History

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, along with Alexander Galitsky, founder of Almaz Capital Partners, just launched a new Russian venture capital fund: Runa Capital, capable to offer approximately $30 million in seed financing.

Almaz Capital Partners is the same VC firm that bought 5% of Parallels stake in April 2009, equal to about $11M, previously owned by Insight Fund.
Runa Capital investment activities will be supported by Runapark business incubator.

Runa Capital list of venture partners include some well-known high-tech entrepreneurs and investors: Andreas Gauger and Achim Weiss, co-founders of the world’s largest hosting provider 1&1, Ilya Zubarev, co-founder of Rolsen and Acronis, Igor Borovikov, founder of the largest Russian software distributor Softline, Charles Ryan, сhairman of UFG Asset Management, and Igor Daniloff, founder of ‘Doctor Web’ antivirus company.
Some of these people already sit in the Parallels board of directors or are tightly connected to the company.

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As virtualization.info reported earlier today, VMware is about to significantly change the architecture of its virtual infrastructure. Before that transformation, which customers won’t see before 2011 probably, the company will change another key aspect of its offering: the pricing model.

Along with the release of vSphere 4.1 in fact VMware announced today a new per-VM licensing that will take effect starting September 1, 2010:

VMware vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager will be sold in VM packs on a per VM basis starting on September 1, 2010. VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager are already licensed on both a per VM and physical server model. Per VM licensing for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ will take effect in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The minimum number of virtual machine licenses in a licensing pack is 25, reports IT News.

vCenter will continue to be priced per-Server, but for how long? It’s easy to guess that the per-VM licensing will be extended to the key tier of the virtual infrastructure as soon as the next version of vSphere will be out.

With the today’s release of vSphere 4.1 VMware also announced a remarkable number of upcoming changes in the platform architecture. Some of them are well-known since a lot of time while others are surprisingly new.

The next version of vSphere will not have:

• the Console Operating System (COS)
  VMware published a warning recommending its customers to transition to the ESXi architecture.
• the Converter plug-in for vCenter
  VMware recommends customers to look for the stand-along Converter product
• the Guided Consolidation module for vCenter
  VMware recommends customers to look for the Virtualization Assessment, the P2V Migration Jumpstart or the P2V Accelerator services.
  The company doesn’t mention the new CapacityIQ product, but it’s clear that it will be the solution of choice for capacity planning and management.

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As expected, VMware releases today a significant update for its vSphere virtual infrastructure.

vSphere 4.1 introduces an impressive number of new features that virtualization.info partially unveiled in May:

• Scripted Install for ESXi. Scripted installation of ESXi to local and remote disks allows rapid deployment of ESXi to many machines. You can start the scripted installation with a CD-ROM drive or over the network by using PXE booting.
• vSphere Client Removal from ESX/ESXi Builds. For ESX and ESXi, the vSphere Client is available for download from the VMware Web site. It is no longer packaged with builds of ESX and ESXi.
• Boot from SAN. vSphere 4.1 enables ESXi boot from SAN (BFN). iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are supported.

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Now that the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available as a public beta, Microsoft published a detailed article about what its Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V is.

The company already published an 80-minutes webcast on this topic, exactly one month ago, but this piece is part of a long and insightful series about memory management in virtual infrastructures and memory over-commitment techniques:

…With Hyper-V (V1 & R2), memory is statically assigned to a virtual machine. Meaning you assign memory to a virtual machine and when that virtual machine is turned on, Hyper-V allocates and provides that memory to the virtual machine. That memory is held while the virtual machine is running or paused. When the virtual machine is saved or shut down, that memory is released.

…

With Hyper-V Dynamic Memory there are two values: Startup RAM and Maximum RAM:

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VKernel is one of the many VMware partners that over the years added value on top of VI / vSphere. Focused on capacity planning and management, the startup saw its partner turning into a competitor the day vCenter CapacityIQ was announced, in October 2009.

Reacting accordingly, VKernel first criticized the competing product, then it started releasing a number of free tools to increase its customer base as soon as possible, and then it introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V in its flagship solution.

Meanwhile VMware didn’t push too much for CapacityIQ, giving VKernel and other partners/competitors like Lanamark, CiRBA and Liquidware Labs enough room to grow. But this are changing apparently, as the virtualization leader is now actively promoting its product on the corporate blogs.

The business relationship between the two companies seems now completely compromised, as the startup got evidence about VMware’s competitive marketing material, circulating since December 2009, that trashes Capacity Analyzer:

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Yesterday Citrix announced a couple of new certifications: the Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer (CCEE) for Virtualization and the Citrix Certified Integration Architect (CCIA) for Virtualization.

The CCEE certification is focused on the ability to combine operational planning skills with tactical design expertise and integration know-how. Candidates must pass exams for Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, and XenServer. On top of that there’s a last exam: the A15, Engineering a Citrix Virtualization Solution.

The CCIA certification instead is focused on best practices for virtualization analysis and design.  Candidates must have achieved the CCEE and pass one more final exam: the A16, Architecting a Citrix Virtualization Solution.

Citrix has multiple products to deliver applications from the data center to the user’s production environment. While this is a good thing because the offering can address the many different needs that customers have, it also represents a significant challenge in terms of communication: when XenApp makes more sense than XenDesktop? And when the two can be used together?

The company is trying to educate new and existing customers by providing some guidance with a new 17-pages paper: Technical Guide to Application Delivery Options for XenApp and/or XenDesktop.

The document, which is focused on XenApp 5.0 and XenDesktop 4.0, is not particularly detailed but outlines some useful application delivery criteria:

Today Microsoft officially announced the first beta of the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.
The beta actually started in late June but the company today makes the bits publicly available.

As expected, the Service Pack 1 introduces the Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V and RemoteFX for the Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

While many server-based computing (SBC) players announced their support for RemoteFX, the real winner here is NVIDIA, which suddenly has a huge opportunity to enter the server market.

NVIDIA is working with Microsoft and the leading OEMs to ship its Quadro GPUs (including the existing FX 5800, the FX 4800 and the FX 3800) in upcoming servers tailored for VDI.

If RemoteFX gets some serious traction, NVIDIA may start producing VDI GPUs that other virtualization players want too. And this includes Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat and even VMware, which has an OEM agreement with Teradici but its business is definitively not producing graphic cards.

Just a few hours ago, during his keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010, Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business division, announced the release candidate of a new add-on for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2: Self-Service Portal 2.0 (VMMSSP).

VMMSSP is a stand-alone product and not an upgrade for the current version of the SCVMM self-service portal. The two portals can coexist.

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