History

Andrew Kutz, the man who did reverse engineering of the VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 (now vCenter) plug-in system, creating a number of tremendously helpful unofficial plug-ins, is back.

This time Kuts launches a more ambitious project: a management interface for mobile devices (yes, including the iPhone and Google Android phones) that supports multiple hypervisors.

Dubbed Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM) the product is currently in beta and already supports VMware Infrastructure 3.5, Microsoft Hyper-V 2008, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and even VMware Server 2.0.

VMM allows to turn on and off any virtual machine and control its resource consumption (vCPU and vRAM).

To make this possible Kutz developed a Unified Virtualization API (UVAPI) that can even be extended by 3rd party developers.

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PHD Technologies continues to renew itself: in August 2008 the company secured an undisclosed sum that is using to acquire technologies and competency as well as to rebuild its leadership.
After appointing Sridhar Murthy as CEO and Igor Saulsky as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales, now the company appoints Joe Julian as member of the Board of Directors:

Julian formerly worked as Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Global Accounts for Veritas Software. In this role, Julian managed the sales, pre-sales, and support renewal operations for all products in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. In addition, he was responsible for the launch of Veritas’ Global Accounts Program, which included 20 global accounts worldwide and the National Accounts program in the United States. Julian also served as an active board member and strategic consultant to Avamar Technologies, leading up to Avamar’s acquisition by EMC in 2006.

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Surprisingly enough in the last few months Intel sold many of its VMW shares (some of them were acquired by Cisco). There may be a good reason: Intel has some serious business to do with the VMware’s competitor Citrix.

Last Friday the two announced a joint effort (codenamed Thunder Lake) to develop a version of Xen for consumer equipment like desktops and laptops (something the industry is calling a desktop or client hypervisor).

Of course the product is not developed for the consumer market, but for the big enterprises with a large-scale population of clients. For this reason Citrix and Intel will offer the new hypervisor along with a centralized management system to control the hypervisor distribution, a delivery mechanism that works on bare-metal hardware, and a security wrapper around the virtual machines to enforce granular access control policies.
The entire platform will be optimized for Intel vPro technology.

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Today can finally publish the results of our Virtualization Industry Survey 2008 about hardware virtualization adoption.

The survey was open at the end of October just for our virtualization.info Vanguards members, then extended to all our readers.
In a little more than one month 1050 responses were collected and, as promised, we are publishing today the surprising results:

Q1 – What is the size of your company? 

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One of the biggest challenge when adopting a new virtualization platform is securing the ISVs support.
Without it moving from the market leader to a more innovative or cheaper solution is a risky business.

It’s the case of KVM, the open source virtualization platform that is part of the Linux Kernel since version 2.6.20 and that is attracting a large number of developers (away from Xen, we were told).

KVM may be very cool, and the fact that Red Hat acquired its maintainer, the startup Qumranet, certainly ignites high hopes for the platform.
But the reality is that, at today, KVM is still too young to feature the ISVs support that VMware, Citrix or Microsoft can offer.

Excluding IBM, which just started to its Lotus Notes, Symphony and a bunch of other applications on the Virtual Bridges implementation of KVM, no other major IT vendor is officially endorsing KVM.

As often happens, Microsoft is the key to change this situation: it’s now more than clear that virtualization is being used across the globe to virtualize and consolidate in large majority Windows boxes.
If Microsoft officially supports Windows in a KVM virtual machine then the other ISVs will follow, and the customers can start adopting the solution with confidence.

With much surprise it’s possible that the unlikely event already happened.

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As promised in November, Microsoft launched yesterday the first beta of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), formerly known as Kidaro Managed Workspace.

Microsoft acquired Kidaro in March 2008, but as usual the product must be re-engineered to meet the software development criteria and quality standards that the company enforces before it can be rebranded and sold.

Managed Workspace is a platform wrapper for Type-2 VMMs (non bare-metal virtualization platforms, like Virtual PC or Virtual Server) that envelops virtual machines in a security layer where the administrator can define granular corporate policies, deciding which physical networks can be accessed, when the VM expires, if the virtual hard drive is encrypted, etc.

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Yesterday the embedded virtualization vendor Open Kernel Labs closed its first round of investments: $7.6 million kindly provided by Chrysalis Ventures, Neo Technology Ventures and Citrix.

The interest of Citrix in mobile virtualization is very high and goes well beyond the port of its ICA client on the iPhone.

Xen, which powers XenServer, is being ported on ARM architectures by Samsung since a couple of years now and Citrix seems ready to leverage the opportunity.
Just two months ago Ian Pratt, CTO of Xen and Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix, clearly stated his interest in mobile virtualization.

On top of that the VMware’s acquisition of Trango, a well-known Open Kernel Labs competitor, is further igniting the interest.

Some are already speculating that Citrix may proceed with an acquisition after this first investment.

Yesterday Sun announced a new offering for the SMB segment: a bundle of some of its mid-range servers and SANs with VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.
Exactly: Sun, which is investing million of dollars on its own hypervisor, is actively pushing two leading competitors.

What’s the strategy behind this initiative?

This is not just a typical offering to pre-install the hypervisor of choice inside a brand new server like every major OEM does since a while now: Sun issued a press announcement, published a dedicated website, highlighted the differences between the two virtualization products suggesting which one is better in which scenario.

An agreement to resell competing hypervisors would make sense if Sun was three years away from releasing xVM Server. But while in late, xVM Server is almost here (as the available documentation demonstrates).

Supposing that Sun can successfully sell ESX and Hyper-V to its customers, what its sales reps will tell them when xVM Server will be out? “Do you mind throwing away the investment that we suggested and that you just made and switch to our hypervisor?”

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As most virtualization.info US visitors know, the new President of the United States, Barack Obama, is using technology extensively.

Besides uploading his public speeches on YouTube (through over 1,800 videos, watched more than 110 million of times) and spending money on videogame ads, one of the most significant uses of Internet he has made thus far is publishing the transition website Change.gov, where US citizens can use Google Moderator to submit questions and ideas (and vote on existing ones) about a number of topics, from Economy to Healthcare.

This part of his Open Government initiative is so popular that more than 30,000 questions have been submitted so far.

Among them, one in the Energy and Environment category may be specially interesting for virtualization.info readers:

Going green on carbon with IT Virtualization

Push a government-wide IT virtualization initiative to reduce the carbon-footprint of our planned digital health records system by 80+%.
Mandate a review of existing federal IT infrastructure to find opportunities for consolidating servers and reducing datacenter energy requirements with a minimum 10 to 1 consolidation ratio.

Is it worth voting?

In October 2008 Amazon finally declared its Xen-based Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) ready for production, introducing a Service Level Agreement, the availability for 32 and 64bit Windows Server 2003 virtual machines, and the support for IIS and SQL Server inside each guest OS.

At that time the company also hinted at a new management console that customers could use to manage their virtual infrastructure in the cloud, but the product remained unveiled until last week.

Simply dubbed Web-based AWS Management Console, the product is a feature-rich control panel that allows to create, launch, find and manage virtual machines (called Amazon Machine Images or AMIs), create and manage volumes and snapshots (called Elastic Block Store or EBS), and even manage the security permissions and the firewall settings.

The product is still in beta but its AJAX interface seems pretty valid and Amazon seems to have created an interface even better than the popular Elasticfox extension for Firefox:

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