History

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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The early stage startup Virtual Computer entered the virtualization market in September 2008 but didn’t unveil anything about its new product before December.

The fact that the company was founded by Alex Vasilevsky, the Virtual Iron founder and former CTO, and the fact that it’s trying to revolutionize the desktop management using a client hypervisor based on Xen, is enough to mark Virtual Computer as interesting.
Citrix must have the same opinion as it partially funded the startup round B ($15 million).

The first version of their flagship product NxTop went out in April, featuring some high performance 3D graphic inside a virtual machine.
The new NxTop 1.1 entered in beta last week and featuring a new thing called System Workbench.

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Update: The article below has been temporary removed after that some VMware distributors and the company itself have indicated how some statements are far from reality.
We removed the article to have time to further investigate and correct our mistakes, if any, without spreading false information.

We can confirm now that it’s not true that a VI 3 Standard license plus a-la-carte vMotion and Storage vMotion can’t be moved to a vSphere 4 Standard license while retaining those features.
VMware clarifies this with a footnote at this URL:

Customers with current Support & Subscription contracts who purchased VMware VMotion as an add-on to VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation or VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard also received VMware Storage VMotion. These customers retain both VMware VMotion and VMware Storage VMotion when they receive VMware vSphere Standard.

But it’s also true that a number of customers were told by VMware sales representatives that their only upgrade choice was to move on the vSphere Enteprise Plus, as reported in the original article below.
We have full details about these customers, that asked to stay anonymous, and yes, they are outraged.

We sincerely apologize for not better checking with VMware before publishing this story.

Never like now VMware has hit a low level of popularity because of its pricing strategy.
The virtualization leader grew steadily in the enterprise market to the point that its products are now adopted in 100% of Fortune 100 and 95% of Fortune 500, but it has been considered out of range by most SMBs so far.
The new licensing upgrade scheme introduced with vSphere 4.0 is further compromising the already delicate relationship.

There are main two problems with that.

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In the last two years pretty much every major vendor in the IT industry rushed to develop a rich VDI portfolio and roadmap. Each of them did its best to acquire promising startups, to announce new and highly efficient remote desktop protocols, to sign partnerships with OEMs for the next generation thin client.

From VMware to Citrix, from Sun to Quest, from HP to Verizon.
Even TV vendors like LG want to be part of the VDI game.
Everyone but Microsoft.

So far Microsoft preferred to stay under the radar as much as possible, even when they acquired Calista Technologies in January 2008, a small startup able to offload the remote client from the task of rendering any sort of multimedia resource; even when they announced some basic desktop brokering capabilities in the imminent Windows Server 2008 R2.

Now some concrete details are finally emerging and the Microsoft VDI strategy seems more interesting than expected:

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Ten days ago Red Hat announced that its new, much awaited, virtualization offering based on KVM was in beta and that the beta program was oversubscribed.

The reality is that, as far as we know, Red Hat never announced the beta program or the details of its implementation of the Qumranet technology (acquired in September 2008), and never gave the opportunity to sign for it to the general public.
Still today there not a single bit of information about what Red Hat did in one year and a half after dropping Xen in favor of KVM.

Red Hat will take another two months to finally tell the world as LeMagIT revealed earlier today: the general availability of the new virtualization platform is in fact planned for September 1, 2009, which means during the VMware VMworld 2009.
Too bad that this year VMware is not particularly happy to have competitors showing their solutions on the exhibit floor.

As part of its renovation plan, in October 2008 PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies) acquired the software division of a popular UK consulting firm, Xtravirt.
The company rebranded the Xtravirt tools and offered part of them for free in March, hoping to attract a large number of prospects that could be also interested in its flagship backup product called esXpress.

After a break to release a long overdue new version of esXpress, PHD is back on its plan to distribute for free the Xtravirt tools and launches Patch Downloader 6.0, a product that automates the download of VMware ESX patches in a file repository of choice.

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Yesterday in a public webinar VMware announced the upcoming release of Studio 2.0, the environment to author OVF packages that the company launched in September 2008.

The new VMware Studio 2.0 is remarkable in terms of new features.

The first most important is that it will support the new generation of virtual appliances (VAs) that VMware calls vApps.
The vApp is a concept that VMware introduced for the first time at VMworld 2008, and it implies a new metadata layer wrapping the virtual appliance what describes the virtual hardware, performance and security requirements to run the virtual machine.

Once created the virtual appliance or the vApp, Studio 2.0 will be able to deliver it on VMware Workstation, Server (both 1.x and 2.x) and of course VI/vSphere.
The most interesting thing about this last interaction is that Studio can push (and update at a later time) the new VA/vApp through VMware Update Manager (VUM).

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With the first post in a new corporate blog, VMware unveiled the existence of Code Central, an online facility where its community can upload and exchange scripts for the various VMware SDKs.

VMware has a special interest in seeing what kind of automation the virtualization professionals want to have now that its vCenter Orchestrator has been released as a free module of vSphere 4.0.

Orchestrator is powered by the technology that VMware acquired by Dunes Technologies in September 2007.
The Dunes framework is powerful and flexible enough to become the foundation for new products, from a VDI connection broker to a virtual lab automation manager.
In most cases the customers will use it to automate specific aspects of their environments, but once in a while a Code Central public script become popular enough to give the input to VMware for a new, non-free product.

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While opening the beta program of the next Fusion major release, VMware also keeps updating the current product which now reaches version 2.0.5 (build 173382).

Fusion 2.0.5 is mainly for bug fixes but it also extends the support to the following host and guest operating systems:

• Host OSes
  Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit only, experimental)
• Guest OSes
  Mac OS X 10.5 (on new Intel Xeon 5500 and 3500 Series)
  Ubuntu 9.04
  Mac OS X 10.6 Server codename Snow Leopard (32bit only experimental)