History

Surgient has been one of the first startups to build value on top of virtual infrastructures in the early days of hardware virtualization, well before VMware led the technology to mainstream adoption.

Compared to its competitors, for a long time Surgient offered a hosted virtual lab automation platform.
Only in September 2008 it extended its business model, allowing customers to install the product on-premises.

That first change in strategy possibly depended on the limited interest that the market demonstrated so far in virtual lab automation solutions, despite Surgient has to compete with a really low number of vendors.
The fact that VMware is among those competitors doesn’t help: another company in this space, StackSafe, disappeared leaving no traces in March 2009 after just 15 months of activity. 
Nonetheless Surgient managed to raise a revenue of $1 million per month in 2007 and was fortunate enough to raise a new round funding for $4.3M in August 2009. 

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virtualization.info started this year questioning the industry interest in virtualization benchmarks.
In that article we reported that Intel discontinued its vConsolidate platform, giving the customers no other choice that using the VMware VMMark system and its non-competitive EULA.

Intel was kind enough to answer, confirming that vConsolidate was discontinued in early 2009, and providing some insights behind the choice, that we quote here integrally:

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Fedora, the Linux operating system supported by Red Hat, will reach version 13 in May 2010, and will introduce a number of new features to enrich the KVM capabilities:

• Hostinfo
  Allow a virtual machine to see information and statistics from the host operating system, under narrow and strictly controlled conditions and only at the discretion of the host administrator.
• KVM Stable PCI Addresses
  Allow devices in KVM guest virtual machines to retain the same PCI address allocations as other devices are added or removed from the guest configuration.
  (this is particularily important for Windows guests in order to prevent warnings or reactivation when device addresses change)
• Shared Network Interface
  Enable guest virtual machines to share a physical network interface (NIC) with other guests and the host operating system. This allows guests to independently appear on the same network as the host machine.

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At the end of last year, people from the University of California and MIT published an extremely interesting 14-pages paper about the risks of information leakage in multi-tenancy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
Titled Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds, it was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2009.

The research mentions The Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso), Microsoft Windows Azure, even if it doesn’t seem yet a IaaS platform, but it primarily focuses on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) describing how attack a target virtual machine inside the cloud in four phases:

1. map the cloud provider’s internal infrastructure (“cloud cartography”)
2. identify the attack target position
3. place a hostile virtual machine in the same host of the target virtual machine
4. perform side-channel attacks leveraging the shared resources

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As most readers know, virtualization.info can deliver its daily news through the email newsletter, the RSS feed, the Twitter stream and even the Windows Live Alerts service.
What most of you probably don’t know anyway is that virtualization.info is on Facebook too:

www.facebook.com/virtualization.info

If you become a fan, our news will appear on your Facebook stream, just in case you prefer to aggregate everything on this platform.

This may be even more convenient if you are using your Facebook identity to comment on our articles, a new feature that we activated just a few weeks ago.
With over 350 million users in the world, it was time for virtualization.info to be there too.

P.s.: Facebook offers a nice Discussion Board for each fan page.
Feel free to use the virtualization.info one to debate about any virtualization topic you like or just to say “Hi”.

IBM may have pioneered virtualization in the sixties, but it’s not a secret that it has no interest in dominating the modern x86 virtualization market.
So far, Big Blue has been happy enough to play the OEM role, distributing VMware platforms inside System x machines. And nobody will find hard to recognize that, compared to the HP and Dell efforts, the IBM commitment in this space has been less evident.

Behind the scene in fact, IBM perceives VMware and other x86 virtualization vendors as competitors which slow down the adoption of its PowerVM platform.

A good example of this comes from a paper released by the International Technology Group (ITG), which IBM often uses to prepare marketing papers, in April 2009: VALUE PROPOSITION FOR IBM POWER SYSTEMS – Comparing Costs of IBM PowerVM and x86 VMware for Enterprise Server Virtualization

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Next week is going to be one of the most important ones in 2010, at least in terms of announcements.

The consumer side of the IT world in fact is going to enjoy the Apple presentation that will take place on Jan. 27, where Steve Jobs is expected to launch the iTablet/iPad or whatever he decided to call it.
The business side of the same IT world instead is probably expecting a significant announcement from VMware, Cisco and NetApp, in the joint presentation that will take place on Jan. 26, despite the absence of Cisco CEO John Chambers (who probably doesn’t want to replicate the show to launch the VMware-Cisco-EMC alliance).

But next week there’s another, even more important, presentation that corporations may want to attend: the Oracle announcement about its strategy with the Sun assets.

Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun in April 2009. The US Department of Justice approved it just four months later. The European Union, instead, took until today to approve the $7.4 billion deal without conditions.

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A lot of discussion is going on these days around some performance issues that Amazon customers are suffering with the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

The discussion was triggered by Alan Williamson, a prominent voice in the Java community, who posted an interesting description of his 3-years experience with EC2. 
Williamson suggests that Amazon is allowing EC2 over-subscription at the point that the cloud is so crowded to generate some serious latency in the internal network, which impacts on the performance of any multi-tier application that resides on multiple virtual machines.

Another Amazon customer, David Mok, CTO at OleOle.com, suggests instead that the overall performance degradation depends on some differences (the CPU) in the physical hardware that is below the cloud, and that the cloud platform, the Amazon implementation of Xen, is incapable to fully abstract.

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In September 2008 VMware announced the future release of a set of APIs to manipulate vSphere-based cloud computing infrastructures.

More than one year later the vCloud APIs still are at version 0.8 (Citrix is not doing much better with the Xen Cloud Platform) and only five hosting providers in the world are using them through a beta implementation of vCloud Express.

Nonetheless, VMware is working hard to be sure that its vision of idea of cloud computing it the one that the industry will embrace at large.

First of all the company submitted the APIs to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) in September 2009.
VMware has a very relevant position in this standard committee since June 2008, when it hired the DMTF President Winston Bumpus as Director of Standards Architecture.

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The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), announced in August 2009, is the Citrix answer to the VMware vCloud initiative that a few hosting providers are implementing worldwide.

The first XCP implementation (version 0.1) emerged in November 2009.

This week the Xen.org community announced a little step forward which moves the platform to version 0.1.1, which includes a number of improvements.
The platform is on based on Xen 3.4.2 and its Dom0 is now based on CentOS 5.4.

The most important news anyway is that the team expects to deliver the alpha no later than early February.
It’s a good news but at this pace customers won’t have anything concrete (like a XCP 1.0 GA) before next year. And considering that the VMware partners have frozen their vCloud Express implementations in an “unlimited beta” status, maybe we should all reconsider the idea that 2010 is the year of private clouds. More likely 2012.