History

It may sound a paradox but in the coming future the remote access to large data centers will happen through tiny mobile devices:

• Intel is investing in VirtualLogix, one of the earliest mobile hypervisor developers on the market
• Citrix is about to release a Receiver for the Apple iPhone (codenamed project Braeburn) and it’s investing Open Kernel Labs to boost the development of their mobile hypervisor
• VMware acquired Trango and it’s working to offer their mobile hypervisor (now called Mobile Virtualization Platform or MVP) in the near future

But the trend is not just about accessing the computing power that data centers offer. The mobile management of large virtual infrastructures is as much interesting.

The Virtualization Manager Mobile for the iPhone, developed by Andrew Kutz is an early example.
Soon many vendor may want to provide mobile version of their hypervisors control panels.

The first one may be VMware which just announced an upcoming new component for the vSphere 4.0 platform: vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA).

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The last time AMD showed a public video of a live migration it turned a number of heads.

The company used an unreleased and unrevealed management console for KVM (which is probably what Red Hat is about to launch), showing how a virtual machine could be live migrated between an AMD Quad-Core Opteron (codename Barcelona) and an Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420.

This time AMD is a little more careful, and unsurprisingly decides to change its demo product, switching from Red Hat/KVM to VMware (there’s a lot of partnership to build against Intel here).

The VI 3.5 virtual machine is migrated from a Quad-Core Opteron (65nm) to a Quad-Core Opteron (45nm) to the upcoming Six-Core Opteron codenamed Istanbul (45nm):

This video is now broadcasted on virtualization.tv, the new webTV channel of virtualization.info.

In September 2008 the management system company KACE announced the acquisition of a small application virtualization firm called Computers In Motion.

Six months later KACE is ready to launch on the market the acquired technology, rebranded as Virtual Kontainers, and start a harsh competition with Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and all the other companies that we list on the Virtualization Industry Radar.

KACE is offering this product as part of their KBOX appliance that provides centralized management:

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After over one year of development, started after the company changed its identity from InovaWave to Hyper9, the first product of this reborn startup is ready.

The actual name of this solution is unclear. In one of the previous news from the company it seemed to be called VI Search and Analytics, but now the entire marketing literature just reports Hyper9 everywhere.

Whatever the product is called, it is a search engine that integrates with vCenter and indexes the information stored inside the VMware Infrastructure inventory.
Once the index is build, Hyper9 allows to find any detail about your virtual infrastructure (VMs, virtual networks, data stores, applications inside the Guest OSes, etc.) through a search engine interface that is much more similar to Splunk than to Google.

Once the administrator receives the Splunk-like results he can save his query, share it with other co-workers or further filter the obtained data by comparing the results with the ones received a previous day, or the ones coming from a completely different query.

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While everybody waits to know if IBM will swallow Sun, Sun continues to execute its (controversial) virtualization strategy.
The third version of its VDI connection broker, simply called VDI, is finally ready.

Announced in January, as expected the product introduces support for xVM VirtualBox, the hosted VMM that Sun acquired from innotek in February 2008.

As previously highlighted, it’s unclear why Sun believes that its customers may want to run a resource hog like a virtual desktop infrastructure on top of a platform that is much slower than a hypervisor.
The reason can’t be the price: even if VirtualBox is free there are several free hypevisors available at this point.

Anyway there are other features that are more interesting:

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In January 2008 a new startup entered the Virtual Lab Automation market segment: StackSafe (see virtualization.info coverage here).

The company was founded in 2005 with the former name of Revive Systems. It took three years to develop and launch a Xen-based solution to compete against VMware, Surgient, VMLogix and the other VLA companies that arrived later (like Skytap).

A little more than a year ago StackSafe showed a solid leadership team with a strong background on security, as some of the executives were coming from Symantec and Counter Pane.
Now the Board of Directors page only lists the CEO, Loren Burnett, along with the startup funders: Roger Novak, of Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Matthew McCooe, of Chart Venture Partners.

In over twelve months (or over four years, depending on they way you count) the company didn’t impress much for its activity and the virtualization community is barely aware of its Test Center product.
Maybe the funders are looking for a leadership replacement?

Update: It seems that StackSafe planned to raise a Series B funding of $10 Million in 2008 (half of them would be provided by the current investors) but couldn’t succeed.
This may imply that the company is simply running out of money.

In November 2008 Reflex Systems (formerly known as Reflex Security) completely changed its focus on virtualization, moving from security to management, and its market strategy.

To sell the new product, Virtualization Management Center (VMC), they also need a new Vice President of Sales: Preston Futrell.

Futrell was the Director of Services Sales in ISS before the security firm was acquired by IBM in 2006.

Maybe Reflex Systems decided for Futrell in the hope that his credibility in the security world will provide a last chance to sell the Virtual Security Appliance (VSA).

Just last month Neocleus hired the former President of Product Management & Marketing at Softricity, Bill Corrigan.
This month instead the company appoints an RSA executive to its Board of Directors: Dennis Hoffman.

Hoffman is the Vice President and General Manager of Data Security at RSA, which is a subsidiary of EMC.

The strong background in security is not really a surprise: the startup leadership comes from well-known security firms like BeeFence, Check Point, Entercept (acquired by McAfee), SofaWare.

Nonetheless this subtle link with EMC is interesting.
Neocleus is about to release its client hypervisor based on Xen (probably beating on time Citrix, VMware, and a number of other startups).
One may think that they are trying to attract the attention of VMware (which is another EMC subsidiary) but EMC swore endless times that its subsidiaries are totally independent and don’t receive any pressure from the parent company. It’s just a matter to believe so.

Just yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is bidding to acquire Sun.

Many believes that IBM may want Sun to consolidate its position in the virtualization and cloud computing space before Cisco Systems gets any market share with its upcoming Unified Computing System. But the Cisco involvement in this bid be be much deeper than that.

Several rumors (none of them coming from trusted virtualization.info sources anyway) suggest that Cisco was already in discussion to acquire Sun before IBM came in.

Many have spotted a similarity between the Sun server chassis and the new Cisco UCS chassis (here an example) and started wondering if between the two have an OEM agreement in place to manufacture the UCS hardware.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that IBM is in acquisition talk with Sun and considering the source this is very unlikely just a rumor:

If the deal does go through, which could happen as early as this week, IBM is likely to pay at least $6.5 billion in cash to acquire Sun, the people said. That would translate into a premium of more than 100% over Sun’s closing price Tuesday.

The impact of such merge would be huge. Of course the big question is what will happen to the many overlapping business units and offerings (servers, storage, management software).

One of the things that IBM may want to save of the current Sun identity is the upcoming and so much delayed server virtualization portfolio dubbed xVM, which includes a bare-metal hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), an enterprise management console that can perform VMs live migrations and resource pooling (xVM Ops Center), a VDI connection broker (xVM VDI), a hosted virtualization product (xVM VirtualBox) and a cloud computing facility that can rival with Amazon EC2 (depending on the recently acquired Q-Layer technology).

So far IBM has been happy in its role of virtualization distributor, despite the company invented the technology in the ‘60s. But Cisco is invading the server space and has a relevant interest in VMware. Not enough to buy the virtualization vendor but enough to keep a leadership position in the fastest growing IT market today.

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