History

In June 2006 Parallels launched its desktop virtualization product for the Apple market, Parallels Desktop, winning an impressive number of customers.

At that time Microsoft was retiring its Virtual PC for Mac and VMware was considering the Apple market just a niche.
Another year had to pass before VMware could release a competitive product: Fusion.

At that time, despite the immense popularity of VMware in the Windows and Linux words, Fusion couldn’t move a high number of customers away from Parallels.

Now, two years and a half later, the Parallels advantage may be fading away: ArsTechnica mentions a NPD analysis where VMware Fusion has 53% retail market share in North America against 44% of Parallels.

Read more

The virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009 will take place in May 5-7 at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, co-hosted with other three great events (Citrix iForum, Network World Live! and Geek Speak).

On Dec 1st we launched a Call for Papers to deliver some great contents on stage.
In one month, despite the closing quarter and the holidays, we received an amazing 97 submissions.

As promised, today we publish all of them, title and abstract, so you can vote for the most interesting ones and help us to build the event you’d like to attend.
We just removed any reference to the speaker, so there’s an exclusive focus on the topic.

To simplify the whole process we setup a Digg-like interface where you can anonymously promote (up arrow) or demote (down arrow) each presentation.
You can even comment each abstract (and we encourage you to do so), so the speakers can have some early feedbacks and fine-tune their presentations to match your needs.
Last but not least there’s a search if you are looking for something in particular and don’t want to browse all the 97 submissions.

Here we go: http://cfp.virtualizationcongress.com

Some of the proposals you’ll find there:

• Building a Business Case for your virtualization projects
• Cloud Computing Adoption Model
• Designing a Stable Virtual Infrastructure
• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You
• iPhone Virtualization
• Power and Cooling in the Datacenter
• Security Architecture for VDI
• Virtual Infrastructures: Scale Up or Scale Out? Rack or Blade form factors?
• Virtualized Storage for Virtualized IT: Best Practices for Maximizing Efficiency, Flexibility, and Data Protection
• VM Sprawl Case Study Findings

For the fourth year in a row virtualization.info grew over 50%, now surpassing 2 Million page views / year.

We also reached 9,000 subscribers and almost 2,000 members of our network of virtualization professionals: the virtualization.info Vanguards.

But what are the articles that contributed to achieve this great numbers? Here the top 10 for 2008:

Read more

As our readers know virtualization.info tracks the evolution of the virtualization.info since 2003 thanks to the huge help of an overwhelming number of news sources, including mainstream news portal, corporate and personal blogs, web forums and newsgroups.

While most news sites don’t shine for their analysis, the overall quality of the blogs is very high.
This year a number of them really impressed for the value of the content and the knowledge of their authors.

virtualization.info recommends (in no special order):

– blog.scottlowe.org – Authored by Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead for Virtualization at ePlus Technology

– IT 2.0 – Authored by Massimo Re Ferrè, Architect at IBM

– Mike D’s Blog – Authored by Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware

– Rational Survivability – Authored by Christofer Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys

– Virtual Geek – Authored by Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC

At the beginning of this month virtualization.info announced the Virtualization Congress 2009, to be held at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, from May 5 to 7.

This year the event will be co-hosted with the Citrix iForum, Network World Live! and Geek Speak (this last one will be offered as part of the Virtualization Congress ticket). More information about this are here.

To build the agenda we issued a Call for Papers that ends Dec. 31, 2008.
We accept proposals from any industry entity, including independent professionals, solution providers and of course virtualization vendors.

So far we got over 50 submissions that we’ll publish next Monday (January 5th) here, asking our readers to vote for the most interesting ones.

Our pre-registrations highlight a special interest for best-practices and designing sessions about most topics around virtualization (from application virtualization to virtual lab management, passing through chargeback), and so we urge the brilliant virtualization architects and engineers that make our readership to share their experiences and submit a presentation during these last three days.

We are keen to bring on stage some independent voices to build some real-world knowledge.
If you are an expert about one specific vendor it’s great.
If your presentation crosses the boundaries of a certain product it’s even better.

Submit here: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/cfp.htm

The evolution of the virtualization industry in the last five years clarified how the market prefers hardware virtualization over any other kind of approach.

Application virtualization certainly is the next big step towards a “liquid” data center, but so far it’s still far away from the mainstream adoption.

The third platform virtualization technique that we track at virtualization.info, something we called for a long time OS partitioning, is the OS virtualization.

As our Virtualization Industry Radar highlights the only commercial players in this segment are Sun and Parallels (formerly SWsoft).
But the Sun presence in this space is very limited: its Solaris Containers (aka Zones) are available only for Solaris 10 and while the product became very flexible in the last two years, it’s clear that the company is moving its investments on hardware virtualization.

Read more

The US startup Virtual Computer continues to unveil bits of its upcoming product, NxTop, which manipulates server and client virtualization to build an innovative VDI environment.

At the beginning of this month the company launched a private beta program and now it demonstrates some high-speed 3D graphics on virtualized laptops.

One of the biggest challenges in adopting a hypervisor on consumer equipment like workstation or notebooks is granting satisfying performance that won’t damage the user experience.
But the hypervisors developed so far for server virtualization just emulate most of the physical devices so that quality display or audio cards are just unusable.

Virtual Computer developed a special version of Xen to address this shortcoming on client side, and now it’s ready to show how it works when dealing with a 3D video cards and some graphic-intensive software like Quake and Google Earth:

Read more

The just released Kernel 2.6.28 includes more than 104 patches for the virtualization engine KVM, included in Linux since 2.6.20.

One of those patches is specially important as it allows the mapping of physical PCI device to a specific virtual machine through the Intel Virtualization for Directed I/O (VT-d) technology.

Intel introduced VT-d in early Q1 2006 but so far only Novell and Oracle supported it in their Xen implementations (as the virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide highlights).

The PCI direct access grants higher performance but lower flexibility in a virtual infrastructure: for instance a VM can only map as many devices as are physically present in the platform.
Nonetheless it’s a critical step to bring high-performance virtualization on consumer equipment (something often called client hypervisor) like laptops.

Read more

Just like most IT companies, the VMware stock performance is not exactly outstanding.
A little more than one year ago VMW reached $124.83 per share, and now it is near its minimum at $22.32.
But things can go worse.

Before Christmas Techworld reported an interesting note appeared in the last Morgan Stanley research about VMware:

First, Q4 is off to a slow start and we believe VMW may struggle to hit consensus. Second, ELA (VMware’s Enterprise Licence Agreement) momentum is slowing, which likely removes a major driver of license growth. Third, headcount will weigh on margins in the first half of 09.

This comment led to a “Sell” recommendation on VMW shares.

Morgan Stanley is not alone: even UBS cut its rating from “Neutral” to “Sell” last month as reported by ServerWatch.
But the fact that UBS is the largest VMware stockholder after EMC raises some additional concerns.

One year and a half after its launch, the benchmarking platform that VMware called VMmark got some serious traction among OEMs.

The results page shows more than 30 analysis submitted by the biggest OEMs, including Dell, HP, IBM, Sun and Unysis.

Easily to predict, VMmark got zero acceptance from the other virtualization vendors, making the tool only partially useful.
Despite that, VMware competitors, did nothing to seriously develop a common standard or at least to adopt the only alternative available today: Intel vConsolidate.
Their only action in the last 18 months has been to join the SPEC virtualization benckmarking group. It’s unclear what progress the project made so far.

Read more