History

Intel is definitively building something. The chipmaker is shopping, and shopping quickly, in the software market with a primary focus on security. At least for now.

Just a couple of weeks ago the company announced the acquisition of the security giant McAfee for $7.68B in cash. Now it acquires the virtualization startup Neocleus.
The news is not official yet, but Neocleus posted the news on its corporate blog a few hours ago, which Intel immediately required to remove, virtualization.info has learned.

Neocleus launched in May 2008, entering the virtualization market with an ambitious plan to leverage a client hypervisor for security purposes. Their product, based on Xen, has been one of the first on the market, along with the Virtual Computer NxTop.
The company, funded by Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel for $16.4M in two rounds, has been under the radar for most of its time.

Neocleus go-to-market strategy changed over the last two years, as their product failed to get any serious traction: in early 2010 the company released a version of its TrustedEdge platform called NeoSphere that could be OEM’ed and extended by PC lifecycle management (PCLM), security and help desk vendors. The first company to adopt it, in March, has been BigFix.

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VMworld 2010 is at its last day and VMware decided to place the second keynote today. The second keynote is usually more technical than the first one, but as virtualization.info readers know, the first keynote already was a split between vision/strategy and technology/roadmap, with both Paul Maritz, CEO, and Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP of R&D on stage. 
So today it will be interesting to see what will be presented.

Rick Jackson, CMO, is on stage to introduce the day. The theme is “innovation”. Apparently, VMware wants to use today to reinforce its image as leading innovator. To do so it invited three guest speakers to show some cutting-edge technologies.

The first one is Pranav Mistry, inventor of SixthSense.
SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that leverages a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant to augment reality on any object around users. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and other physical objects.
A video of the prototype in use is shown. It’s almost exactly the futuristic interface seen in the Minority Report movie and even more than that. A lot of companies are working to bring to the market that interface, but Mistry’s project seems well beyond that.

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Here we go again. As usual virtualization.info is at the VMworld conference to live cover the keynotes and any other major announcement released by VMware during the event.

Paul Maritz, CEO, is today’s keynote speaker. He will speak in front of 17,000 attendees, as Rick Jackson, CMO, confirmed on stage. Is VMworld on track to compete against the Oracle OpenWorld in terms of audience?

Before Maritz performance, VMware starts with a funny video that tries to describe what cloud computing is without using any technical jargon. The choice demonstrates how early-stage this market still is considered.

Martiz on stage.
He reports that in 2010 the number of virtual machines surpasses for the first time the number of physical servers deployed (more than 10M).
He also reports that VMware has over 25,000 partners and over 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) worldwide.

Maritz says that VMware is committed to innovate on automation and management to decrease OpEx. Seeing that the primary focus is on automation is very positive: datacenter orchestration has been overlooked for too much time.
He also says that innovation should also focus on the way infrastructure resources should be purchased.

Now Maritz is making a case for the SpringSource acquisition (and all the others related to that): are legacy apps on new infrastructure enough?
VMware believes that the world embracing cloud computing would move on more sophisticated, next generation web applications , and this implies the need for a new application platform, made of management tools (Hyperic), open frameworks (Spring) and common services (APIs).

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In the attempt to distract the audience just before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix announced last week the imminent availability of XenClient 1.0.

The Xen-based client hypervisor (see virtualization.info report about it) is expected to ship at the end of September as part of the XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2.
The platform will be free only for XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum editions customers with current Subscription Advantage agreements.

It’s not clear if consumers will be able to download and use the product in some way but it seems that Citrix is primarily targeting enterprise customers with this first release.
But no fear: Virtual Computer is expected to release NxTop 3.0 later today, which will introduce a free downloadable client hypervisor that doesn’t require the enterprise management component.

Update: Those ones that don’t have XenDesktop can still use the product. Citrix will release a XenClient Express edition you can be used on up to 10 devices free of charge, with full functionality, and no expiry.

Just one day before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix managed to distract the audience with a major announcement: the acquisition of VMLogix for an undisclosed sum.

