History

In March Convirture released version 2.0 of its open source management console ConVirt (formerly XenMan) for multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.
At that time the company also announced an upcoming Enterprise Edition that is finally available today.

This edition introduces the following features:

• dynamic resources allocation (through the use of resource pools)
• high availability (through hosts and virtual machines fail-over)
• virtual machines backup (both scheduled and on-demand)
• network and storage automated configuration (VLAN and SAN setup across multiple hosts)
• role-based access control
• alerting and email notification
• CLI and APIs

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Microsoft is not the only one that is pushing its channel to sell more virtualization. While at Redmond the company is preparing a new 20% deal registration incentive program that will start in October, VMware launches a new Accumulative Volume Purchasing Program (VPP).

The program provides incremental, tier-based discounts for VMware partners to offer their customers over a rolling two-year period.
Partners receive financial incentives when they purchase VMware products in volume with discounts on eligible license products, through a 4-level discount range:

Virtualization and cloud computing are changing the way we design data centers. The more powerful CPUs Intel and AMD produce, the more virtual machines per core administrators can host on a single hypervisor. But the higher consolidation ratio we achieve the more issues we have with memory, storage and networking components, that are quickly becoming the new virtual infrastructure bottlenecks.

Virtualization vendors try to overcome memory limitations with several overcommitment techniques, like the new Memory Compression from VMware and the upcoming Dynamic Memory from Microsoft, while storage vendors try to develop more virtualization-friendly SANs controllers able to facilitate acrobatics like long-distance virtual machines live migrations, like the EMC VPLEX. 
Excluding Cisco and HP, established networking vendors don’t seem equally busy in addressing the new challenges that exist in virtual and cloud computing infrastructures.

This topic has been covered a number of times before. The last one is in a roundtable hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) last month.

The group of experts that participated the round table is particularly interesting as it includes CTOs and Vice Presidents from Citrix, Juniper, HP, Yahoo! and even the semi-stealth startup Nicira, where the founder and former CEO of VMware Diane Greene invested.

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Despite the great Q2 performance reported two days ago by VMware, not everybody believes that the virtualization vendor will continue to keep its leadership position in every market segment the near future.

Dow Jones in fact reports about a research note released last month by Goldman Sachs about VDI suggesting that Citrix will surpass VMware and lead the market in the next three years.

The financial firm wrote in the Americas Morning Summary of June 9:

We believe Citrix and VMware will dominate the VDI market for the foreseeable future, with close to 90% of the market between the two. However, momentum is diverging currently in favor of Citrix. Hence, we have updated our model to reflect increasing market share for Citrix increasing from 42% in CY2009 to 50% in CY2013. VMware’s share moves from 51% to 39% over the same timeframe. Previously we had both vendors with equal share in CY2013.

The skepticism expressed by the VMware’s executives during the Q2 2010 earnings call certainly didn’t help to counter the Goldman Sachs forecast.

The Computer Security Division of the US National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) published last week the first draft of a new paper titled Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies.

By “full virtualization” the authors mean what the Industry calls “hardware virtualization”: a virtualization platform based on a type-1 (bare-metal, or hypervisor) or a type-2 (hosted) virtual machine monitor (VMM) that hosts virtual machines (VMs).
The document also refers to “server virtualization” meaning “hardware virtualization for server consolidation” and to “desktop virtualization” meaning “hardware virtualization executed on a consumer desktop” and not “hardware virtualization for client consolidation”.

The 35-pages paper has three sections: the first one introduces the concept of full virtualization and its implementations. the second one presents the security recommendations for virtualization components, and the third one introduces to the discipline of secure virtualization planning and deployment.

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In April virtualization.info covered the soft launch of a very interesting stealth startup called VMTurbo.

Without unveiling its product, the company promised a solution that could automate virtual infrastructures following constrains dictated by capacity management and platform optimization engines.
At that time, the VMTurbo’s Product Marketing and Business Development Manager John Gannon said:

…we are absolutely providing capacity management functionality in our product but we’re also addressing the issues of (automated) bottleneck prevention and remediation, workload balancing, rightsizing, and power management at the same time…

Now the company has finally unveiled more details about its offering and the product seems really articulated.

