Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
The UK startup tuCloud, which launched in September 2009 with one of the first Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering on the market, just hired a new CTO: Jose Luis Medina.
Medina has been the CEO of Bató IT Services, a consulting firm focused on virtualization and based in Spain, for almost a year and a half. Before that he covered several roles as project manager and business development manager for multiple companies in Spain.
In February Computer Associates (CA) appointed Andi Mann as its new Vice President of Product Marketing for Virtualization Management.
Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) for more than four years, Mann is a well-know and respected industry analyst, extremely focused on the virtualization and cloud computing markets.
His insight and privileged position in the industry will hopefully increase the confidence in the CA virtualization strategy and capability to execute.
So far the company in fact didn’t play a too active role, and while its messaging seem to imply a renewed effort, customers may want to wait the delivery of these promised new, robust, insightful management tools:
The announced Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, which will introduce Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and the RemoteFX technology (acquired from Calista in January 2008), is expected to be released within the end of this year by Microsoft.
Its official beta program started on June 21 and the first build already escaped the Microsoft Connect facility, probably hitting the illegal software distribution channels within the next 24-48 hours.
The documents accompanying the beta 1 are already circulating, and they indeed include confirmation of the two major features mentioned above:
Changes specific to Windows Server 2008 R2
Dynamic Memory
Constraints on the allocation of physical memory represents one of the greatest challenges organizations face as they adopt new virtualization technology and consolidate their infrastructure. With Dynamic Memory, an enhancement to Hyper-V™ introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, organizations can now make the most efficient use of available physical memory, allowing them to realize the greatest possible potential from their virtualization resources. Dynamic Memory allows for memory on a host machine to be pooled and dynamically distributed to virtual machines as necessary. Memory is dynamically added or removed based on current workloads, and is done so without service interruption.
Virtual machines running a wide variety of operating systems can use Dynamic Memory; for a complete list, see the “Dynamic Memory Evaluation Guide” at [removed URL]. The guide also discusses Dynamic Memory settings and usage in detail.
TechTarget is reporting that VMware had to delay the release of View 4.5, planned for June 14. virtualization.info sources confirm that the product was supposed to reach the GA status one week ago and that, instead, VMware released a new beta.
The product won’t appear before September, in time for VMworld or may be even later.
TechTarget also adds that the product won’t have the profile management component acquired from RTO Software in March, because of incompatibilities with Windows 7.
In early May Brian Madden reported about another feature that was supposed to be included in View 4.5 and that has been axed: the client hypervisor known as Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).
The new version of vSphere may be released earlier than expected according to some changes in the VMware’s website. And the virtualization platform may be indeed called vSphere 4.1 rather than 4.5 as virtualization.info suggested so far.
An attempt to browse the URL http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=ESX41 in fact redirects to the default login page for non-public downloads, and on this page the product name used is ESX 4.1:
Yes, it’s true: virtualization.info already used the “Diane is back” theme in February, when the founder and former CEO of VMware sort of reappeared on the virtualization market as an investor of the startup Nicira.
But Nicira still is in stealth mode at this point and the Greene’s role in there will probably be all but operational.
She may be more active in another startup that emerges today from the stealth mode: Nimbula (formerly Benguela).
Greene will be a board member, advising an interesting team of former Amazon and VMware employees.
The company has been founded in 2008 by Chris Pinkham (CEO) and Willem van Biljon.
Pinkham is the former Vice President of Engineering at Amazon.com, where he spent five years, and one of the founders of Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). van Biljon was an Amazon Director, leading the EC2 development team, but in his career he founded Mosaic Software and managed it for over 11 years.
Second day here in Prague for the Catalyst Conference 2010. Yesterday virtualization.info reported about a subset of the agenda, providing live coverage of three sessions about Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing.
Today the focus will shift on server and desktop virtualization, including a promising session about client hypervisors.
The first session we are going to cover is titled Server Virtualisation, Mobility, and Shared Physical Infrastructure: New Beginnings, performed by Chris Wolf, Research Director at Gartner.
Wolf is on stage.
He starts describing the state of the union for the virtualization market: many companies now consider virtual infrastructures as the default platform for all x86 applications, and this platform is the foundation of emerging standard architecture models designed by vendors like VMware, Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft and HP, featuring a deeper integration between servers, storage, networks, security and management.
This week virtualization.info is in Prague, Czech Republic, to follow and report about the Burton Group (a Gartner independent subsidiary) Catalyst Conference 2010 Europe.
The event features a specific track about virtualization and IaaS cloud computing and virtualization.info will cover some of the sessions that are part of this track.
This morning the first one is titled Building a Viable Cloud Adoption Strategy, performed by Drue Reeves, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner.
Reeves is on stage: we know that cloud computing has a lot of issues (security, vendor viability, ROI, liability, etc.).
He says that we passed the definitional phase in cloud computing and this is the year of planning, building and maintaining.
Customers are primarily divided in two groups: the ones that are ready to happily jump on the cloud computing bandwagon and the ones that want to know nothing about it.
|
|
|
|
BlueLock is one of the four hosting providers that joined the VMware vCloud program and that currently offer a vSphere-based cloud infrastructure powered by vCloud Express.
The company planned to declare its offering out of beta at the end of March, but at the very last minute it changed its mind and postponed the launch.
Of course the company is spending a lot of effort to promote the VMware cloud, mostly now that the vCloud Service Director (vCSD) is about to hit the market, and convince customers that it can work better than Amazon EC2.
Part of this effort turned into an interesting 10 minutes video, where the company compares the two Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing offerings:
Now that the TechEd 2010 conference is ended, Microsoft is publishing its breakout session video on TechEd Online.
Just last week virtualization.info mentioned a must-see session about the Hyper-V Dynamic Memory feature, part of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.
Today we’d like mention another interesting session titled Hyper-V Backup Deep Dive: A Look Under the Hood.
The 53-minutes presentation is available for on-demand streaming (you’ll need Silverlight) and for download (both WMV and MP4 formats). Microsoft also published the slide deck.
