History

Microsoft just released an introductory book about its virtualization products for free:

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (From the Desktop to the Datacenter) Mitch Tulloch (with the Microsoft Virtualization Team) ISBN: 9780735693371 452 pages

The book covers Hyper-V 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, App-V (formerly Softricity SoftGrid), Terminal Services, MED-V (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspace), Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit and even the technologies that Microsoft is trying to market as profile virtualization: User Profiles, Folder Redirection and Offline Files.

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In June 2008 Microsoft published an important document for all the customers that are evaluating and adopting its hypervisor: the Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008.

The document contains a section dedicated to Hyper-V and while most of the suggestions included in this whitepaper are just common sense or recap of the product features, there are some hidden treasures:

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By now it should be more than clear that the battle for the enterprise market between VMware and Citrix is no more played on the server consolidation playground, but rather on the VDI one.

The are a lot of component in a virtual desktop infrastructure where the two companies (and their additional competitors) can innovate: the consolidation ratio provided by the server-side hypervisor, the connection broker intelligence, the speed of the remote desktop protocol, the provisioning of the thin client OS, and very soon the efficiency of the client-side hypervisor (needed to achieve the much wanted offline VDI).

A notable move in this long-term game was made by Citrix which just two weeks ago announced a groundbreaking agreement with Intel to develop a client hypervisor which will be distributed through all the major OEM partners.

VMware answers today releasing an open source VDI client: VMware View Open Client.

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Just yesterday virtualization.info covered the amazing work of Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts that lead two separate Citrix and VMware solutions providers.

Their Virtual Reality Check project is a performance analysis of the leading hypervisors (VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V) when running typical Microsoft Terminal Services/Citrix XenApp workloads: a Windows XP virtual desktop loaded with Outlook 2007 and Acrobat Reader 8.

Easy to guess, the post achieved one of the highest page view score in the history of virtualization.info, despite other prominent influencers already covered the project the previous week.

The non-sponsored results published by Spruijt and van de Kamp generated a lot of reactions as their conclusion on Citrix XenApp is:

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At the beginning of December 2008 virtualization.info broke the news about the upcoming entrance of Cisco in the x86 server market, revealing some details about a massive blade system codenamed California that will be powered by VMware technology (and probably by EMC storage).
Only two months later the rest of the worldwide press (including mainstream newspapers like the New York Times) confirmed the information.

Cisco (as well as VMware and EMC) stays mum about this project, besides the company’s CTO, Padmasree Warrior, admitted the future entrance in new markets with something called Unified Computing.
It’s even unclear when the three will announce the partnership (VMworld 2009?).
Despite that, we may have the first pieces of the puzzle. And it’s coming from EMC.

Yesterday in fact, Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC (and Top Blogger 2008 for virtualization.info), published one of his amazing posts highlighting the vision of a private cloud in a box:

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At the beginning of 2006 Parallels (at that time called SWsoft) announced the upcoming availability of its first hypervisor: Server.
The company planned to release the product in mid-2006 but after two years and a half it has yet to happen.

To be fair, in June 2008 Parallels released a server product called Server which doesn’t feature a full bare-metal architecture comparable with other hypervisors like VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V.

Despite the early marketing literature (now corrected), the current Parallels Server has a hybrid architecture that makes it more similar to a hosted product like VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server, and in fact it needs to be installed on Apple Mac OS Server.

Nonetheless the company didn’t change its plans: the hypervisor is still under development and will appear for the first time at the ongoing Summit 2009, held in Las Vegas.

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XenoCode is a US company that switched its core business in June 2008 and suddenly entered the application virtualization market with a product called Virtual Application Studio.

The solution was so interesting that Novell decided to close an OEM agreement with the company in September 2008.

Only six months after the first release XenoCode is ready to release the new version of its application virtualization platform.

Virtual Application Studio 2009 introduces a couple of key features:

• support for Active directory deployment
• dynamic virtual layers

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The US startup featuring an interesting end-to-end VDI solution (which doesn’t require Microsoft RDP anymore) just secured additional $6 million from the venture capital firms that participated the Series B funding: Foundation Capital and Goldman Sachs.

With this operation, the total amount of funds raised in this second round of investments is $18 million.

The interest around VDI is growing more and more every day and this startup will need all the money it can collect to compete against giants like VMware (which just announced an open source VDI client) and Citrix (which recently announced a groundbreaking partnership with Intel).

Last week a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts, Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), launched a remarkable project called Virtual Reality Check.

The non-sponsored joint effort produced a set of valuable benchmark comparisons between VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, when running Windows XP and Vista virtual machines for Terminal Services and VDI environments:

• Bare-Metal Platform Index v1.0
• Hyper-V Platform Index v1.0
• VMware Platform Performance Index v1.0
• XenServer Platform Performance Index v1.0

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It really seems like Sun has serious issues to deliver its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server, in time.

The product, along with the enterprise management console Ops Center 2.0, was initially expected for September 10, 2008 but that day Sun, unable to release in time, just re-announced the product line (the first announcement was published in November 2007).

During the second announcement Sun suggested that its virtualization offering may be released within two months (meaning November 2008) but once again the milestone was missed.

Last week, without any press release, Sun decided to release Ops Center 2.0 anyway, despite xVM Server is clearly unready.

At the same time the French magazine LeMagIT (which usually makes great newsbreaks) confirmed that the hypervisor is in late, and that its release is now postponed to Q2 2009.

LeMagIT also unveils that the first edition of xVM Server will not support SAN and iSCSI storage facilities.
For that, customers will have to wait a subsequent release scheduled for H2 2009.