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In January virtualization.info reported about a stealth startup called Pancetera.

At that time there was almost no information about the company’s technology but a brief list of provided benefits. A few additional hints found online suggested that the product, possibly called TeraCapture was a storage management solution for VMware virtual infrastructures.

The real product, now that Pancetera unlocked its website, is slightly more complex as it combines the storage management with the storage optimization.

The storage management component is called SmartView.
SmartView aggregates all the storage resources available inside the virtual infrastructure as a hierarchy, under the P: virtual drive.
It supports fibre channel and iSCSI SANs, NFS arrays and even DAS resources like local hard drives. 
Any operating system or management solution that can read and map a CIFS shared folder or a NFS volume can remotely access the P: network drive, performing files management with simple drag&drop operations.

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Yesterday VMware announced its financial results for the Q2 2010. During the earnings call, the company’s executives briefly commented on the market adoption of VDI and the forecast for the near future.

VMware continues to be surprisingly skeptic about the imminent adoption of VDI as a mainstream technology. And while it’s evident that most companies are not yet sold to the idea of client virtualization, this still is a radical change in the message that the delivered in the last couple of years.

In the Q1 2010 earnings call To Nielsen, COO, said:

Exactly when this market is going to tip though we don’t know. We were saying – engaged and focused on it, but I couldn’t tell you if its going to be at the end of the year or next year or exactly when that’s going to be but our eyes are certainly on the ball and we are going to make sure that when it does tip, we are there to take advantage of it.

In this call, three months later, he reiterated:

We continue to hold high expectations for the desktop virtualization market, yet it remains difficult to predict at what pace customer interest and evaluations will turn into accelerated buying. We are seeing Windows 7 upgrades, and the proliferation of new end-user devices such as the iPad and Smart phones are fueling public discussion and customer interest. However, no single technical or economic tipping point is emerging as the accelerant to VDI adoption.

During the Q&A part of the call, Nielsen added more details:

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Yesterday VMware announced its financial results for Q2 2010.

Interestingly, the company started the call reporting a record growth in the SMB segment. VMware expects to accelerate this trend even more with the inclusion of vMotion in the vSphere 4.1 Essential Plus SKU. At the moment the vSphere Essentials business is growing 100% sequentially.
VMware added 20,000 new customers in the last two quarters, reaching 190,000 customers total, but it doesn’t say how many are in the SMB segment.

The company closes the Q2 quarter with $2.8B cash and $1.5B of deferred revenue, a year-over-year growth of 33%. 
Total revenue for the Q2 was $674 million, up 48% from Q2 2009, while total license revenue was $324 million, an increase of 42% from the Q2 2009. 
Software maintenance and support revenue was $290 million, an increase of 54% from last year, but the revenue decreased sequentially. Customers continue to buy on average more than 24 months of support and maintenance with each new license purchase.
Professional Services revenue was $60 million, an increase of 54% from last year, and up 11% sequentially, but VMware doesn’t expect a strong growth in the PSO revenue because of the investments in the partners ecosystem (VKernel seems to disagree here).

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Demand Technology Software is a US firm that develops a number of products for performance data collection and monitoring on Windows operating systems.

The company’s flagship product is called Performance Sentry. Its multi-tier architecture is designed to scale up to thousands of monitored servers, storing their performance data on its SQL Server database. To collect data, it uses an agent that runs as a Windows service.

The company just released a version of this product that supports VMware vSphere (both ESX and ESXi hosts, with or without vCenter Server). The new version, called Performance Sentry VM, does more than just run inside a virtual machine.

Leveraging the VMware APIs in fact, Demand Technology Software managed to translate the VMware’s performance metrics into objects and counters that Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon) can use.
The translated data, coming from the hypervisor and the guest operating systems, is presented by the Performance Sentry virtual machine that basically runs as a proxy provider. At this point any management solution can use it, including Perfmon or System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) thanks to a Management Pack that the company develops.

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