History

No matter what the official version says, the Red Hat virtualization strategy has always been problematic.

It started in December 2004, when the company revealed the plan to adopt the open source hypervisor Xen as virtualization engine for its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.0.
Unfortunately such plan didn’t become reality earlier than two years later, when Red Hat finally released RHEL 5.0 with Xen in March 2007.

In mid 2006, being already in late, the company decided to play an interesting game: it declared Xen immature and accused its main competitor, Novell, for being irresponsible in integrating Xen in its enterprise distribution (SUSE Linux).
Probably to support such claims, Red Hat did its best to ship RHEL 5 with a minimal, under any enterprise standard, GUI for Xen: Virtual Machine Manager.

After that, a series of dramatic events happened.
First Microsoft signed a series of alliances with the some of the key Xen contributors: with XenSource, with Novell and with Virtual Iron. Then Citrix acquired XenSource in August 2007.

So, in less than one year Red Hat lost much of its capability to influence the Xen development despite it contributes to the open source project since the early beginning.
It was easy to guess that the company would quickly evaluate an alternative. And the only valuable alternative for Red Hat was KVM, the young virtualization platform that was included in the Linux kernel after just six months of development.

KVM offers a lot of advantages to Red Hat.
For example it ships as an official kernel module, avoiding major investments in maintaining it.
For example Novell is not using it and it’s unlikely to do so for a while (it has too much to do with Microsoft and Citrix right now).
For example it brings a new powerful allied, IBM, which clearly has no more interests in heavily investing in Xen.
For example its inclusion in the kernel makes very hard for Microsoft, its allied, or any other uncomfortable player to influence its development.

So yesterday Red Hat did the much expected move to announce the adoption of KVM.

The company will offer a new lightweight distribution which integrates KVM, selling it as the Red Hat virtualization platform (Embedded Linux Hypervisor).
Additionally, the company will offer a new enterprise-wide management solution called oVirt, which is based on the standardized libvirt APIs and is designed to scale up to thousands of virtual machines.

What happens to Xen now? What happens to the Red Hat investment on it?
The official press announcement don’t say it explicitly but the choice of words lets clearly understand that Xen is the past and KVM is the future.
It’s unknown if Red Hat will continue to support Xen or what will happen to those enterprise customers that adopted RHEL 5 to use the hypervisor (mostly because Xen and KVM virtual machines are incompatible).

In any case it’s unlikely that Red Hat will drop Xen tomorrow: the company sits in the Xen advisory board and its support policy implies that any distribution must be supported for seven years.
Red Hat may want to spend this time convincing its customers that KVM is a better virtualization engine: Virtual Machine Manager, for example, has been already re-categorized as a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines.

Both the Embedded Linux Hypervisor and the oVirt management console are already available in beta here.

Red Hat didn’t mention when both products will be available as RTM.

Today a new virtualization startup enters the market: Lanamark.

The company was founded in 2007 by Mark Angelo, is currently based in Canada and has less than ten employes.
Hard to believe Lanamark is one of the few startups that isn’t funded (yet) by a venture capital firm or an angel investor.

Angelo is a well-known figure in the virtualization industry coming from PlateSpin, where he was Product Line Manager for PowerRecon, and recently from VMLogix, where he was Director of Business Development.

Lanamark enters the capacity planning market, one of the most important segments recognized by virtualization.info in our Virtualization Industry Challenges report, where its CEO accumulated a lot of experience working on PowerRecon.

The capacity planning segment is populated by few but strong competitors which are already present on the scene since a while: Novell (through the acquisition of PlateSpin), CiRBA, VMware and Microsoft.
Despite that Lanamark may not have to compete with most of them.

The company in fact doesn’t plan to directly sell its platform to customers, but rather aims at offering it only to OEMs and service providers.

To create a valuable proposition Lanamark developed a three-tiers architecture ideal for those scenarios where the capacity planning is performed by a 3rd party entity:

• the first component, Explorer, gets installed on a single machine in the customer network. From there it can discover all the physical assets on the site without any additional agent
• the second component, Portal (which is hosted by Lanamark itself), stores the data collected by the Explorer and manages the customers analysis
• the last component, Studio (which is managed by the system integrator), accesses the customer’s data available at the Portal and performs the actual capacity planning

This approach, similar to the one used by VMware with its Capacity Planner, avoids the consultants to waste time at customer’s site, performing the analysis and planning in house.
Obviously it may raise some concerns: the customer has to trust the whole platform when sending out its own precious data about company workloads and performance.
Lanamark will have to demonstrate that the transaction between all the components is secure enough, and that the Portal has acceptable data retain policies.

