History

While the virtualization community continues to debate on the real-world value of the VMmark benchmark platform, VMware continues to update it.

VMmark 1.1.1 was released at the end of April with the following updates:

• The VMmark harness has been updated to include automation of hypervisor and workload virtual machine reporting for disclosure
• The reporting script has been updated to support a future version of VMware ESX
  (is this referring to vSphere?)
• A new VMmarkConfigChecker script is included to help confirm that the workload virtual machines comply with the Run and Reporting Rules for VMmark
• The disclosure.html template has been updated

Starting June 1st, VMware only accepts benchmarks submissions scored with this new version of VMmark.

Seven months after its first release, the Swiss startup icomasoft is ready to upgrade its flagship product, VI PowerScripter, to version 1.5.

The new version includes the experimental support for VMware vSphere (with the integration with vCenter 4.0 GUI).

Unfortunately for icomasoft, one of the most popular vendor in the virtualization market, Vizioncore, recently launched a competing product, EcoShell, which seems able to do everything VI PowerScripter does but for free.

In September 2008 Surgient, one of the first startups in the virtual lab automation space, partially re-tuned its strategy, changing the name of its product suite and adopting a new licensing model.

At the end of April 2009 the revamped solution, dubbed Virtual Automation Platform (or VAP, formerly Virtual Q&A Management System or VQMS) received its first minor update.

VAP 6.1 includes the following new features:

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Not happy enough to enter a new market segment with vControl, Vizioncore is very busy developing the next major release of its flagship product: vRanger Pro.

This version four of vRanger Pro is dubbed Data Protection Platform (DPP) and will be released in three phases during 2010 over the next 12 months.
The new features that it will offer include:

• Direct to target architecture
• Instant File Level Restore
• Support for backup and restore to/from SFTP and CIFS repositories
• Resource Manager to control throughput
• Support for PowerShell
• Support for VMware vSphere

The company VP of Support and Product Management, Jason Mattox, writes on the new corporate blog, Vizioncorum, to provide some details about the new Direct to Target architecture:

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A couple of weeks ago VKernel, the hyperactive US startup that launched in October 2007, secured a second round of funding: $7 million provided by Longworth Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.

The previous round, dated was led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners for as much as $4.6 million in February 2008.

As result, the VKernel board of directors welcomes a couple of new members: Nilanjana Bhowmik, Partner at Longworth Venture Partners, and Doug McNary, the former CEO of Onaro (acquired by NetApp in 2008).

Last week every major IT news portal (like NetworkWorld) quoted the words of Joshua Corman, Principal Security Strategist at IBM Internet Security Systems (aka ISS, the popular security firm that IBM acquired in 2006 for $1.3 billion).

At the Interop conference in Las Vegas Corman said something that other security and virtualization experts are saying since a long time:

x86 virtualization is often a risky proposition for highly regulated, mission-critical applications, because people and processes are not ready for virtualization and the security risks it introduces

Corman also recommended to not use a Type-2 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) for production use, and only rely on hypervisors.
It will be interesting to see the KVM and Linux community reaction to this claim.

After the acquisition of some of the jewels of the IT industry, like VMware (in 2003 for $635 million) and RSA (in 2006 for $2.1 billion), plus an endless number of other interesting vendors, EMC slowed down its pace in 2008. But the worldwide financial crisis represents a great time to restart the shopping season and close amazing deals.

So last week EMC announced the acquisition of Configuresoft, a configuration management company that started to focus on virtualization and VMware in early 2008.
The price paid for this deal was not disclosed.

The main reason behind the operation is the OEM relationship which already exists between the two companies, where EMC is selling Configuresoft technologies as Server Configuration Manager (SCM) and Configuration Analytics Manager (CIA).
But considering that EMC is the parent company of VMware, parts of the Configuresoft intellectual property may go to the subsidiary which may find them extremely useful to enrich its vCenter Suite.

For the first time in its history VMware invested $20 million in a hosting provider: Terremark.

So far the vendor acquired several startups, most of them offering virtualization solutions that integrate with VMware Infrastructure. With a couple of exceptions VMware also acquire a software house, Sciant, and a consulting company, Foedus.

It’s very likely that VMware wants Terremark to become the cloud computing provider that unleashes vSphere 4.0 against Amazon and its EC2, which is based on Xen and may be sooner or later move to Citrix XenServer.
A first sign of it was visible during the VMworld Europe 2009 keynote in February, when Paul Maritz invited the Terremark EMEA CTO on stage to show their early implementation of the VMware vCloud initiative.

Terremark is a public company and the announcement made on May 26 gave its stock a small nice boost:

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As announced in late April (see the virtualization.info coverage) VMware made available its new vSphere 4.0 (aka ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0) in late May.
And as already detailed in a previous post, the rest of the company portfolio doesn’t support the platform at the moemtn.

To fill the gap VMware has to release updates for almost every product. Converter is the first one, introducing support for vSphere with its version 4.0.1 (build 161434).
It may take longer time for the others: for example View has been just upgraded to version 3.1 but it doesn’t see vSphere yet.

VMware is also working to update the training and certification paths: Mike Laverick reports on his blog the official announcement sent to all the VACTs:

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The release of Hyper-V 2.0 (aka Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V) and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is approaching.
The Release Candidate build is available since almost a month now, and Microsoft may release both platforms before 2010 as originally announced.

As the hypervisor hits the RC, the company unveils additional details about it.
In Q4 2008 we discovered the existence of a virtual machine live migration feature, along with the virtual disks hot plug capability and the support for nested page tables (NPT), TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames.
Now we know that Hyper-V 2.0 will support up to 64 logical processors on the host (8 CPUs each featuring 8 cores) and the so called Processor Compatibility Mode.

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