History

At the beginning of this month the open source project OpenNebula, maintained by C12G Labs, announced the support for the VMware vCloud APIs.
Then, just a couple of day after, the Red Hat CEO said that he’s actively looking to acquire companies in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

And now OpenNebula rushes to announce support to the Deltacloud APIs, the meta-APIs open source project maintained by Red Hat, that the Linux vendor is working to turn into a commercial solution for 2011.

This means that OpenNebula can now connect, through Deltacloud, to additional public and private cloud platforms, including ones that implement RHEV-M:

The Xen.org effort to deliver a Xen-based cloud computing platform, dubbed Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), was formally announced in early September 2009.

The first release, 0.1, only appeared in November 2009, with a very minor update (0.1.1) issued in January 2010.
And one of its key components, the Open vSwitch, didn’t hit the 1.0 GA status before last May.

In this timeframe XCP jumped from version 0.1.1 to 0.5 and it’s available as a Release Candidate, as announced on the official mailing list.
Even if not market as 1.0, the Xen.org team informs that “XCP-0.5 is intended to be a *stable* release, suitable for long-term production use.”

The bits don’t seem to come with up-to-date release notes so we are unable to report on the new features included in this version at the moment.

At some time during the TechEd 2010 conference Microsoft made a significant change in its configuration limits for Hyper-V.

While the previous supported limited for a a single Hyper-V host in a fail-over cluster was of 64 virtual machines, this number has been increased to  384 virtual machines per host.

The total number of hosts allowed per cluster remains equal to 16, with a maximum of 1,000 virtual machines across all nodes.

As the support article confirms, the change applies to the existing version of Hyper-V R2 shipping with Windows Server 2008 R2 and not to the upcoming Service Pack 1 that will be released later this year

Thanks to ServerTalk for the news.

A couple of weeks ago, at its TechEd 2010 conference (see virtualization.info live coverage of the opening keynote) Microsoft hosted a 80-minutes breakout session about the much discussed memory over-commitment technique that will be introduces in Hyper-V as part of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

The presentation, performed by Ben Armstrong, Senior Program Manager Lead at Microsoft, covers Dynamic Memory in depth and it’s the first concrete analysis of how the product will work.

Before this presentation Microsoft only published a few details, suddenly removed by the original poster.

The presentation is available for on-demand streaming here (you’ll need Silverlight) and for download (both WMV and MP4 formats). Microsoft also published the slidedeck:

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At the end of May Microsoft recently expanded its support for the on-premises Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and off-premises Microsoft Update facilities to a new virtualization product: App-V.

WSUS, formerly Software Update Services or SUS, is a free patch management platform offered since 2003 and quite frankly one of the best back-end product ever produced by the company.

At the moment the support only includes App-V 4.5 as reported on the WSUS corporate blog.

Eric Sloof, of NTPRO.nl fame, recently published an interesting rumor about an upcoming name change for the VMware vCenter ConfigControl product.

ConfigControl has been announced in January 2009 with a bunch of other products but VMware never delivered it.
And now, before reaching the general availability, it seems that the product will be rebranded as vCenter Change Insight.

Like other change management products, this one offers a number of highly desirable features for enterprise customers that are working with large-scale virtual infrastructures and soon cloud computing platforms:

• Auto-documents environment, all entities, relationships, dependencies
• Tracks and alerts on configuration and relationship changes real time
• Assesses configurations against past, peers and best practices
• Takes corrective actions via policies (e.g. call out to Orchestrator)

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Last week virtualization.info covered the departure of Andrew Lee, the VMware’s former Director of Corporate Business Development, in charge for a number of acquisitions, including the SpringSource one.

But apparently there’s much more going on in Palo Alto: virtualization.info got a hint that Jocelyn Goldfein, Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop Business Unit, is gone too.

The news is not official, and there’s no trace of changes on her LinkedIn profile or in the VMware’s Leadership page, but we are able to confirm that she’s no more at VMware.
Goldfein is officially on sabbatical and the BU reports to Raghu Raghuram, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Virtualization and Cloud Platforms.

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Earlier today GigaOM reported an ongoing acquisition talk between VMware and Engine Yard, the hosting provider that offers a popular Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud for single and multi-tier Ruby-on-Rails applications.

So far Engine Yard raised $37.5M in three rounds of investment. Amazon participated the last two rounds.

After the acquisitions of SpringSource and the one of GemStone Systems, as well as the partnerships with Salesforce and with Google, it’s clear that VMware has a major interest in owning PaaS cloud providers for different development languages, even if the details of its strategy are still very vague at this point.

Almost one year passed since VMware started its expansionistic campaign in the PaaS and SaaS cloud computing markets, and after so much time it’s still extremely hard for customers to understand the new vision of the (former) virtualization vendor.
Hopefully this August, at the VMworld 2010 conference, VMware will finally explain how all the companies it bought so far will contribute to form the big picture of its post-Diane Greene era.

In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news that the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies was working to enter the virtualization space with its own hypervisor.

The bare-metal virtual machine monitor (VMM), based on Xen and dubbed HyperCore, was officially confirmed one month later but it took more than one year to reach version 1.0.

The vision of Phoenix for that platform has been partially shared by a number of vendors that are offering their client hypervisors (or that are working to do so) at today.
The idea was to provide a very low footprint client hypervisor, centrally managed (Virtual Computer approach) and secured out-of-band (Neocleus and Citrix approach), that could serve personal and corporate virtual machines side by side (Citrix and VMware approach).

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The server version of App-V (formerly SoftGrid), now officially dubbed Server App-V, was previewed for the first time ever in May 2009 at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) but Microsoft actually announced plan to deliver this product in January 2008.

In the last year Microsoft barely mentioned it again, showing an additional demo at MMS 2010.

Unfortunately, the just ended TechEd 2010 conference didn’t bring better news (see virtualization.info coverage). Quite the opposite, the event sanctioned a far distant release, probably scheduled for Q2 2011, in sync with the launch of the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

To be fair Microsoft didn’t explicitly said that Server App-V will arrive by that timeframe, but at this point there’s no hint about an earlier release.