History

At the end of next month VMware will open the doors of its first VMworld Europe conference, an extended and enriched version of well-known Technical Solution Exchange (TSX).

On stage the company is expected to unveil some interesting news considering all acquisitions completed in the last months (Determina, Dunes Technologies, Thinstall). Most of the message may be focused on data center automation as revealed by the following session:

• From the Virtualized to the Automated Datacenter [SM3]
  At the most recent Gartner Datacenter Conference in November 2007, the leading analyst firm proclaimed that “As virtualization matures, the “next big thing” will be automating the composition and management of these virtualized resources”.
  As the leader in x86 virtualization, VMware will lead the way from the virtualized to the automated datacenter. In the first half of 2008 VMware will introduce a line up of new products that will help customers automate and streamline key IT processes such as IT service delivery and IT service continuity.

virtualization.info will be in Cannes to cover the keynotes and all new announcements. Check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice (part 1 and part 2) and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.

The whole January virtualization.info published exclusive introductory videos of some US product managers and staff engineers describing their sessions:

• Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement
• Ashwin Kotian, Product Manager for Physical Virtualization
• Bing Tsai, Staff Engineer
• Kit Colbert, Staff Engineer

This month we start with a specially interesting guest, Eddie Dinel, Product Manager for the just unveiled Stage Manager:

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Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

SkyRecon is the last vendor focused on security which partners with VMware. Many others already re-aligned their offering to conquer the emerging virtualization market: Reflex Security, Blue Lane, Catbird, SteelEye, etc.

While having some security products supported inside a virtual machine is mandatory (virtualization.info recognizes the lack of support as the top challenge in virtualization adoption today), unfortunately none of these companies is bringing serious innovation in the space.

No matter if the solution is endpoint security, continous data protection (CDP), intrusion detection system (IDS) or something else. Each of them is just the traditional product inside a virtual machine (with support for this scenario).

No product in these categories acts at hypervisor level, introducing a new way to centralize security control and management, despite virtualization provides the unique opportunity.

This implies two major problems, one technical and another strategical:

• from a technical point of view these solutions deploy an agent in each protected/monitored/etc virtual machine, duplicating several times the same identical software and wasting precious physical resources which could be used instead to achieve higher consolidation ratios.
  Besides being inefficient this approach doens’t mitigate at any level the security management hell that we already experience today, having to handle at least three different agents per protected computer (typically: patch management, antivirus and firewall).
• from a strategical point of view these solutions will soon see their own major partner, VMware, becoming an unbeatable competitor.
  It’s well-known in fact that VMware is exploring how to introduce security at hypervisor level since many years and its recent demonstration of continuous availability (along with Determina acquisition) is a confirmation of the effort.

Once VMware (and the other virtualization players) will start offering these features at the hypervisor level, providing more effective security control while avoiding physical resource wasting, which product customers will buy?

Citrix didn’t lose time after the XenSource acquisition and after winning 400 new customers in Q4 2007, it’s now working at the new version (codename Miami) of XenServer.

The first public beta is available today with some interesting improvements like:

• Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter
• Centralized logging
• Support for NIC bonding (host level) for fail-over
• Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
• Support for Windows guest OS hot disk remove
• Support for 10Gb Ethernet NICs (Mellanox/Chelsio)
• Support for shared fibre channel storage
• Support for Windows Vista (x86 only), Red HAT Enterprise Linux 5 (both x86 and x64), Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (both x86 and x64)

Enroll for the beta here.

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Today VMware releases its much awaited VDI connection broker: Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0

Despite the versioning this is the very first release of VDM that VMware makes available outside its Professional Services channel. This specific release is also interesting because is the first one which integrates technology acquired from Propero.