VMLogix entered the virtual lab automation (VLA) market in October 2006, in competition with a really short number of companies.
In February 2009 the company signed a deal with Citrix to OEM its flagship product in the Essentials management package, which is available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
As Citrix has to enrich its virtual infrastructure to better compete against VMware, this acquisition was largely expected.

The acquisition is expected to complete during the Q3 2010. The VMLogix technology will be fully integrated in the next version of XenServer (6.0?) as well as in the just announced OpenCloud platform.

With VMware owning Akimbi (June 2006), Quest owning Surgient (July 2010) and StackSafe out of business (March 2009?), there are no more virtual lab automation startups out there, except Skytap and the just born CloudShare. But both companies only offers a hosted business model, and this restricts the range of potential bidders.
According to this, in the attempt to become more desirable acquisition targets, both Skytap and CloudShare may want to offer soon a version of its platform for on-premises deployment.

Earlier this week Symantec announced two new products for VMware virtual infrastructures dubbed ApplicationHA and VirtualStore.

ApplicationHA, powered by Veritas Cluster Server technology, monitors applications and virtual machines health. It can restart both: applications by direct intervention, and VMs by coordinating with vCenter Server.
Plus, the product can be fully operated from the vCenter Client and supports VMware HA and DRS.

VirtualStore instead is powered by Veritas Storage Foundation and is a virtual NAS that has a couple of specific capabilities for VDI environments.
The first one, called FileSnap, allows to rapidly clone and provision thousands of virtual machines in minutes through vCenter.
The second is a page caching system that Symantec claims able to eliminate the performance bottlenecks when multiple users concurrently power their virtual desktops.

ApplicationHA will be available in September, at $350 per VM.
VirtualStore instead will be released in November with a per-server pricing model.

Yesterday CA announced the release of a new version of IT Client Manager (ITCM), its systems management software.

ITCM integrates multiple other CA products, including Asset Management, Software Delivery, Remote Control. Patch Management Desktop DNA and Asset Intelligence.
As result, it offers asset discovery, OS migration, patching, remote control, and software delivery capabilities.

Version r12.5 becomes much more virtualization-friendly with the support for hardware virtualization platforms VMware ESX (both 3.5 and 4.0) and Oracle Solaris Containers (aka Zones, for both SPARC and Intel architectures) as well as application virtualization platforms Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp.

For hardware virtualization, ITCM r12.5 provides full virtual assets inventory capability, while for application virtualization the product integrates virtualized packages in the software delivery lifecycle.

CA plans to further extend virtualization support in ITCM r13, scheduled somewhere in 2011, by adding presentation virtualization profile management capabilities and a full set of capacity planning tools for VDI deployments.

A couple of weeks ago Veeam silently released a free edition of its reporting solution Reporter.

Reporter 4.0 was released in May, introducing a web GUI, change management reports and capacity planning reports.
The free edition lacks a few things:

• the capacity planning report pack
• the historical data for change management reports (it can only track the last 24 hours)
• the automatic generation and delivery of reports
• the access through Microsoft PowerShell
• the capability to access raw data through Microsoft Excel
• the capability to export full details about the virtual infrastructure through Microsoft Visio
• the capability to view data on multiple dashboards (only one is supported)
• the capability to publish data on multiple 3rd party dashboards (only one is supported)

Despite that, the free version still offers rich reports about the virtual infrastructure inventory, events, user access, storage capacity and configuration changes.

Vizioncore has recently lost its Vice President of EMEA region, virtualization.info has learned.

Roger Baskerville was the EMEA Sales Director at XenSource before the Citrix acquisition. He then covered the role of Regional Director for Northern Europe at Citrix.
Vizioncore hired him in November 2008 and now it lost him just before the integration with Quest is completed.

No words on where he’s landing.

For years Google has been pretty adamant that it doesn’t need hardware virtualization.
Everything started in 2007 when a Google engineer, Luiz André Barroso, said at the Usenix conference:

I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.

In April 2009 Google even (indirectly) responded to VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz about the idea that virtualization is the only viable way to do cloud computing.

But now, apparently, something changed at the search giant.

The KVM Forum 2010 just ended and the speakers slide decks are now available online. They are full of extremely interesting details about the KVM project and its roadmap.
And one of them is especially interesting: Ganeti as a KVM cluster management interface.

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