History

On April 9 virtualization.info published an article titled How Microsoft and VMware use virtualization internally, detailing how the two competitors use their own virtualization products inside the company.

The details about the Microsoft internal case study appeared in a public TechNet article that raised a number of critics on how poorly the vendors seems to use Hyper-V.

One of the Microsoft employees involved in that article, David Lef, Microsoft IT Technology Architect, wrote to virtualization.info giving additional details about the adoption of virtualization inside Microsoft:

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Something must be happening at Redmond if Microsoft for the first time ever decides to roll out a VDI strategy that doesn’t include Citrix as the exclusive partner.

It’s a well-known thing that Microsoft and Citrix are deeply in love with each other, sharing similar hypervisor architectures, a common roadmap, and marketing and sales resources to carry on their virtualization strategies and erode the VMware market share.

It’s true that in 2010 Microsoft will introduce a basic connection broker (called Remote Desktop Connection Broker) in the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2, but the reality is that the Microsoft sales force recommends XenDesktop as the solution of choice for any VDI scenario. At least so far.

Today Quest announced a major deal with Microsoft to integrate its vWorkspace (the former VAS acquired by Provision Networks in November 2007) with Hyper-V, App-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

It’s great success for Quest/Provision Networks which is now validated to the eyes of customers as much as Citrix in VDI scenarios. Yet, the big question is: why Microsoft has changed its strategy?

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Last week VMware announced for the third time its upcoming platform vSphere 4.0, that will replace VMware Infrastructure 3.5.

The company already announced the platform at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas and VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, providing a huge amount of details about the new features and components on stage and on the corporate website.
Nonetheless, VMware decided to announce the product a third time with an on-site and online launch party, despite the actual bits are not yet available for download or purchase.

A very few amount of things were communicated during the on-site and online announcement (the recording is available here): the new product tagline, the pricing and the availability.

Let’s start from the new tagline: the company marketing decided to drop the Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS) label, revealed in September 2008 with the first announcement, to embrace a much more hyperbolic Cloud Operating System (Cloud OS).
In May 2006 virtualization.info published a piece titled The long chess game of VMware, suggesting that the virtualization vendor may want to move away from a direct competition with Microsoft as soon as the software giant would be able to compete on virtualization.
The article pictured a scenario where VMware moves in a direction where Microsoft may not follow for several years: the general purpose grid computing space.
Here we go. Exactly three years later, VMware prefers to call the architecture cloud computing instead of grid computing (the technical differences between the two approach are not relevant in this discussion) but the strategy is being fully executed.

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In mid-March the Wall Street Journal broke the news about an ongoing acquisition discussion between IBM and Sun. The deal never happened and IBM walked away retiring a $7 billion offering.
At this point Oracle jumped in and acquired Sun for $7.4 billion.

For the virtualization industry this is a very interesting move.

Sun is finalizing an entire virtualization portfolio, the xVM family, that includes a much delayed hypervisor based on Xen (Server), an enterprise management solution (Ops Center), a connection broker (VDI) and even a desktop virtualization solution (VirtualBox).
On its end, Oracle announced its own virtual infrastructure in November 2007, which includes a Xen-based hypervisor (VM Server) available free of charge and an enterprise management solution (VM Manager).

So far Oracle kept a low profile and didn’t seriously push its presence in the virtualization market, at the point that most people believe that Oracle VM is just for Oracle workloads. But the company strategy is very different: the database vendor wants to become a fully accredited virtualization vendor and compete with its former partner VMware.

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One month ago Cisco announced its plan to enter the x86 market with a blade system (Unified Computing System or UCS) that is specifically tailored for virtualization and fabric computing.

Trying to clarify that this is not just marketing hype the company also unveiled its key partners: BMC (for the automation layer), VMware (for the virtualization layer) and EMC (of course for the storage layer).

Despite that after one hour and a half the company didn’t disclose a single technical detail about how the platform works and how the technologies above blend together.
Additionally, the network vendor acquired last week Tidal Software, a company that focus on job scheduling, application performance management, and automation software, but didn’t say if it will be or not part of the UCS strategy.

The only concrete information emerged so far about UCS come from the blogosphere and are mostly about the hardware specifications.

Today finally Cisco talks about some more features of the blade system.

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One week ago virtualization.info broke the news about the departure of Karthik Rau, Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing, and a key member of the original leadership team that led VMware in the early days.

An anonymous source sent us a tip on that news suggesting to double-check the employment status of some key members of the View (formerly Virtual Desktop Manager or VDM) team, arrived at VMware after the 2007 acquisition of Propero.

Two of them left the company to start a consulting firm:

• Steve Peskin – Senior Director of VDI OEM Alliances
• Tommy Armstrong – Senior Product Marketing Manager for VDM/View and ThinApp

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Earlier this week SDTimes published a brief coverage of the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Francisco last week.

A very brief note in the article highlights a remarkable information:

For the virtualization crowd, Zemlin [Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation] said that, moving forward, the Linux Foundation is encouraging vendors and developers to standardize on KVM, not Xen.

If true this may be the confirmation that the Citrix acquisition of XenServer has compromised the relation with the open source community, despite Citrix is giving back.

It’s interesting to note that the Red Hat acquisition of Qumranet, which developed and maintains KVM, didn’t have the same impact.

In January 2008 virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft indirectly announced the plan to bring its application virtualization technology (App-V, formerly SoftGrid) on servers.

At that time no mainstream news source recognized the groundbreaking news but a recent job announcement appeared on the Microsoft Career portal catalyzed the attention of CodenameWindows and Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Do you want to be part of a great, growing team that will deliver technology that will change the way Microsoft and the industry deploy and execute software on the Windows platform? Join the Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) team and work on a new v1 product to bring the revolutionary Application Virtualization technology to a new market – the datacenter. Server Application Virtualization will effectively let any application be repackaged as an xcopyable application, making deployment vastly simpler and more reliable…

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After one year and a half of work behind the scene, Oracle must have decided that it’s time to highlight its presence in the virtualization space.
To do so the team started a corporate blog covering Oracle VM and the industry at large.

The company didn’t waste time and immediately started to smash the competition, starting from the once-best-friend VMware:

The industry has talked of the power of “virtual appliances” for some time but despite the promise of being able to just download, start-up and use software, virtual appliances have not been widely deployed in the enterprise, so why is that? First and foremost has been the lack of availability of anything other than toy appliances to use. If you look at VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace, you will see about 1,100 appliances. Spend some time clicking through there…go ahead …I’ll wait. What do you think? See anything you want to use in your production enterprise as-is? No? Me either.

…

For the production enterprise, you need an enterprise server operating system (not a workstation OS), that is supported by a real company (not just forums), and you need real enterprise applications (not “crippleware”) that are officially supported and licensed for production. Go ahead, go back and look at the Operating System Appliances category on VMware’s Marketplace: how many of these appliances contain server- (not workstation-) operating systems backed by a commercial company? What about the “Certified Production Ready*” appliances…surely that’s better, right? Er…well…some good software for sure, but again the included OS is almost always a workstation version and/or forum supported: not production-ready…

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Last week VMware released a minor update for its desktop virtualization product Workstation, introducing the support for the new Intel Xeon 5500 CPU family and a bunch of additional guest operating systems.

A round of new guests are now supported on VMware Server as well, which was upgraded to version 2.0.1 (build 156745) at the end of March:

• Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
• CentoOS 4.7 / 5.2
• Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) / Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Service Pack 2 / 2008
• Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1