History

A consistent part of the competition between virtualization vendors is not played trying to place more sales, but trying to hire more bright minds. This can happen at different levels, not just in R&D.

A critical place where VMware wants to hire is the sales engineering department, where highly skilled virtualization professionals may debunk any vague and misleading messages from competitors in the proper way.

If the skilled sales engineer also has a past as influencer VMware wins two times cause the value of his intervention is much more trustable.

So it doens’t come by surprise that in October 2007 VMware hired Massimiliano Daneri, author of the highly popular VMBK.pl, the hot backup script for ESX Server.

And doesn’t come by too much surprise that the company now hired Andrew Dugdell, the well-known blogger at WindowsVirtualization.com.

The fact that he spent last two years mostly blogging about Microsoft virtualization technologies, and even won the Microsoft Most Valuable Professiona (MVP) award about virtual machines for two years in a row, is ironic but even more useful for VMware: customers will find hard to not believe that the new Sales Engineer is a reliable source in technical comparisons.

The hystorical BIOS brand Phoenix Technologies announced in January that it’s shaping hardware virtualization technologies to power a new generation of platforms dubbed PC 3.0.

This new system will have as foundation a hypervisor called HyperCore, able to run instant-on, single-purpose virtual machines (for web browsing for example) along with Microsoft Windows virtual machines, to address the multiple needs of daily computer usage.

A couple of weeks ago virtualization.info published a company’s flash demo which presents the architecture of HyperCore and reveals a third virtual machine, called ManageSpace, which will be used to transparently manage the entire PC even when the main Windows environment is compromised.

Today Phoenix announces the first partner, SupportSoft, that may use the ManageSpace virtual machine to centralize troubleshooting of million of computers in the world:

Phoenix Technologies Ltd., the global leader in core systems firmware, and SupportSoft, a leader in technology problem resolution, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver the industry’s first remote PC management solution that allows users to continue running key productivity applications while the Windows operating system is being remotely diagnosed and repaired. The new solution will be built on Phoenix Technology’s new HyperSpace platform which hosts instant-on applications or appliances before, during and after Windows Vista boots up and shuts down.

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“Our partnership with Phoenix Technologies will further our mission of 24/7 remote management servicing and provisioning,” said Josh Pickus, President and CEO of SupportSoft. “When a PC crashes due to malicious programs or other reasons, the system is inaccessible making it impossible to diagnose the failure’s cause and often making data stored on the disk drive inaccessible. As a result, the PC is unavailable when it’s needed most and sometimes requires an onsite visit by skilled technicians. Now we will be able to provide remote maintenance services even when Windows is down and run diagnostic programs while the user continues uninterrupted.”…

The Phoenix strategy is very interesting: the company is trying to build an ecosystem on its hypervisor providing a new, almost invisble spot for 3rd party paid services. And this happens without having to play the time and money consuming role of the general-purpose-virtualization-platform-vendor like VMware and others.

Despite that, in this particular case, Phoenix will have to be ready to answer privacy concerns that customers may raise thinking about a system which includes agents they never required.

In July 2003 XenSource and Symantec signed an OEM agreement to embed the Veritas Storage Foundation inside the XenEnterprise product, which seemed an interesting competitive advantage considering that VMware doesn’t provide yet any native capability to manager storage in VirtualCenter.

Seven months and a Citrix acquistion later that project has yet to take off, and the upcoming XenServer 4.1 doesn’t show any trace of Symantec code.

The Register published an interesting article on the subject revealing some plan changes:

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What you won’t find in Version 4.1 is the support for Symantec/Veritas’ Volume Manager software that the pre-acquisition XenSource folks promised last year to customers. Many of you were told that the Volume Manager would become a standard part of XenServer when 4.1 arrived. Not so.

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All of the “integration” work with Symantec’s Storage Foundation software is completed, according to Crosby. The problem is getting that software to customers – apparently. XenSource used to talk like customers would receive the storage management goodies for free, but it now sounds like you’ll end up paying.

“We said we would bundle it as part of the product,” Crosby said. “It turns out that not all customers wanted us to do that. It is becoming an add-in option for the customer.”…

Update: Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, promptly replied to The Register article:

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When Citrix acquired XenSource, our route to market changed – or rather was amplified – by the Citrix channel partners. The Symantec agreement, which we still view as critical to our ability to address the massive installed base of storage without requiring customers to change their processes, training or technologies for storage management, is now being re-drafted to expand its scope and to ensure that there is complete alignment between Symantec and Citrix in the market. A key part of this is ensuring that the channel is trained to distribute, install and support our product and all of its component technologies, including those of our partners where relevant. Although our integration work against Symantec Storage Foundation is complete, we have not yet completed the work necessary to ramp the channel training, support and certification with the additional Symantec storage management capabilities, so it has been omitted from the XenServer 4.1 release.