The company has another problem: VMware will allow its partners to use Capacity Planner for free within the end of this month, and Microsoft is working to offer its own capacity planning tool for free as well.
To win the competition Lanamark may bet on cross-platform capabilities: the platform will be able to perform capacity planning for multiple hypervisors, obviously including VMware, Citrix and Microsoft ones.

The product will be available soon through an early adoption program.
The 1.0 release instead is expected in Q3 2008.

Lanamark has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

The Canadian company CiRBA launches today the newest version of Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

DCI is more than a static capacity planning tool useful only for the first P2V migration phase: it monitors the virtual infrastructure on continuous basis and suggests the virtual machines best arrangement across virtualization hosts at any moment, depending on several factors that customers can specify with rules.

Depending on which rules an operator can write, DCI can suggest different placements, so the product may become complex to use in the proper way.
To accomplish the task in an easier way this new major release introduces a set of predefined and customizable analysis templates, including:

• Financial Analysis 
  DCI 5.0 introduces integrated financial analysis by enabling the results of an analysis to be directly inserted into any Excel-based financial model.  CiRBA 5.0 includes a default model that provides a comprehensive TCO/ROI calculation, factoring in both capital and operational savings, applying hardware, power, facilities and staff costs to analysis results to determine the true financial profile of each strategy being considered.
• Power Consumption Analysis 
  DCI 5.0 provides the ability to analyze both measured and estimated power draw for individual IT systems, and rolls these measures up to overall utilization for groups of servers and entire data centers.

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

The US startup Neocleus was announced just one month ago, has yet to deliver its first product and, as often happens these days, already secured a second round of investments.

The first round, $5 million, was granted by Battery Ventures and Gemini Isreal in 2007.
This second one, $11.4 million, is provided by the same venture capital firms.

Neocleus is the first virtualization vendor that tries to pitch a hypervisor (based on Xen) for desktops instead of servers, so it’s easy to imagine the interest that the company raised.
Despite that there’s still no mention on when their product will be released.

The recent deal to integrate Citrix XenServer with ProLiant servers user interface must be not enough for HP (or maybe it’s VMware the unsatisfied one).

Today the OEM vendor announced an agreement with VMware to deliver a wide range of virtualization-aware products:

• HP Business Availability Center
• HP Operations Center
• HP Network Management Center
• HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping
• HP Universal CMDB
• HP Server Automation Center
• HP Client Automation
• HP Operations Orchestration

Additionally, HP will deliver a version of HP Insight Control Environment which integrates VMware Infrastructure 3 and other undisclosed automation tools.
This will certainly go much further than the current iVirtualization initiative to sell ProLiant machines with ESXi.

The newest version of SoftGrid, rebranded Application Virtualization (and App-V if one name is not enough for you), is almost finished.

Today Microsoft releases the first Release Candidate which introduces a number of new features like:

• HTTP streaming
  Virtual applications can be streamed from an IIS server 6 or 7
• New GUI for Sequencer
• Sequencer support for MSI packages
  The Sequencer now supports the creation of MSI packages, eliminating the need for a server environment
• Reporting
  Offline usage of applications or usage of applications when streaming from different sources is now accounted in the Application Virtualization database
• Support for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2008 
  A Management Pack for SCOM 2008 is now available.

Application Virtualization 4.5 will be available only through the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) for those customers that subscribe the Software Assurance. The others can only continue complaining.

Enroll for the beta here.

Qumranet, the US startup launched in November 2007, is already well-known for its efforts in improving the end user experience in VDI environments: the SPICE remote desktop protocol which powers its Solid ICE product was written from scratch to address the RDP and ICA shortcomings.

Now the company reveals that it’s working on another technology to further improve the SPICE performance.

The new feature, called SPLICE (easy to confuse with their SPICE protocol), will address the latency issues suffered by end users which access a virtual desktop from a distant WAN location (e.g.: a branch office).
To limit the performance impact, SPLICE will be able to transparently relocate a virtual desktop from the headquarter to the branch office.

