History

For the ones that don’t know it, Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite which Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350M in cash and that competes with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PIMs offered by Google or Zoho for example.
Zimbra also offers an open source mail client that competes with products such as Microsoft Office and Mozilla Thunderbird.

The platform didn’t get much traction compared to the competitors above and Yahoo is rumored to be trying to sell it since September 2008.

Now All Things Digital, the tech division of the The Wall Street Journal, is reporting that VMware is acquiring Zimbra.

While this is seems extremely unlikely, WSJ is very reliable news source and Kara Swisher reports confirmations from multiple sources.
So, assuming this rumor will be confirmed as true, the question is: why a virtualization vendor like VMware would want a SaaS collaboration suite like Zimbra?

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Many have said that 2010 will be the year of cloud computing. What this really means is unclear, just like the definition cloud computing.

Problem is that cloud computing means too many things already and the market doesn’t even exist.
The industry somewhat agreed to recognize as cloud computing just three major architectures (with examples):

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
  SalesForce CRM
  Google Apps
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
  Google App Engine
  Microsoft Azure
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
  Amazon EC2
  The Rackspace Cloud

But the reality is that the expression “as a service” can be applied to much more than that, and the vendors’ marketing departments learned this game too well during the advent of virtualization.
So, for instance, we can find things like Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) or Computer-as-a-Service (CaaS), which simply are IaaS architectures which only serve virtual desktops instead of generic virtual machines. It’s like saying Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) on demand.

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Vendors’ marketing departments spend a lot of time promoting performance analysis when a new virtualization platform or a new server hardware hits the market, but are the customers interested?

Right now we have only two benchmarks methodologies to measure virtual infrastructures: the VMware VMmark (launched in July 2007) and the Intel vConsolidate (launched in December 2006).

There’s also an ongoing activity at the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) to define a standard practice but the development is so slow that nobody really knows if hardware virtualization will still be around for its release.
Additionally, virtualization.info got a tip that Intel discontinued vConsolidate during the second half of 2009 (we are still waiting for an official answer on this).

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In the past months virtualization.info documented how the Cisco entrance in the server market with its Unified Computing System (UCS) is having a major impact on the landscape.

The move is especially dangerous because it involves powerful allies like EMC and VMware, and delivers a platform that is designed from scratch to be a virtual data center in a box.

The most nervous among its competitors seems HP, which openly criticized the UCS and then acquired 3Com to strengthen its networking offering.

HP also released a competing platform, called BladeSystem Matrix, which doesn’t bundle yet with any specific virtualization platform (VMware vSphere support is still experimental).

The first public comparison between the two blade systems comes from Steve Kaplan, Vice President Data Center Virtualization Practice at INX.
his technical analysis is well worth a read.

While addressing the nth skeptic article about the destiny of XenServer, the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management division Simon Crosby provided some details about the company’s performance in 2009 and its plans for 2010.

Specifically, Citrix added over 35,000 new customers this year (it’s not clear how many of them bought XenDesktop and how many just XenServer) and plans to serve over 100,000 virtual desktops for next year.

With these numbers Crosby clarifies once again that Citrix has no interest in dropping XenServer to adopt Hyper-V and limit itself to deliver XenDesktop and Essentials for the Microsoft hypervisor.

Chris Wolf too, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, answered the article above, and his tweet seems to suggest that the upcoming version of XenServer will highlight the commitment on the product:

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So far, the Novell strategy about virtualization has never been too clear.
The company offers its own version of Xen since October 2005, made more appealing thanks to a multi-year agreement with Microsoft to support Windows guest OSes and interoperate with Hyper-V.
It has a feature-rich orchestration framework, ZENworks, which supports multiple hypervisors but that is almost unknown in the virtualization community.
In February 2008 it acquired the Canadian startup PlateSpin, which now enriches the Novell portfolio with a P2V migration, disaster recover and capacity planning tools.
It also plans to release additional products for performance monitoring and configuration management.

Despite that, it’s still unclear where Novell will be in the virtualization market within the next few years.
One of the PlateSpin products, Forge, still uses VMware ESX rather than SUSE Linux with Xen to host the P2V’ed virtual machines for disaster recovery.
The stand-alone Xen platform that was announced in March 2008 never came out.
A lot of former PlateSpin executives left the company, the development of virtualization products has been moved to India, and just a couple of weeks ago Novell definitively phased out the subsidiary website (the brand still leaves in the products’ names).

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Just a couple of weeks ago Red Hat made bold move by releasing its remote desktop protocol SPICE, acquired from Qumranet in September 2008, as open source.

The company now offers the SPICE drivers for KVM virtual machines.

The package (for Windows XP only at the moment) creates a virtual GPU called Red HAt QXL and a Virtual Desktop Interface Port.

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While Paul and Peter Ghostine are now busy working on a stealth-mode cloud computing startup, their former employer Quest releases vWorkspaces 7.0 just before the end of the year.

The new release introduces a number of interesting features, including:

• Inclusion of Flash redirection (for 32bit Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8) in the Experience Optimized Protocol (EOP) [demo]
• Bandwidth and compression control for USB devices (Virtual USB Hub)
• Integration with VMware Linked Clones [demo]
• Customization of Sysprep procedure
• Support for reprovisiong VMware virtual machines at logoff
• Support for 32/64bit Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 [demo]

vWorkspaces 7.0 also includes the experimental capability to redirect Internet Explorer to the client.

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix has released the first updated for its XenServer 5.5, which introduces a number of improvements and addresses a critical issue with the LVHD snapshots:

When LVHD snapshots are deleted, disk space is reclaimed by freeing unused snapshot data. This is provided automatically by XenServer while VMs continue to run. However, there is a known limitation in the 5.5 implementation of this feature: when all snapshots are deleted for a given VM’sdisks, some disk space allocated to these snapshots may remain. To address this limitation, Update 1 includes an ‘Off-line Coalesce’ tool that can reclaim all disk space previously allocated to deleted snapshots while the VM is temporarily set offline.

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix released a minor update for its orchestration framework Workflow Studio.

The new version 2.0.1. doesn’t introduce any change in the product but extends the existing activity libraries and delivers a couple of new ones.
Here’s the extended/new libraries about virtualization:

• [NEW] Citrix XenDesktop Activity Library
  • Activities that create, delete, and retrieve desktop definitions and manage desktop groups.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenServer Activity Library 
  • Automate the process of taking snapshots, backing up VMs, and backing up VM metadata for site migration and disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Automate the installation and update of tools on guest VMs.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenApp Activity Library
  Now includes activities that support automated application streaming packaging and application management.

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