History

Last week a Gartner chart comparing virtualization vendors market shares and their hypervisors’ features generated a lot of buzz as, for example, Oracle VM was reported as more used than Microsoft Hyper-V.

The chart was included in a recent article from Datamation, but Gartner said that it was part of November 2007 report.
The analysis firm has requested the news magazine to update its article with the newest version of that chart, based on projections made on March 2008. Let’s compare the two diagrams:

	November 2007
	March 2008

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While Sun puts the final touches to its first hypervisor xVM Server 1.0 and to xVM Ops Center 2.0 (which could be released in November), some more details about the products emerge from a corporate blogs.

In a list of FAQs published there an interesting (yet confusing) indication about the free vs paid strategy about the xVM family:

Q: Within the Sun xVM Portfolio, what’s going to be open-source, and what will cost money?
A: Sun xVM VirtualBox and Sun xVM Server will be open-sourced. Some features, though, such as guest migration, are part of Sun xVM Ops Center. Also, service contracts can be purchased for any part of the Sun xVM Portfolio.

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The VDI vendor Leostream continues to execute its new strategy after the $3 million cash injection received in May.

After appointing a new Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing and closing an reselling agreement with IBM, the company now signs a partnership with eG Innovations, a company focused on performance monitoring.

eG Innovations will enhanced its product, VM Monitor, to use the data about the virtual desktop infrastructures that the Leostream connection broker can offer.
It’s unclear if the two companies will offer a bundle of if the integration will go further.

ToutVirtual is a US virtualization startup emerged from the stealth mode in early 2006.
Since that time few progresses were made to become a relevant player. The last news from the company is more than one year old, when the company renamed/revamped its product portfolio.

Finally ToutVirtual is back, announcing that its flagship product, VirtualIQ Pro, now supports Microsoft Hyper-V.

VirtualIQ Pro is a monitoring and reporting tool offered as virtual appliance for several hypervisors (ESX, XenServer, SUSE Enterprise Linux with Xen and now Hyper-V).

This segment is becoming crowded and while most players are still fully focused on supporting VMware, there’s an evident shift in interest. 
ToutVirtual will have to show something very special to survive the competition (and the current economical crisis).

VDIworks, after just five months since the spin-off from ClearCube, decides to replace its President and CEO.

Rick Hoffman, formerly ClearCube CEO, is now replaced by Amir Husain, previously covering the role of CTO inside the company and inside ClearCube before the spin-off.

It’s not clear if Hoffman will go back to ClearCube or just leave both companies.

The US startup Pano Logic, offering a complete VDI platform made of a software connection broker and a hardware thin client, has just appointed its new President and CEO: John Kish.

Kish can really boost the company popularity as he comes from one of the most popular thin client vendor: Wyse Technologies.

Kish also has a notable experience with Oracle: when he was a senior manager there he established the company’s presence on the desktop. Under Kish’s leadership, Oracle’s Desktop Products Division grew to over 400 employees and over $400M in revenues.

Maybe the first step under his control will be supporting Oracle VM, which Gartner says it’s becoming more popular than Microsoft Hyper-V.

This year Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie starts the PDC 2008 conference by talking about the data center in the cloud.
He introduces a new flavor of Windows called Azure, a version of the Microsoft operating system built for cloud computing (but still based on existing technologies like Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, ASP.Net 3.5, etc.).

Windows Azure will not be available for installation at customers site, but will be deployed at Microsoft data centers (currently available in US, soon worldwide).

Microsoft says that the new OS is powered by a highly scalable hypervisor (doesn’t specify which one but it’s probably Hyper-V 2.0) which acts as a fabric controller and manages both servers and services through roles, channels and interfaces.

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Steven Bink at Hypervoria.com is reporting live from Microsoft PDC 2008 conference in Los Angeles.

Before the keynote is actually performed (it will be live streamed here) he already published the list of features planned for Hyper-V 2.0, part of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2:

• Live Migration
• Virtual memory hot plug
• Virtual storage (VHD) hot plug/remove
• Dynamic memory distribution across all VMs
• Support for shareable LUNs (Clustered Shared Volumes or CSV)
• Support for AMD RVI and Intel EPT nested page tables technologies
• Support for up to 32 physical cores
• Support for I/O Virtualization technologies

Please note that Microsoft is still unsure about including the dynamic memory feature in the RTM. In any case it will not appear in the beta builds.

Update: The new website about Windows Server 2008 R2 that Microsoft just launched reveals that the OS (and Hyper-V 2.0) will be available no earlier than 2010.

Today is a special day for Amazon: the company just declared its cloud computing infrastructure based on Xen, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as ready for production and introduced a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Each account will be allowed to configure up to 20 virtual machines with option to have more.
To manage the whole virtual infrastructure Amazon is also introducing a new web management console.

More than that EC2 finally offers 32bit and 64bit Windows Server 2003 virtual machines, reachable through RDP, despite this new option is considered as part of a new beta program.

On top of Windows, Amazon also supports Authentication Services (for more than five accounts or for LDAP connection), IIS6 (including ASP.NET) and 64bit Microsoft SQL Server (Standard Edition only) but the company doesn’t clarify which version is offered.

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Datamation just published a new article about Virtual Iron and its potential to win virtualization competitors.

The piece includes a very interesting Gartner chart that reveals surprising information:

First of all the Microsoft virtualization offering is perceived as the less mature and stable compared with the other in the matrix. Even less than Oracle, the last vendor entering the virtualization space.This shouldn’t surprise much considering that Hyper-V is at its first edition while Oracle uses Xen as the hypervisor for its Oracle VM.
Nonetheless it’s a further confirmation that Microsoft still has a huge amount of work ahead if it wants to change the market perspective.

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