere Hypervisor (formerly ESXi) hosts and their virtual machines.

Go allows to initialize and patch ESXi hosts, create and operate virtual machines, check the VMs patching level connecting to the Shavlik Technologies service.
The company made the product available for free but customers have to grant to VMware the privilege to analyze the way they use the console.

Last week, at VMworld Europe (read virtualization.info live coverage) announced a new edition of Go, simply called Go Pro.

There are two additional key capabilities: Go Pro introduces software licensing management and patch deployment (rather than just scanning).

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In July 2010 Citrix and Microsoft released a technical white paper detailing a reference architecture for a VDI environment combining Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 running on top of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and Dell hardware. This end to end solution provided by Dell is called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD). The paper is called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop Reference Architecture and contains 27 pages.

The document covers three types of configurations:

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Mark Russinovich, founder and former Chief Software Architect at Sysinternals/Winternals and now Microsoft Technical Fellow has released version 5.0 of the SysInternals LiveKd tool.

LiveKd is a utility which allows you to enable kernel debuggers like Windbg and Kd, part of the Debugging Tools for Windows on a local system. Normally these tools only work when attaching a serial “null modem” cable between two systems and booting the to be analyzed system into debugging mode.

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Beginning October Quest released vWorkspace 7.2 beta 2 of its multi-platform VDI connection broker software. vWorkspace 7.2 will be the follow up of version 7.1 which was released in April this year.

Quest did also announce that for vWorkspace it will extend support for connectors to the Apple iPad and Zero PC , InfoWorld reports. By providing support for the Apple iPad, Quest follows other companies like Citrix and VMware which earlier announced support for the Apple iPad as well.

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Last week Virtual Computer and the security vendor Sophos announced a technology alliance to secure the NxTop environment with Sophos Antivirus.

Similarly to the Citrix-McAfee alliance, this is a two-phases integration. In the first one, happening now, the two companies are optimizing the infrastructure for malware scanning.

Specifically, Virtual Computer prevents that every virtual desktop equipped with the Sophos endpoint agent and deployed on its NxTop client hypervisor will have to re-download and update the signature database at each boot. All AV updates in fact are downloaded and applied only to the virtual machines’ master image. 
Most parts of a NxTop virtual desktop guest operating system are rolled back to their master image status when rebooted, greatly reducing the risk of stay resident malware, but some parts are retained to offer profile personalization. According to that, the Sophos AV, which lives in a dedicated VM, can be fine tuned to perform scanning only on the persistent areas of the guest OSes.

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After the release of SPICE 0.6.0, happened in September, the development of the open source remote desktop protocol supported by Red Hat continues towards the next stable milestone, 0.8, expected in February 2011.

Besides bug fixes, SPICE 0.6.3 introduces the text copy & paste capability for all clients, while images copy & paste is currently limited to Linux.

The open source Linux distribution Fedora already includes SPICE 0.6 in its beta 1. Linux-KVM.com reports that the GA version, available soon, should include this new SPICE release.

Interestingly, the protocol’s roadmap now mention a planned client for Apple operating system Mac OS X. So far SPICE clients are only available for Windows, Linux and, experimentally, Nokia platforms.

In mid May McAfee, or better the now security division of Intel, announced a two-phases partnership with Citrix to deliver security solutions specifically tailored for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). 
The first phase involved releasing a VDI-optimized antivirus, while the second is about introducing a single out-of-band security agent that control the whole virtual infrastructure through hypervisor’s APIs (something the industry usually calls introspection).

A couple of weeks ago McAfee completed the first step, announcing the availability of its new Management of Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) antivirus.

MOVE is based on a lightweight agent, that pseudo-randomizes some of its activities on the virtual desktops’ virtual hard drive, and that doesn’t carry on the scanning and removal engine. 
The core activities are in fact executed out of band, in a remote, dedicated virtual appliance. What the optimized agents, which are centrally managed by McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), really do is copying the suspicious files from the potentially infected virtual desktop to the security virtual appliance, over a secure channel.

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A little more than one month ago the New York Post reported about a soon-to-be-closed two-part sale deal reached by Novell and two undisclosed buyers. Immediately after, the Wall Street Journal reported that VMware was one of the bidders, interested in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) business unit. 
According to the first report, such deal was expected to finalize within 3-4 weeks, which means right now. Meanwhile, Reuters added color to the story, reporting that the acquisition couldn’t complete as soon as planned because none of the bidders wanted the NetWare asset at the price that Novell’s board of directors wanted to sell.

True or not, the whole virtualization industry is holding its breath to see if VMware will end up owning an operating system and, with it, a complete software stack, from the hypervisor to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.
Well, apparently, it won’t happen.

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