The product is in public beta since September 2007 and the RTM build (403) sports some interesting features:

• Partially fault-tolerant architecture (user database synchronization between VDM servers)
• DMZ-friendly architecture (front-end tier for incoming connection and back-end tier for Active Directory and VI3)
• Integration with VirtualCenter
• Win32 and web-based client (it integrates rdesktop on Linux and Microsoft RDP Client on Windows and Mac OS)
• Web-based management interfaces
• RDP tunneling over SSL
• Support for HA solutions (NLB or clustering)
• Support for persistent and non-persistent desktop pools
• Support for RSA SecurID based authentication
• Support for Microsoft Active Directory authentication
• Support for client USB redirection

Download a trial here.

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

The still calm Virtual Lab Automation market, where only three major companies use to compete (VMware, Surgient and VMLogix), welcomes today a new player: StackSafe.

Founded in 2005, the US startup enters the virtualization world with 20 people and a product, Test Center, which features a web-based management interface and supports both VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenServer platforms. Besides that the company doesn’t provide much more details about the internal virtual architecture behind the product.

StackSafe offers a cold P2V migration utility to import production servers inside the Test Center. The product is available at $50,000 for an annual subscription.

The company has an impressive focus on security.
The management team has some relationship with Symantec: Loren Burnett, company’s CEO, helped selling its previous firm (Riptech) to the security giant in 2002, while Jonah Paransky, Vice President of Marketing, worked in Symantec as Director of Product Management for Global Managed Security Services.
Additionally, StackSafe Vice President of Engineering, Carolyn Turbyfill, comes from the popular security firm Counterpane (of Bruce Schneier fame), acquired by British Telecom in 2006, where she covered the same role.
Even Board Advisors feature strong knowledge on security, with representatives from George Mason and Columbia universities, as well as from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The company is funded by Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Chart Venture Partners.

Both the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

VMware just released a minor update for its desktop virtualization platform on Apple Mac OS X.

The new build (72241) introduces several bugfixes and one additional feature: transparent mapping of keyboard shortcuts in non-Unity mode (for example: Command-C to Ctrl-C).

Download a trial here.

IBM is trying to gain momentum relaunching its virtualization platform for POWER architecture under a new name.

Unfortunately Big Blue is missing the market in any case because its platform is unable to virtualize Windows operating systems, which are the large majority of guest OSes worldwide.

Other non-Microsoft-oriented companies recognized this and focused on providing interoperability and smooth performances for Windows virtual machines. It’s not a case that its partnership with Microsoft is driving Novell virtualization business. Sun will follow soon.

Quoting from the official announcement:

…IBM introduced today a new virtualization platform — PowerVM Express — specially made to enable customers to better manage their IT costs, drive maximum energy efficiency and increase resource utilization. PowerVM provides virtualization solutions for the broadest range of operating systems in the industry, including AIX — IBM’s UNIX operating system, Linux, and i5/OS for System i customers…

…

PowerVM software — formerly known as Advanced POWER Virtualization (APV) — is now available in Express, Standard and Enterprise Editions. New to all three PowerVM editions is a feature — at no additional charge — that allows System p servers to run Linux x86 binary applications unmodified without recompilation, in addition to UNIX and Linux on POWER applications…

IBM also published a new 58-pages paper about the product: Getting started with PowerVM Lx86.

Propalms, a US-based company focused on the server based computing (SBC) market, just announced its entering in the VDI market.

The new product will be called Virtual Desktop Manager and will be included in the existing TSE.

The company is the last one of a long series which includes VMware (since its Propero acquisition), Sun (with its new VDI), Citrix (with its upcoming XenDesktop), Leostream, Qumranet (with its new SolidICE), Ericom, ClearCube (now vendor-agnostic), and others.

Providing a competitive and valuable offering against the big players and the horde of startups will be hard.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar will be updated as soon as Propalms releases the Virtual Desktop Manager component.

Quoting from the Xsigo official announcement:

Xsigo Systems, Inc., the technology leader in data center I/O virtualization, today announced the management integration of the Xsigo VP780 I/O Director with VMware Infrastructure 3, the market-leading virtual infrastructure software suite. The solution is available immediately as a plug-in for VMware VirtualCenter 2.5, the central management console for VMware Infrastructure environments, allowing users to manage VMware virtual machines and virtual I/O resources from a single console…