History

Every time Parallels makes the news about its upcoming bare-metal hypervisor it’s impossible to not highlight how in late this product is: disclosed at the the beginning of 2006, the product was delayed and delayed and at today the company doesn’t provide yet a final date for its GA milestone.

The only server-side product released so far by Parallels came out in June 2008 and it’s called Server for Mac, but it doesn’t feature a bare-metal architecture that can compete against VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, Oracle VM, etc. etc.

Over the months and the years, the belief that Parallels can really deliver such product started to fade away. Last month finally the company gave a sign that something is moving by scheduling a promising session about this product at its Summit in Las Vegas.

Now a slide deck of the Parallels roadmap coming from that conference is publicly available (as The Register promptly highlighted yesterday) exposing a lot of concrete details about the hypervisor:

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In February 2008 Microsoft released Windows Server 2008.
At that time Hyper-V was still in beta phase. Despite that, Microsoft decided to take some serious, unprecedented risks and included it in the RTM version of its server operating system.

The actual RTM version of the hypervisor didn’t come out before June 2008.
The customers that wanted to upgrade could download a stand-alone package or just connect to the Windows Updated service.

At today the situation is still the same: who downloads Windows Server 2008 has to install Hyper-V beta and then upgrade it in some way.

Microsoft will fix this with the upcoming Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2008, which will finally integrates Hyper-V 1.0 RTM as part of the OS.

The RTM-Escrow of this SP2 was released just yesterday and this means that the final release is really near.
It’s ironic that this happens now that Hyper-V is already in 2.0 beta phase.

At a point of its history VMware must have decided that leading the hardware virtualization market was not enough. To actualize its long-term strategy (whatever it is) the company figured out that it would need at least an additional layer of virtualization.
So, in January 2008, it acquired the US startup Thinstall.

The first rebranded version of Thinstall technology came out in July 2008 under the name of ThinApp 4.0.
It included a couple of interesting features (Application Sync and Application Link) but was not a groundbreaking major release.

After 8 months (or 13, if you start to count from the acquisition announcement) ThinApp just reached version 4.0.2 (build 3089), a bugfix release that came out earlier this week.

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In October 2008 Veeam extended the capabilities of its Reporter tool by launching a new Enterprise edition.
The main difference between the standard edition and this one is that the latter has a specific focus on reporting the changes happening in large-scale virtual infrastructures.

This week Veeam releases the version 3.5 of this new Enterprise edition and introduces a couple of most-wanted capabilities:

• Support for Microsoft PowerShell
  a new Veeam PowerShell Extension allows to run custom queries against Virtual Infrastructure data gathered by Reporter Enterprise 3.5 and get details about the current state or earlier points in time.
• Support for custom reports
  Custom templates for your Raw Data Analysis reports can be created by including any custom branding or even custom reports to meet your daily reporting requirements.

The new 3.5 version also extends the number of predefined reports and collects additional data about the networking layer.

At the end of February Citrix unveiled its new strategy to compete against VMware: giving away the full version of XenServer and offer a premium management pack, called Essentials, for its hypervisor and Microsoft Hyper-V.

The free XenServer comes with a lot of features (including VMs live migration, resource pooling and storage management), but Essentials has a number of additions that may seriously appeal the high-end enterprise customers.

Citrix recently published the videos of three features included in Essentials: the Dynamic Provisioning Services, the Automated Lab Management (coming from an OEM agreement with VMLogix) adn the Advanced StorageLink Technology:

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So far Quest Software has made some serious investments in the virtualization space.
It acquired Invirtus in June 2007, Provision Networks in November 2007, Vizioncore in January 2008.
The company even acquired the interesting storage startup Monosphere in January 2009 that nicely complements virtualization solutions.
And for sure the company makes no secret anymore of its big ambitions in this virtualization industry.

It’s hard to believe that the Quest appetite will stop here. The only real question is what the company will target next to extend and better integrate its current portfolio.

Maybe we have a hint in the today’s announcement released by Surgient.
The virtual lab automation company is slowly but deeply changing its go-to-market strategy and just like every other IT firm today, it’s waving its commitment on cloud computing.

Putting the hype aside, one of the quotes included is interesting and comes from Quest:

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In August 2008 PHD Technologies secured an undisclosed amount of money from an unnamed venture capital firm.
It used part of that money to rebuild its management team (a new CEO, a new EVP of Worldwide Sales, a new Executive Chairman) and to acquire the software products developed by Xtravirt.

The CEO, Sridhar Murthy, seems already gone but at least PHD Technologies relaunched its brand and released the Xtravirt products as free tools.

Under the new name of PHD Virtual Technologies (even if the logo just says PHD Virtual), the company launches today:

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Yesterday Citrix released under GPL2 open source license a new component of its Project Satori, the software stack for paravirtualized Linux guest OSes that run on Microsoft Hyper-V.

The core of this software has been already released by Microsoft under the name of Linux Integration Components in September 2008.
It included the hypercall adapter for Hyper-V, the optimized disc driver (called StorVSC) and the optimized network driver (called NetVSC).

The package missed an optimized mouse driver (called InputVSC) that implies poor performance when the Hyper-V console is remotely accessed and the use tries to interact with the Guest OS from inside it.

The InputVSC driver is now available here.

The early preview of the Citrix/Intel Project Independence published by Gabrie van Zanten a couple of weeks ago raised a lot of doubts about the architecture of the upcoming client hypervisor (and some negative reactions from Citrix).

To clarify where they are going the two companies just published a joint interview that spread some lights on a couple of technical aspects:

Interviewer: What is Project Independence?

Simon Crosby (Citrix): Together, we are building a Type-1 hypervisor based on the Xen open source hypervisor. It’s tiny, tiny as in just a few MB of flash memory associated with the platform, so small enough to be a bios extension. It owns all hardware including trusted platform modules and has full control over devises, but more than that, it can actually decide which platform it hands through to different guests…

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It may be just an impression but the number of old-school executives that are populating the VMware ranks is rapidly increasing.

Everything started in August 2008 when the company board fired the founder and CEO Diane Greene and replaced her with Paul Maritz, for many years one of the most important executives in Microsoft after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

After that, VMware started to hire executives that worked in Microsoft (Tod Nielsen, now employed as COO), IBM (Maurizio Carli, now employed as General Manager EMEA) and CA, (Andrew Dutton, now employed as General Manager APAC) .

Yesterday the company hired yet another Microsoft former executive: Richard McAniff.

McAniff was the Vice President for Microsoft Office and now is the new Chief Development Officer.
He takes the seat of Richard Sarwal, the former Executive Vice President of R&D, that went back to Oracle after just one year at VMware.