History

Yesterday, finally, Red Hat announced the availability of its new virtualization offering, which includes a platform based on KVM and an enterprise virtualization manager.

The company already released Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 in mid September, which features KVM in the same way (despite technical differences in the architecture) Microsoft Windows Server 2008 features Hyper-V.
The problem is that RHEL 5.4 plus KVM may be not enough to compete against lightweight, dedicated platforms like VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer. Additionally, RHEL 5.4 lacks of enterprise management tools that customers can use to control large scale virtual data centers.

This gap is filled today with the release of Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) and Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers (REVMS).

REVH is a stripped down version of RHEL 5.4, with the following characteristics (partial list):

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As expected, today VMware, Cisco and EMC announced a special alliance, a coalition as they call it, dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE).

This entity will share investments to sell the components, training and consulting for a number of bundle packages called Vblocks.

The VCE will also count on a partners ecosystem, which already counts on six system integrators: Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.

The Vbocks can be deployed at customers data centers or hosted online. 
To design them, operate them on behalf of the customers, or just transfer them from the hosting facility to the customers data centers, Cisco and EMC created a special joint venture called Acadia
VMware and Intel invested in Acadia too, and the company will start operating in 2010. 
It’s not clear why the system integrators above cannot do that instead of Acadia.

At its launch VCE will offer three Vblocks:

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At the end of the last week Reuters broke the news about an upcoming joint venture between EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco.

The three should announce a new product portfolio this week, called vBlock, probably gluing together Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus, EMC V-Max and VMware vSphere, which the joint venture will sell as a hosted service.
And if the customer wants it, the vBlock gear can be moved inside the company’s boundaries.

At the end of September virtualization.info published an article about the strong alliance that these three companies are building and how it’s going to impact the VMware partnership with the other OEMs and how it’s going to influence the perception that customers have of the VMware position in the market.

We expect the official announcement before publishing further comments, but it’s clear that this joint venture is going to modify the landscape in some serious way.

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Just last week virtualization.info questioned the Microsoft effort on desktop virtualization (including application virtualization and the so called enterprise desktop virtualization, what we call here platform wrappers).
Our article mentioned the MED-V lethargic development lifecycle and the fact that Microsoft stays under the radar for App-V too because at this time it may be the best thing to do.

What Microsoft is waiting for to massively push App-V and everything else beyond Hyper-V?
For App-V, the answer may be Office 2010 (codename Office 14).

During the summer in fact ZDNet reported that the new version of Office, expected somewhere in 2010, will feature a special edition called Click-To-Run.

Office 2010 CTR will be available on Microsoft servers, and streamed on the customers desktops on demand, as the Microsoft invitation letter to its beta testers describes:

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No, VMware doesn’t really want to compete with Google, but with what Google represents today: a major vendor that believes in a web-centric IT.

At this point of its history, the VMware ambition goes well beyond leading the virtualization space.
VMware wants to be the mandatory platform that customers need to offer and consume business services. Something that is not just what the industry calls today cloud computing.

VMware wants to be inside the data center, inside the home and business workstations and thin clients, and even inside portable devices like smartphones, tablets and netbooks.
When the industry will be ready, VMware will probably want to be inside home appliances too.

Maybe this was the original plan since the beginning. Maybe it became the new mission once VMware recognized that, because of Microsoft and others, its hypervisor would become a commodity in a few years.
For sure such plan (partially) explains the acquisition of SpringSource.

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Ten days ago Microsoft announced the availability of its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009 R2.
As most readers know, this is a special bundle that the company offers to its enterprise customers (Volume License only), and only if they subscribe the Software Assurance (SA) service.

MDOP contains key components of the Microsoft virtualization offering, like the application virtualization platform App-V, acquired from Softricity in May 2006, and the security wrapper for Virtual PC MED-V, acquired from Kidaro in March 2008.

While none of the two technologies is as popular as the hypervisors, both are critical for the Microsoft long-term virtualization strategy.
App-V is specially important and Microsoft is silently working behind the scene to offer it inside servers, not just on desktops like today.

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Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and Fusion 3.0

Beyond the support for Windows 7 and its Aero interface inside the virtual machine, Workstation 7.0 (build 203739) includes a number of remarkable features. For example:

• Autoprotect
  The product automatically takes snapshots of any virtual machine every half hour, every hour or every day
• Encryption
  The product encrypts any virtual machine with the AES 256-bit algorithm
• CPU release
  The product frees CPU resources instantaneously without powering off or suspending if the virtual machine is paused.
• Virtual disks manipulation
  The product can expand and compact a virtual disk (Windows 7/Vista only) without the use of any 3rd party product
• Virtual Hardware version 7
  Support for up to 4 vCPUs, up to 32GB vRAM, up to 10 vNICs
• Support for ESX 4.0
  customers can run VMware ESX 4 inside Workstation 7 as long as their physical hardware features an Intel EM64T CPU with VT-x or an AMD64 10H CPU (and later) with AMD-V, and as long as the virtual machine has assigned two or more CPU cores
• Support for IPv6

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In June the new startup Liquidware Labs released the first rebranded version of the VMsight technology acquired in May: Stratusphere 4.2.
They are back this week with the first consistent update and easy to guess the new 4.5 version integrates the technology acquired from Entrigue Systems in September: ProfileUnity.

In details Stratusphere 4.5 introduces support for Citrix XenDesktop 4 and Microsoft Window 7, as well as the preliminary support for VMware View 4 (which still is in private beta).
On top of that the product sports several enhancements in the GUI, in the reports and in the correlation engine.

Anyway the most interesting thing of this release is that now Liquidware Labs allows users to download a trial version of the product.
The company always said that it’s specifically targeting Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), and most of the time this means that you don’t need to have (and promote) a freely downloadable trial.
If Liquidware Labs has just changed this it may mean that it’s also changing its marketing strategy.

Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and of course Fusion 3.0.

The new version of Fusion (build 204229) introduces a notable number of features, including:

• 64bit engine
• Virtual EFI (to replace the legacy virtual BIOS and grant full compatibility with Mac OS X)
• Embedded P2V migration tool (Migration Assistant for Windows)
• V2V migration from Microsoft VHD format
• Support for 4-way CPUs
• Support for Aero (Windows 7/Vista), OpenGL 2.1 (Windows XP) and DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3
• Support for Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit and 64bit, host and guest OS)

Three months after the launch of one of its newest products, vCenter Chargeback, VMware is ready for the first minor update.

The new version 1.0.1 (build 204097) fixes a number of bugs and introduces a few welcome features:

• Support for Windows Authentication
• Additional computing and billing policies
• APIs (technical preview)