History

Just five days ago Symantec went under fire for its supporting policy about VMware VMotion.

Basically the company refused to support two of its core products in a VMware environment where VMotion was used because some of its customers reported several kind of problems.

Thanks to the power of the blogosphere, to the massive negative PR, or more likely to the powerful influence that VMware can exercise, Symantec immediately changed the offending knowledge base article, taking the responsibility of any odd behavior for its products after a VMotion:

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At its PDC 2008 Conference Microsoft hinted at a list of features expected with Hyper-V 2.0.
The second version of the hypervisor should appear in 2010, as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 (even if many rumors of these days suggest that the OS may arrive a little earlier than the virtualization platform).

Now Microsoft formalizes the list of features through a whitepaper: the Windows Server 2008 R2 Reviewers Guide.

Additionally, the document exposes the upcoming strategy about VDI, unveiled just few days ago:

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Microsoft just release the first beta of its long awaited help desk software called System Center Service Manager.

This first usable build was expected much earlier but the feedbacks received from the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) testers convinced the company to reconsider the features.

The new development of Service Manager brought in some enhanced capabilities in different areas.
A key one is the change management.

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Just two weeks ago VMware announced the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, a startup focused on the so called embedded virtualization.

VMware announced that the Trango technology will be used to power a new Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) without adding further details.

Now something about the timeline emerges: Reseller News published an article quoting Srinivas Krishnamurti, Director of Product Management and Market Development at VMware, who said:

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Immediately after the replacement its CEO (the former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz took the place of Diane Greene), VMware risked to lose a number of high-profile executives and software engineers loyal to the fired co-founder.

The mass exodus never happened (also thanks to some aggressive workforce retaining programs) but VMware lost a bunch of key figures nonetheless:

• Paul Chan (Vice President of Product Development) in August
• Richard Sarwal (Executive Vice President of R&D) in September
• Mendel Rosenblum (Chief Scientist and co-founder) in September as well

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The list of executives leaving Virtual Iron gets longer and longer.

In May the company lost its public face, the Chief Marketing Officer Mike Grandinetti.
In November it also lost the one that was supposed to reshape the go-to-market strategy: the Chief Security Officer Tony Asaro. Asaro left the company after just

And now Virtual Iron loses its Director of Corporate Marketing Tim Walsh.

In realty Walsh left before Asaro, in October, to found, like its former colleague, his own consulting company.
Walsh left Virtual Iron after more than 3 years (and $65 million funding).  

Now, or the CEO Ed Walsh is working to completely renew its leadership team or the high-level profiles are leaving a sinking boat.

Just one month after the 6.5 release, VMware is ready to refresh again its Workstation.

Besides a bunch of bug fixes, the minor update 6.5.1 (build 126130) introduces a couple of interesting new features, both experimental:

• Experimental support for smart cards in Linux guests
• Experimental support for Unity mode in Linux guests

Download a trial here.

At the end of the last week VMware launched the public beta program for the newest version of its free P2V migration tool: Converter 4.0.

Converter 4.0 is already embedded into VMware Infrastructure 3.5 but the users that don’t buy the flagship platform can just use the stand-alone Converter 3.0.2, which is one year old.
It’s not clear why VMware is taking so long to synchronize the two versions.

The first beta build (122441) of the new version introduces key features that can be used with any VMware product besides VI 3.5:

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Since months now a serious number of companies and open source contributors is looking at Red Hat to understand its new virtualization strategy.

The company took a major step in June when it thrown out of window years of efforts on Xen to fully replace it with KVM.
Just two months after, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, the company that started KVM, that maintains it, that managed to inject it into the Linux kernel, and that sells a very interesting VDI solution.

What Red Hat wants to do now with KVM and Qumranet (somebody hopes that their highly performing VDI protocol SPICE will be open sourced) is critical to understand what chances has Linux to impose itself as a valuable virtualization platforms against the popular hypervisors ESX (offered by VMware) and Xen (offered by every other vendor except Microsoft).

Some hints of the new strategy surface in a recent interview that InformationWeek arranged with Jim Whitehurst, the Red Hat CEO:

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So far the CA activity in the virtualization space has been more than silent.
Yes, the company issued many press announcements stating that it’s reworking many of its products to support virtualization, but the software giant never took major steps to become a virtualization leader like almost every other major IT player did in the last two years.

Hiring the former co-founder of Virtugo (a virtualization startup that mysteriously disappeared shortly after its merge with uXcomm), Chris Dickson, as Vice President didn’t seem to help much.

Now things may change as CA just made a joint announcement with VMware, revealing that its Data Center Automation Manager is integrated with VMware vCenter and will interoperate with Stage Manager.
Additionally, VMware vCenter capabilities are integrated into the CA Advanced Systems Management (ASM), where the VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology can merge with the CA’s Dynamic Resource Brokering (DRB), and together they can possibly start a fantastic virtualization management sprawl.

The announcement seems to imply that these are just the first steps of a much more tighten relationship. We’ll see for how long CA will be happy to play this role in the virtualization industry.