History

Microsoft is preparing a new offensive against VMware for its new fiscal year 2011, starting this October.

eChannelLine published the summary of a keynote performed by Ross Brown, the Vice President of Worldwide Partner Sales at the company.

During his speech Brown covered the five main revenue opportunities for Microsoft partners in FY11, and one of them is virtualization.
The company announced a new 20% deal registration incentive for new virtualization business starting in October.

Microsoft probably aims at reaching at least the 30% market share during the new fiscal year, counting on the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, currently in beta, which introduces Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

Believe or not, the first blade system in the history of Cisco, the Unified Computing System (UCS), was launched more than one year ago.

Since March 2009, Cisco managed to enter a number of data centers, also thanks to the tight relationship with VMware and EMC.
In May The Register reported a sequential revenue growth last  up 168% with a unique customer base doubled to over 900 customers.
Last month Cisco reported about another 100 new customers.

HP, the player that has the most to lose if Cisco gains any significant market share, reacted in several ways.
It openly criticized the new competitor, it acquired 3Com to strengthen its networking offering, it renewed its relationship with Microsoft about virtualization.

A few are closely watching the competition and what it will produce in terms of innovation around fabric computing, virtualization and cloud computing.
One of them is Steve Kaplan, Vice President of Data Center Virtualization Practice at INX, a leading Cisco and VMware partner.

In December 2009 Kaplan presented the first public comparison between the Cisco UCS and the HP BladeSystem Matrix. As far as virtualization.info knows, nobody from HP or the HP partners network ever replied with an alternative side-by-side comparison, but HP is clearly fighting in the field.

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Oracle released yesterday version 5.0 of its Sun Ray Software, the solution introduced by Sun in 1999 to centrally control and power its Sun Ray thin clients.

This release introduces a couple of major new capabilities.

First of all, the client part, called Oracle Virtual Desktop Client (formerly Sun Desktop Access Client) can be installed on Mac OS X.
On top of that the product now ships with a connector for VMware View 4, allowing the Sun Ray Clients to be used as View thin clients.

The server component is available for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 Update 3, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2 and Sun Solaris 10 5/09 for both SPARC and x86/x64 architectures.

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The US startup Liquidware Labs just secured a very big customer: Dell Services (formerly Perot Systems).

The two companies signed a partnership to use Stratusphere and ProfileUnity in VDI assessments and migration plans for the many Dell enterprise customers.

The OEM already announced plan to use the technology for both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop platforms, which are offered as part of what Dell calls Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD) model.

Finally, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) released the first industry standard benchmark for hardware virtualization and OS virtualization: SPECvirt_sc2010
The standard body is working on this since November 2006.

The benchmark designed to simulate the activity of three typical workloads: a web server, a Java application server and a mail server.
To do so it leverages existing SPEC benchmarks, modified to measure performance in a virtualization environment: SPECweb2005, SPECjAppServer2004 and SPECmail2008.

SPECvirt_sc2010 adopts the same approach used by the VMware benchmark VMmark, the tiles, to measure scalability: the framework deploys additional tiles until overall throughput reaches a peak and all virtual machines continue to meet required quality of service (QoS) criteria.

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Immediately after the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, Veeam announced opened a public beta program for its new Monitor 5.0.

The company released version 4.0 exactly one year ago, introducing storage, hardware and process monitoring.
The new version sports a new dashboard, over 100 pre-defined thresholds and alarms linked to a knowledge base, the capability to monitor logical disk space and snapshots, and of course the support for vSphere 4.1. This last thing means that Monitor is now able to report about completely new things like:

• NFS usage
• Storage paths and storage adapters (including load balancing status, I/O, latency, and read/write rates)
• Virtual disks: including I/O, latency, and read/write rates
• Power usage of ESX/ESXi hosts
• Memory Compression

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After a couple of months of beta testing, the startup Kaviza announces the availability of VDI-in-a-box 3.0.

The new version  introduces support for the ICA/HDX remoting protocol and XenServer, an expected move considering that Citrix has invested in Kaviza an undisclosed sum in April.

The company is now saying that its solution can lower the cost of a virtual desktop down to a price range between $260 and $410 (including hardware, software and licensing).
The minimum amount of virtual desktops is set to 25.

The US startup 5nine entered the virtualization market in June 2009, launching four different products in a very short timeframe: a capacity planning tool that also offers manual P2V migration capabilities, a capacity management tool, an automated P2V migration tool, and a virtual firewall.

To be fair, the first three ones could easily merge into a single product: since the technology is already there, a customer would probably expect that the same tool performs capacity planning before and after consolidation, allowing the administrator to go for manual or fully automated execution of the plan by orchestrating P2V migrations.
Separating all these features in different tools is just a way to complex things, and in fact 5nine now has a bundle called Migration Suite that comprises all products.

While shaping its capacity management offering, 5nine also updates on its other product: Virtual Firewall.

Launched in July 2009, the first version showed severe limitations and a way too simple packet filtering engine to be considered for any medium business or enterprise deployment.

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Two well-known security players in the virtualization market, HyTrust and Catbird, just announced a technology partnership to integrate their two flagship products.

The HyTrust Appliance  provides control and compliance for host machines by analyzing, authorizing and creating an audit trail for all virtualization administration operations and enforcing correct host configuration; while Catbird vSecurity proactively secures the virtual network and guest operating systems by analyzing and responding to network events and attack, and enforcing correct VM configuration.

HyTrust data will be incorporated into Catbird’s compliance framework. From the Catbird Command Center, IT administrators will be able to manage and monitor the automated and continually-updated compliance posture of a data center. Rolled up into a single view, the combined information covers more controls than any other solution in the marketplace, simplifying auditing and reporting for regulators and security directors monitoring compliance changes in the move from P to V.

ToutVirtual is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in February 2006. The company initially focused its management solution on VMware platforms, and then slowly added support for Xen (the Citrix, Novell and Oracle implementations) and Hyper-V.

So far the flagship product, which changed names from ShieldIQ to VirtualIQ to VirtualIQ Pro, didn’t win any relevant market share. The company barely updated it three times in four years: the last version, 3.0, is dated January 2009.

But something is moving again: two days ago the company announced an OEM agreement with Symantec to include Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) in the upcoming VirtualIQ Pro 4.0.

ToutVirtual will use Backup Exec to provide continuous backups, application-aware backups, as well as physical to virtual (P2V), virtual to physical (V2P) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations.

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