Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
The frenetic activity of VKernel in the last months seems to have repaid the US startup.
Today the company reports the results of its first year of activity:
It’s certainly a good result considering the current economy, but VKernel may find a hard time to keep these results in 2009, as VMware is entering the chargeback and performance analysis segments where the startup is focusing.
The second version of Hyper-V is much awaited as Microsoft promised to introduce with it a virtual machine live migration technology that could rival with VMware VMotion and Citrix XenMotion.
As it seems that customers can’t live without this capability, the news that Microsoft won’t deliver Hyper-V 2.0 before 2010 immediately put the company out of competition for another year.
But Microsoft learned from the errors of the past and it’s trying to announce less and deliver more. So, with much surprise the new version of the hypervisor came out last week, as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta.
This first build, available for download to the general public, includes all the features already announced in a whitepaper in November 2008 plus some more:
Putting aside the much criticized emphasis about cloud computing, the biggest announcement of VMworld 2008 was that VMware is going to broaden its scope and product portfolio in 2009, invading pretty much every market segment and creating a lot of concerns for some of its partners.
VMware isn’t ready yet to show the new vCenter modules and stand-alone products mentioned on stage, but it’s teasing the customers with their names and core features:
VMware starts the new year hiring away the Borland CEO Tod Nielsen.
Prior to Borland, Nielsen served as senior vice president, marketing and global sales support for Oracle Corporation. Prior to Oracle, Nielsen was the chief marketing officer and executive vice president of engineering at BEA Systems, where he had overall responsibility for BEA’s worldwide marketing strategy and operations, as well as all research and development operations. Nielsen joined BEA after the acquisition of his private company, Crossgain Inc., where he served as its chief executive officer.
Anyway the most interesting news is that Nielsen worked for twelve years at Microsoft where he possibly met Paul Maritz, the new VMware CEO.
Nielsen, who will work as COO and will report directly to Maritz, is the second Microsoft executive that VMware hires.
It’s more than clear that Sun doesn’t want to be a secondary player in the emerging markets, most of all in the virtualization and cloud computing ones.
In the virtualization space the company is developing its own hypervisor, based on Xen, and an enterprise management system that could rival with VMware vCenter.
Unfortunately both xVM Server 1.0 and Ops Center 2.0 are terribly in late and the customers’ hopes to have an open source hypervisor with enterprise-grade support within a reasonable amount of time are fading away.
Sun is also moving to build a concrete presence in the cloud computing space: its general purpose grid computing facility Network.com is being upgraded, probably to mimic the wildly popular Amazon EC2.
And now the company announces the acquisition of Q-layer, a European company offering a management platform, called NephOS, that simplifies the on-demand provisioning of discrete servers, as well as networks and storage resources, and offers per-user chargeback capabilities.
It seems very likely that the next version of Network.com may feature NephOS to further compete with Amazon.
After more than one year of development, Phoenix Technologies is finally ready to sell it client hypervisor: HyperCore.
The company formally announced the consumer version of the product last week at CES 2009, where HyperCore, based on Xen, was launched in two editions:
Thanks to its fault-tolerance engine, everRun FT, Marathon Technologies became one of the key partner of Citrix in the last year at a point that parts of its product were included in the new XenServer 5.0.
Now Marathon is ready to rock Microsoft Hyper-V as well: last week the company announced a new agreement with Microsoft to develop a future version of the hypervisor which uses everRun as fault-tolerance mechanism.
Once again Citrix and Microsoft are sharing technologies and partners, making their two hypervisors more and more similar in approach and features.
Over time the difference between the two will be in a small set of cutting-edge capabilities that Citrix will implement 18 months before Microsoft, and will sell to enterprises that don’t want to go with VMware anymore for any reason.
After a long beta, the popular (at least in Europe) Login Consultants last week released the first version of their Virtual Session Indexer (VSI).
VSI 1.0 is a free benchmark platform to measure the remote desktop performance in a Terminal Server farm or in a VDI environment.
To run the tool it’s required to have a 4 tiers infrastructure: a domain controller for the authentication a file server for logging user sessions, a server to host the TS/XenApp/VDI service and a workstation to launch the user sessions.
Here a video of the product in action:
The first week of 2009 Vizioncore released vRanger Pro 3.2.8.1
Despite the numbering this release introduces a major new feature that many customers were waiting: the full support for VMware ESXi.
Unfortunately, while vRanger Pro is the first solution to offer full and differential backups for the free VMware hypervisor, it can’t be used out-of-the-box: the product can complete the task only with the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) component, which is part of the VMware Infrastructure.
Today Vizioncore announces a name change for its vOptimizer, the product acquired from Invirtus and once known as VM Optimizer.
Just like vRanger Pro the product is now vOptimizer Pro.
The move is a bit strange: over one year ago Vizioncore renamed VM Optimizer in vOptimizer 4.0, saving the version numbering that Invirtus was using.
Now the company is axing that product name and going back to 2.0.
Along with the new name Vizioncore announces a new feature: now vOptimizer Pro can automatically reclaim the wasted space inside the guest OS (Windows only).
