History

A couple of weeks ago, PRWeekus reported that VMware is changing its PR and communication structure.

First of all the company hired Aaron Feigin in May as the new Senior Director of Global Communications.
Feigin comes from Borland, where he has been Vice President of Corporate Communications for five years.
Feigin is not the first ex-Borland executive that joins VMware: in January the company hired Tod Nielsen, the former Borland CEO, as its new COO.

It seems that Feigin plans to make the VMware announcements less technical and more marketing oriented:

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Just two weeks ago MokaFive launched the second version of its enterprise solution, renamed Suite.

The company changed its strategy and executive team over the last three years and seems to lack a clear focus on how to deliver its vision.

Maybe the situation will improve in the coming future as they hired a new Vice President of Business Development: James Nicholas.

Nicholas comes from the venture capital world, where he was Director of Princeton Capital from 1996 to 2002 and Director of TriplePoint Capital from 2007 to February 2009.

In December 2008 a new startup called iCore Software entered the almost empty OS virtualization market, where Parallels is a leader (and potentially a monopolist if Oracle will kill the Solaris Containers technology as soon as it completes the acquisition of Sun).

At the moment iCore targets the consumer market but, as often happens in IT industry, as soon as the first investment will come in (and with it a bunch of seasoned board advisors), the strategy may change quickly.

At the moment their product, Virtual Accounts, is still in private beta and may appear hopeless in a highly competitive market where VMware (Workstation/Fusion), Parallels (Desktop) and Sun (VirtualBox), and soon VirtualPC embedded in Windows 7, are pretty mature and already address most of the customer needs. Anyway Cisco seems to have a different opinion.

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In May Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron. Just five weeks later the database giant fired most of the employees, terminated the partner program and stopped selling new licenses (with a few exceptions).
The only option offered to Virtual Iron customers is to drop their suddenly-in-end-of-live hypervisor and jump on Oracle VM, which is free but certainly has different capabilities and not a single tool to simplify the migration.

Virtual Iron never detailed how many customers they have, but it’s safe to assume that most of them, if not all, are in the SMB segment. And considering that Virtual Iron had a $3.4 million revenue in 2008, it’s likely that its customers are no more than 3000 as The Register is suggesting (more probably much less than that).

For some reasons these customers must be special if VMware decided to announce a notable 40% discount to those ones that will move to vSphere.
The initiative sounds good but uncommon for VMware, which never took too much care of the SMB market in its history.

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It’s not a secret that virtual machines live migration is perceived by most virtualization professionals as a must-have feature.
After trying to dismiss its value for months, even Microsoft is putting a major effort in promoting it now that its upcoming Hyper-V R2 finally offers it.

The problem with VM live migration is that it doesn’t work beyond a single network segment where two or more virtualization hosts share the same SAN space.
The first vendor that will be able to offer such feature over a WAN link will change forever the way we think disaster recovery.

VMware is working on long-distance VMotion since a while now, but the last time we checked (at the VMworld 2008 analyst briefing) the company was skeptical about delivering the technology in a short timeframe (like 12-18 months) because of complex technical issues.
Nonetheless a long-distance VMotion was demonstrated just last week with the help of Cisco.

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This is not exactly the best possible week for VMware which is receiving “negative attention” from technical and financial analysts.

David Cappuccio, Managing Vice President at Gartner, wrote on his corporate blog how the current VMware market position reminds the Novell leadership of the early ‘90., and if VMware, like Novell, is doomed to be smashed by the Microsoft techno-commodities. 
It’s not a new speculation: plenty of others pictured this scenario years ago, as soon as Microsoft announced its plan to deliver a free hypervisor as part of the operating system.
Nonetheless, the fact that a Gartner VP is wondering about the topic out aloud is remarkable.

Elsewhere, Reuters is reporting how only 2 of 31 Wall Street analysts who follow VMware stock advise investors to buy it at current prices, as the shares are expected to drop much as soon as Microsoft will start distributing the RTM of Hyper-V R2 next week.
Analysts project revenue growth of 2 percent to $1.9 billion this year, with per-share profit excluding items falling to 91 cents from $1.05, according to Reuters Estimates.

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A couple of weeks ago VMware published a benchmark analysis titled Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 4.

It assesses the performance of a SQL Server 2008 OLTP database hosted by a vSphere 4.0 virtual machine with 8 vCPUs and 58GB vRAM, and compares it against the performance of a physical system:

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VMware, Cisco and EMC are really putting a massive effort in promoting the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform that Cisco unveiled in March.

One of the most interesting things produced in this effort is the whitepaper that Cisco just published on his website: Scalability Study for Deploying VMware View on Cisco UCS and EMC V-Max Systems.

The triad managed to setup and document a VDI environment based on VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 4 with 640 virtual desktops (Windows XP with 512MB vRAM and 8GB vHD), served by four UCS blades (160 seats per blade), each with 96GB RAM and the new Intel Xeon 5500 Quad Core CPUs.
Which is four times what was achieved on Dell M600 blades.

The description of the environment is extremely detailed and goes deep into the configuration setup and the performance analysis. It’s really worth a read.

Thanks to Virtual Geek for the news.

Now we are talking. Today Altor Networks releases today the third generation of its Virtual Firewall (VF) which features a brand new kernel that fully leverages the new VMware VMsafe APIs.

The choice to rewrite the core part of the product will probably raise concerns about its stability, but there was a good reason to do so.

VMware offers two modes to use the VMsafe network APIs, called Slow-Path and Fast-Path.
By using the Slow-Path, a security vendor asks for a copy of the virtual traffic inside a dedicated VMsafe virtual appliance, plugging into the virtual switches that connect the protected VMs.
This approach is slow (it obliges to perform context switching) and implies some potential risks  as the VMsafe virtual appliance itself could be targeted for an attack.
By using the Fast-Path instead, a security vendor can process the virtual traffic from inside the ESX vKernel, in a truly transparent mode.
Unfortunately the Fast-Path integration is harder to implement but pays off in terms of performance, flexibility and security, so different vendors are using both modes to deliver a hybrid solution.

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We still don’t know anything about the new Red Hat virtualization portfolio based on KVM and Qumranet VDI technologies, despite a (claimed) oversubscribed beta program that nobody was able to access.

A key piece of this offering of course is Red Hat Enterprise Linux which was expected to drop Xen in favor of KVM as the default virtualization engine.
The release notes of the just announced beta of RHEL 5.4 confirm this.

The KVM version included in RHEL 5.4 will support RHEL 3.x, 4.x and 5.x guest OSes along with Windows XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008.
All of them are supported in 32 and 64bits, and each OS will be able to run without installing any para-virtualized (PV) driver, despite these components will be available as part of the distribution. 
No mention of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 which will hit the RTM next week.

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