At the moment Qumranet doesn’t reveal any further detail about how this will happen, but informs that SPLICE will be included in a special product called Solid ICE Multi-site, soon available as technical preview.

To use this feature customers will probably have to build an architecture which has multiple Solid ICE servers, one at the headquarter and one for each remote location.

virtualization.info will post additional details as soon as possible.

Parallels, formerly known as SWsoft, has finally released its own hypervisor.

Parallels Server 1.0 is the first server virtualization platform able to officially support Apple machines (both Xserve and Mac Pro) as bare-metal hardware and Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest operating system.

The product, which requires Intel VT and AMD-V CPU enhancements, features:

• support for 32bit and 64bit VMs
• support for up to 4 virtual CPUs per VM
• support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (only on Apple hardware) guest operating systems
• support for up to 32GB of physical RAM
• a management console and CLI which can be scripted and extended through Python

Additionally, Parallels Server includes the physical to virtual (P2V) and V2V migration tool already seen in consumer products: Transporter.

Today Parallels releases only the Mac OS version and this creates some confusion: if the product is a bare-metal hypervisor why it’s marketed in two different versions?

The company official announcement doesn’t help at all:

(Parallels Server) Supports virtualizing Mac OS X Leopard Server in a virtual machine running on a Mac OS X Leopard Server platform

This statement describes a hosted solution and not a bare-metal one.

Maybe Parallels Server adopts an architecture similar to the one used by Xen-based (like Citrix XenServer or Sun xVM Server), Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.
In such architectures the so called parent partition (the first VM booted by the hypervisor) has to run a specific guest opeating which controls and manage the interaction between the other VMs and the physical hardware.

In this case Parallels probably offers two versions of its hypervisor, one for the Apple market, which launches Mac OS X Server in the parent partition, and one for the other markets, which launches Linux (or Windows).

virtualization.info will update this post with more details about the product architecture as soon as possible.

This version is priced $999 for an unlimited number of cores.
The release timeframe and pricing for the non-Mac OS version is unknown but should follow soon.

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

The number of firms entering the application virtualization market these days is impressive. Just few hours ago virtualization.info included Ceedo in its Virtualization Industry Radar. Now we move on Xenocode.

The company was founded in 2002 but so far it primarily focused on .NET code obfuscation with a product called Postbuild.
Such product was already able to virtualize the managed code for an easier deployment so was easier for the company to target a wider audience.

Now Xenocode extended its virtualization capabilities to any application, Windows binary or .NET/Java code, offered in a packaging solution called Virtual Application Studio.

Like many competitors this product offers a fully virtualized environment which abstracts the file system, the registry, the processes and threads.
After the packaging Virtual Application Studio is able to generate virtual executables which don’t require administrative privileges to run or .MSI installers.
The overhead per application is around 400Kb.

Xenocode virtual applications don’t require any agent installed on clients to be deployed and don’t have any other complex requirement like an Active Directory infrastructure.
It’s also possible to run the applications from a USB key or to stream them from a network share (it’s not clear if this last feature require any 3rd party streaming capability).

Xenocode doesn’t provide any enterprise management feature that many competitor decided to offer.
The company prefers to rely on 3rd party management products like Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Novell ZENWorks or CA Unicenter to distribute its packages.

Virtual Application Studio uses a per-user licensing model. The pricing for the application and 5 licenses (which the company calls a Starter Kit) is $499. Each additional license costs $40.

Download a trial here.

Xenocode has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Ceedo is an Israeli startup focused on application virtualization.

The company, funded by Intel Capital, was founded in 2005 by Dror Wettenstein.

In November Ceedo launched a product for consumers, Ceedo Personal, which presents an unusual approach: instead of blending virtual applications in the operating system, it collects them in a dedicated menu, called Easy Access Menu, which mimics (but doesn’t replace) the Windows one.

The product supports Windows XP and Vista and can be run from a USB key. In fact Lexar resells the solution under the name PowerToGo.

Now Ceedo releases an enterprise version of its platform, which allows to deploy/update/remove new virtual applications or define virtual workspaces policies from a centralized management system.

The company pricing starts from $89 per seat (with a perpetual license).

Download a trial here.

Ceedo has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.