History

Rumors of a possible EMC/VMW acquisition by Cisco has resurfaced.

virtualization.info has discovered some circumstantial evidence which combined could mean that something huge is about to go down.

• Cisco is raising cash for possible acquisitions, as reported earlier today.
• Yesterday’s SEC filing is evidence that someone is hoarding VMware shares.
• At Cisco Networkers 2009 a tighter Cisco/VMware/EMC strategy was evident.

Monday’s SEC filings shows that Cisco posted a prospectus on raising $4 billion in senior bonds. The book building is run by all the major investment banks and is closing on February 17.
Cisco must be really confident for such a major issuance in these market conditions, but Standard & Poors is giving the senior unsecured notes an A+ rating with a stable outlook.
Cisco will use $500 million of the $4 billion to repay short term debt.  When combined with sizeable cash holdings, this leaves them with with $4.7 billion in cash at the US parent company. According to CNET that amount excluded cash holdings at subsidiaries overseas.

That is not enough for a full takeover as the market cap of EMC is around $25 billion and VMware about $10.5 billion, but a possible stock swap with a cash settlement sprinkled on top could certainly interest EMC investors (Cisco currently hold 1.7% of the total outstanding stock).

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Leaked by the VMware Partner newsletter, and confirmed by a VMworld Europe 2009 abstract (DC10 – Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability), the upcoming vCenter Server Heartbeat will be announced on Feb 24.

SearchServerVirtualization is reporting that the new module will implement a hot-standby achitecture, monitoring sever and network hardware, as well as the vCenter application instance itself.
Hearbeat can either restart the application or fail-over it through LAN or WAN.

Heartbeat is not developed by VMware. The name of the partner that is providing this solution will be unveiled at VMworld.

Whoever is the partner (SSV speculates on NeverFail Group) it only supports Windows installations and uses Microsoft SQL Sever as backend database.

While the virtualization community is still intensely discussing the benchmarks around XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V used for VDI scenarios, provided by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and confuted by VMware, a new study surfaces.

This performance analysis, committed by VMware, shifts the focus from VDI to application virtualization, comparing Citrix XenApp 5.0, Microsoft App-V 4.5, Symantec SVS Pro 2.1 and VMware ThinApp 4.0.1.

The measurements were performed using the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) Clarity Suite: the Clarity Tracker Agent is deployed on the benchmarked Windows machines, the Clarity Studio produces workload simulation, and the results are uploaded for further analysis to the Exo Performance Network.

The conclusion are rather interesting:

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Last week mainstream news magazines Network World and Business Journal suggested that two major IT vendors, Novell and Dell, are ready to make some acquisitions in the virtualization space.

Network World is reporting the Novell President and CEO’s words:

…Novell is now planning to extend the technology to provide tools to users that will enable them to move workloads from virtual environments to a cloud computing model…

Business Journal instead is speculating that Dell may want to acquire Egenera, countering the HP’s acquisition of Opsware:

Dell officials have suggested that it’s time for the company to do more deals to expand its revenue base to compete with rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
The question is: Will it gamble on large acquisitions or continue with a track record of relatively conservative deals?

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Yesterday Quest held its Q4 2008 earning call and its new President and CEO Douglas Garn reported a couple of interesting details talking about the virtualization subsidiaries:

• On the service side of our virtualization, Vizioncore continues to deliver very strong results. We had record revenue in Q4, despite the economic conditions. We closed out the year of 2008 with over 15,000 clients within Vizioncore, which is absolutely remarkable. Certainly we’re hoping that they more than double that this year.
• On the desktop side, again we continue to see strong traction on the desktop virtualization area. Customers are highly interested and we’re engaged in many, many positive opportunities. We’ve signed a significant OEM deal with one of the top tier one hardware vendors and it’s a nice size opportunity for us, but cannot give you any more detail.

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One of the missions of virtualization.info is to report about new vendors entering the virtualization market with valuable, innovative products.

We believe so much that promoting the virtualization startups is the right thing to do that we decided to use the Virtualization Congress 2009, to do so.

Less than one month ago we launched a contest, calling for all the early-stage companies that want to launch for the first time at our conference in Las Vegas in May.
Six of them will be selected to present their brands and products on stage (for free) and one of them will get a year of advertising on virtualization.info (for free).

Today we are happy to announce that we have the first submission.
Of course we’ll not unveil the name of the submitting companies, but in April we’ll announce those selected to present on stage.

Some of the leading architects in the virtualization community will be at the Virtualization Congress to speak.
Some of these guys, along with many potential customers and partners (and buyers), will attend the Call for Startups general session, so this will be a great exposure opportunity.

Remember: for the Virtualization Congress 2009 US we accept submissions up to March 31, and we’ll select just six startups. So be sure to apply as soon as possible.

In October 2008 Christopher Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys (and virtualization.info Top Blogger for 2008) denounced how the PCI Standard Council didn’t demonstrate much interest for virtualization.

Just one month later VMware was joining the Council.

Now, magically, a Special Interest Group (SIG) for virtualization is coming, as reported by Troy Leach, Technical Director of the PCI SSC:

A SIG for virtualization is coming this year but we don’t have any firm dates or objectives as of yet.  Only those 500-600 companies (which include VMware, Microsoft, Dell, etc) that are participating organizations or the 1,800+ security assessors can contribute. As you can imagine with those numbers, we already receive thousands of pages of feedback and are obligated to read all comments and suggestions.

Thanks to Christopher Hoff for the news.

The last week discussion about XenServer vs ESX (vs Hyper-V) for VDI scenarios, ignited by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and followed up by VMware, is still hot.
So maybe it’s worth to further discuss the topic by highlighting a recent paper published by Citrix: XenDesktop 2.1 Scalability Analysis.

The first part of the 29-pages document describes how a Citrix XenDesktop infrastructure (including XenServer, XenApp, the Desktop Delivery Controller connection broker) was tested against Provisioning Server for Desktops (to deliver new virtual desktops) and EdgeSight (to simulate application workloads) to measure its scaling capability.

The analysis was summarized in the following XenDesktop Environment Sizing Guide:

Microsoft is preparing a new key document for its virtualization customers: the Hyper-V Security Guide.

Considering the mission-critical role of any hypervisor, this guide should be available since day one (but Microsoft is not the only virtualization vendor to blame for the lack of security guidance).

The document is divided in three chapters:

• Hardening Hyper-V
• Virtual machine management and delegation
• Protecting virtual machines

So far it doesn’t seem particularly rich and Microsoft will have to greatly enhance the first chapter to make it a valuable resource, but it already offers some little jewels like the Hyper-V Attack Surface Reference Workbook.

The Hyper-V Security Guide is now in (public) beta testing so anybody can enroll for the program and download it right now.

These days Microsoft Powershell seems the driving force behind all attempts to automate virtual infrastructures:

• Citrix released an orchestration platform, Workflow Studio, built on Powershell
• VMware released version 1.5 of its VI Tookit (aka Powershell SDK)
• Quest released its PowerGUI PowerPack 2.0 for VMware (aka VMware multi-host management through Powershell)
• icomasoft, a Swiss startup, released its VI PowerScripter Professional (aka VMware vCenter plug-in to execute Powershell scripts)

Last week Citrix validated Powershell once again by releasing its Powershell SnapIn for XenServer.

Ewan Mellor, Principal Software Engineer at Citrix, posted some basic examples (here and here) of what can be done with the Microsoft scripting language on XenServer.