History

Last week Gartner published a great interview with Ian Pratt, CTO of Xen, Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix (formerly co-founder of XenSource) and Chairman of Xen.org.

During the interview Pratt answers several questions about cloud computing and next steps for virtualization. Some answers are specially interesting:

Q: How real is the vision of cloud computing for the average organization today? Are we set to see a mass migration of IT functions toward external suppliers?

A: These things never happen as the people who are selling them propose, but I think there will be a movement over time. There are already plenty of startups whose entire IT infrastructure is cloud hosted and so they don’t have any physical infrastructures. Clearly, companies such as Amazon are providing a service that is useful.
But it’s a far bigger deal to take things that are working and running well in a data center and then try to push them out into the cloud. There are obviously going to be a lot of concerns around security, and you have to do a good job of convincing people that you’re going to look after their data in a secure fashion. I think the clouds that we have today are capable of evolving to do that. We have hypervisors. We know how to do a lot of these things, and I think that kind of strong isolation will evolve and be built into these cloud computing farms over time so they can provide those kind of guarantees: You can really create virtual data centers within a cloud and have confidence your data is being looked after, both when it’s on disk and flying across the network, as well as when it’s actually sitting in memory.

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One of the most exciting news announced at the VMworld 2008 last month in Las Vegas is the new pluggable virtual network that VMware Infrastructure 4 will introduce in 2009.

The first 3rd party virtual switch available for ESX 4 will be the Cisco Nexus 1000v.
The product is not yet in public beta but Cisco is already showing it to selected customers.

We are delighted to announce that virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab, our on-demand data center for virtualization professionals, has been selected as the demo facility for the Cisco Bootcamp about Nexus technologies in Switzerland.

The event will take place Oct. 21-23 and will show for the first time in the country a Nexus 5000 / Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) on a unified fabric (UF) in conjunction with VMware ESX environments.

Unified fabric (UF) is the overall name of the brand-new technologies that consists of: Datacenter Ethernet, Fibre-channel over Ethernet and high-speed 10G Networking for Datacenter LAN, SAN and cluster interconnect.

Unfortunately the Nexus will not be available for rent after this bootcamp, but stay tuned as we’ll fill this hole very soon. Also, look for other exciting announcements coming about Rent-A-Lab before the end of the year.

Today the analysis firm IDC released some surprising numbers about virtualization vendors market share:

• VMware: 44% (combining ESX and Server)
• Microsoft: 23% (combining Hyper-V and Virtual Server)

Isn’t clear how much of these market shares translates in production deployments and how much is about test & development or shelfware, but one thing is for sure: the Microsoft gain is remarkable (and its growing case studies library confirms it) even if VMware still leads with 78% revenue share.

Besides the numbers above there is something else that is interesting: worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year, compared to a 72% year-over-year increase the previous quarter.

Who ships more servers for virtualization duties? HP (34% market share) followed by Dell (25%) and IBM (16%).

Update: Easy to guess the report above generated a huge number of reactions (and complains from VMware).

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Not surprisingly at all the analysis firm Gartner just released a new report forecasting that virtualization will be the top strategic technology for 2009. But more interesting than that is the firm prediction on VDI adoption:

…However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

The second most strategic technology for 2009, believe or not, is cloud computing.
We’ll see if Gartner prediction is more accurate than virtualization architects perceptions collected so far at virtualization.info.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

As virtualization.info reported many times in the last couple of years, the current effort to bring security into the virtual infrastructure leaves much to desire.

The best thing that new and consolidated security vendors can do at the moment is:

1. moving traditional tools like firewalls, IDS, anti-virus and so on into virtual machines
2. ask the virtual infrastructure administrator to reconfigure the virtual network so that virtual traffic pass through or pass by the virtualized security tools above
3. offer support for this uncommon new deployment

and all of them are bad things:

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Three months after the first technical preview, VKernel is ready to release its new Capacity Analyzer (formerly Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer) 2.0.

Despite the major release number the product doesn’t seem to have any groundbreaking new feature.
Anyway VKernel included new Disk I/O statistics and enriched the user interface.

Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Since few weeks the members of the virtualization.info Vanguards community are enjoying a new discussion forum.
As the feature is pretty new not all of our 1,800 members are using it. Nonetheless some interesting threads are coming out.

One of the is specially interesting and starts this way: Do you think the current financial crisis will push CEO/CFO/CIO to reduce the IT costs by adopting Cloud Computing services? (Amazon EC2, Salesforce, etc.)

The answers arrived so far from prominent virtualization architects and engineers bring in several perspectives, all worthwhile of mention. A summary:

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In August Citrix promised the beta release of a new toolkit to author virtual machines compliant to the new Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) standard.

Today is the day: Citrix just released the first technical preview of project Kensho under the LGPL license.

The package at the moment includes:

• an import/export tool (for Windows XP and 2003 only) which can convert in OVF any virtual machine in VHD format, taking it from a folder (the Library) or directly from a Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V host.
• an agent to be installed on XenServer hosts which allows the direct import/export of OVF VMs (this is not needed to interact with Hyper-V as the tool uses the WinRM interface provided by Windows Server 2008)

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The amount and the entity of the announcements released by VMware during its VMworld 2008 require some time to be digested and properly evaluated. In some case the details are not fully realized until the first practical implementation arrives.
It seems the case for the Ready Management Initiative.

Under this name VMware is now grouping all the efforts to open vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) interfaces to 3rd parties for standardized, interoperable management of the virtual infrastructure.

As the slide above clarifies, this interoperability is bidirectional: this means that 3rd party management consoles can integrate into vCenter as one would hope and expect, but also that vCenter can integrate into 3rd party management consoles.

A lot of key vendors already adhered the Ready Management Initiative but SAP is the first that shows up a concrete example of the last scenario described above.

The company in fact is working to integrate vCenter basic capabilities into its Adaptive Computing (AC) Controller:

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At this point it’s well known that Sun is about to enter the virtualization market with a massive offering: a hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), a management platform for physical and virtual machines (xVM Ops Center), a connection broker (Sun VDI) and even a hosted virtualization platform for desktops (VirtualBox).
On top of that it’s easy to guess that the company will release virtualization friendly servers and storage arrays.

As said many times before, Sun has a unique opportunity at the moment, being the only big company that can offer a complete computing stack for virtualization, from the hardware to the software, without bothering its customers with multi-vendor license and support agreements (and issues).

In such position one would think that Sun is focusing all its effort in integrating the components above in a well concerted offering, leaving few things to desire outside the company’s portfolio. But it’s not the case.

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