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The omission of Storage Foundation from XenServer 4.1 should not be read as any change in the strength or strategic nature of our partnership with Symantec. On the contrary, Symantec is possibly our most strategic ISV partner, because Citrix is not, and never will be a storage management vendor and Symantec offers one of the industry’s most powerful capability sets for managing the diverse storage infrastructure used by our customers today…

Qumranet is the US startup behind KVM, the open source virtualization platform which was included in the Linux kernel after just 6 months of development.

While supporting KVM, pretty much like XenSource supported Xen before being acquired by Citrix, Qumranet was working on a commercial offering and in September 2005 launched SolidICE: a complete VDI solution for KVM.

Today, after just 5 months since it left the stealth mode, the company loses its Vice President of Marketing, John-Marc Clark, who moves to eEye, a popular security vendor.

Qumranet didn’t publish any announcement yet about who’s going to replace Clark.

Today Microsoft opened the beta program for its System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, introducing support for the upcoming Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid), in beta as well.

Enroll for the beta program here.

With a surprising move Sun just announced that will acquire the German virtualization vendor innotek.

Right today virtualization.info covered the beta release of VirtualBox for OpenSolaris, stating that it could be a major opportunity to finally address the need for desktop virtualization products in the Solaris empty market.

Just few hours later Sun unveils its move:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market.

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The stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed during the third quarter of Sun’s 2008 fiscal year. The terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is not material to Sun’s earnings per share…

With this acquisition Sun further extends its virtualization strategy and becomes more aggressive against VMware.

The recent virtualization.info Q&A with Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM Server at Sun, can now be read with a broader perspective, mostly for the Ops Center part.

After Propero (UK) and Dunes Technologies (Switzerland), both acquired by VMware, innotek is the third virtualization vendor which is acquired in EMEA. Is this finally a sign that even the old continent is a place for successful startups?

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

Quest involvement in virtualization has increased substantially over the last two years. The company initially made a controlling investment in Vizioncore in 2005, acquired Invirtus in June 2007, then Provision Networks in November 2007. Last month Quest finally completed the acquisition of Vizioncore.

While the acquired companies are focused on different virtualization segments (disaster recovery, VDI, P2V migration and virtual machines performance optimization), Quest itself has long been well-known for its focus on software management of applications, databases and operating systems like Windows.

So while Quest is becoming a major virtualization player, its parallel business focus, its acquisition strategy and its current relationship with its subsidiaries in virtualization can be confusing to customers. virtualization.info met Scott Herold, the new Lead Architect of Quest’s Virtualization Business Unit, to ask for clarification about the big picture.

With this Q&A virtualization.info opens a new section of the website called TechTalk, which collects all the exclusive interviews we published over these years.

Each of them contain precious informations unavailable in official press announcements, and reading some of the oldest ones knowing how the virtualization market evolved in these last three years really provides a unique perspective.

Read the entire interview with Scott Herold here.

The latest company entering the consumer virtualization market, innotek, is demonstrating once again some interesting progresses: its open souce virtualization platform for desktops, VirtualBox, is now available as beta product for OpenSolaris (64bit architectures only).

Already available for Windows and Linux, with a version for Mac OS in the work (the 3rd beta is launched today), VirtualBox is the first product with a commercial support available for the Sun operating system.

Sun itself is working on a server class hypervisor called xVM Server, but so far the company didn’t reveal any plan to adopt the technology also for desktop usage.

If the product will be released fast enough, innotek may experience the same populary that Parallels was able to obtain launching its Desktop product on the empty Apple market. With the major difference that the average Solaris user is an experienced system administrator, and he may influence its company opinion on future server-grade products from the virtualization vendor (like the hyperkernel hypervisor).

Download the beta here.

Citrix has yet to release its new XenServer 4.1, expected for March, and already talks about the following version. InternetNews reports the news with a very short quote from Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division:

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After XenServer 4.1, Citrix’s next XenServer release is expected in the second quarter. Crosby said that while he doesn’t know if it will be called 4.2, the company will introduce some new high availability features to the product.

If this is confirmed it will be a further sign of company’s notable acceleration in the hardware virtualization space.

After a couple of months of beta, Vizioncore is finally ready to release its first P2V migration product since Invirtus offering inclusion.

This version is notable for the conversion speed and the support for all major virtualization platforms (VMware, Citrix, Virtual Iron and Microsoft ones).

With this release Vizioncore is officially in competition with the others P2V migration providers like PlateSpin, Leostream and even VMware.
PlateSpin in particular becomes a major competitor since the company is invading the disaster recovery market where Vizioncore is a popular player.

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