History

As experienced virtualization professionals know, the most critical tier of a VMware Infrastructure is not the virtualization host, ESX Server, but the management server, VirtualCenter, which provision, coordinates and moves all virtual machines. Despite that VMware offers some high availability capabilities for ESX Server but nothing to protect VirtualCenter.

Luckily VMware made VirtualCenter a cluster-aware application since version 2.0.1 patch 2, which allows customers to use industry standard products to achieve fault tolerance.

Next Monday The Neverfail Group, a VMware Technology Partner, will launch its own solution to the problem: Neverfail for VMware VirtualCenter.

The product is much more sophisticated than Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), monitoring the healt of the hardware, network infrastructure, operating system and the management service as well. As soon as the fault is recognized it fails over VirtualCenter on another physical host, without service interruption.

At the same time it’s less demanding than MSCS, not requiring a shared storage facility to work.

From its corporate blog Roger Klorese, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Citrix, reveals a major feature coming for XenServer:

There’s been a lot of noise recently about the complexities of patch management in a virtualized world — a lot of jockeying for last place, as it were, in the “Whose Patch Tuesday is Biggest” contest.

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We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.

Pool-wide patch management has been integrated into the product, and, in conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, will allow you to:

• Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
• Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
• Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
• Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
• Apply the patches
• Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

Roger is referring to the virtualization.info post Patch Tuesday for VMware, which raised some concerns about the growing need for a hypervisor patch management strategy.

VMware is already addressing the issue with the launch of Update Manager, included the new VI 3.5.

With this feature Citrix starts to build those features needed to attract big customers and become more competitive on the enterprise market.

From the Xen-devel mailing list Keir Fraser, Project Leader at XenSource, announces release of new Xen 3.2 version.

This new build introduces some important features:

• Preliminary PCI pass-through support (using appropriate Intel or AMD I/O-virtualisation hardware)
• Preliminary support for a wider range of bootloaders in fully virtualised (HVM) guests, using full emulation of x86 ‘real mode’
• ACPI S3 suspend-to-RAM support for the host system
• Xen Security Modules (XSM)
• Configurable timer modes for HVM guests, depending on how the guest OS manages time-keeping

As usual source code is available here while binaries will be soon released here.

After achieving several IBM Server Proven certifications for its platform, Virtual Iron goes further and enters the IBM PartnerWorld program.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software, today announced that it has achieved advanced partner status within IBM’s PartnerWorld program. The membership advancement reflects Virtual Iron’s continued sales, marketing and product development contributions to IBM and the optimization of Virtual Iron’s solutions for IBM’s computing platforms including the certification of its software as IBM Server Proven, IBM System Storage Proven, and most recently, IBM Ready for Grid and IBM Ready for DB2…

This monday virtualization.info revealed that VMware is about to announce a new product called Stage Manager.

Now Duncan Epping just published additional informations about the product, also revealing that the beta program is expected to start next week:

VMware starts a new beta program the 21st of January, the product is called Stage Manager.

• You can easily boot shadow production servers
• Create test environments for infrastructure changes
• Build complex pre-production environments
• Systematically propagate complex system changes through development, testing, staging and user acceptance phases before committing systems into production
• Get a better grip on your change, configuration and release (CCR) management processes

Read the whole article at the source.

On his personal blog Duncan Epping just published an interesting news about a new upcoming certification from VMware: the VMware Certified Design Exper (VCDE).

A new advanced certification for design architects of enterprise deployments, VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDE), will be in beta toward the end of November. The VCDE measures the consultants ability to design, implement, document and test a VMware Infrastructure data center for the enterprise. Requirements for the VMware Certified Design Expert include:

• VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3
• Pass a VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise level exam and a VMware Infrastructure 3 design exam
• Submit, present and defend a successful virtual infrastructure design plan

Read the whole article at the source.

This is a welcome addition considering the growing need of high-level architects, able to consider all the complex aspects impacted by virtualization (networking, storage, security, performances).

VMware also announced the update of its flagship certification, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), to include VI3.5 topics by March 2008.

Since the day Apple changed its licensing to allow virtualized copy of Mac OS X Server on its own hardware, the competition between Parallels and VMware reached a new level.

The first support statement came from Parallels which will provide Leopard Server virtual machines on its upcoming Parallels Server.

Few weeks after also VMware is ready to confirm the same feature coming:

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Today, we are pleased to say that VMware is able to virtualize Mac OS X Leopard Server on Apple hardware using VMware’s proven Mac virtualization engine. We will be demonstrating this achievement with our “Mac OS X Server in a Virtual Machine” Technology Preview…

And since Mac OS X Leopard has moved to 64-bit, we are able to leverage VMware’s proven 64-bit support to run Mac OS X Server at it’s full potential, a feature that has been a VMware exclusive for more than three years.

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The one question we know we will get asked is will VMware support Mac OS X Server on non-Apple hardware. While this is only a technology preview today, VMware works closely with Apple and respects their licensing policies and as such Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine will only be supported on Apple hardware per Apple’s license agreement…

What VMware doesn’t explicitly say is which product will allow Mac OS X Server virtual machines and speculations about a possible Fusion Server (aka VMware Server for Mac) are already all around.

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

SWsoft today announced that Mark Zbikowski, a former Microsoft Architect and pioneer software developer, will serve the company as Senior Technical Advisor. In this capacity, he will assist SWsoft as a resource to the development team and advisor to senior management.

While at Microsoft, Zbikowski led efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. In 2006, he was honored for 25 years of service with the company and the first employee to reach this milestone other than executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Zbikowski designed the DOS executable file format, used in MS-DOS executable files, and his initials “MZ” grace the headers of that file format. He is one of the main architects and developers of Windows NTFS, the most popular file system in use.

Zbikowski expertise is very interesting considering its new role in SWsoft. It’s evident that the OS virtualization vendor is working on a much deeper integration with Windows.

On top of that it’s worth to remember that SWsoft already includes several former employees from Redmond.

Last but not least there always is the long-term plan of acquiring an OS virtualization company for Microsoft, something that Bob Muglia said very clearly in June 2006.

Considering all these facts, it’s possible that Microsoft is preparing to acquire SWsoft (before its supposed IPO).

Just yesterday virtualization.info published the news about a possible acqusition of VMware in the application virtualization market, speculating that the acquired firm could be FastScale.

The official announcement comes today, clarifing the actual acquired company and the company strategy behind the move:

VMware, Inc. , the virtualization software leader, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualization software company headquartered in San Francisco. VMware is acquiring Thinstall to expand its desktop virtualization capabilities which help customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the current fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed…

The acquisition of Thinstall and its use for VDI scenarios extended the competition front with Microsoft (which acquired Softricity application vendor in June 2006) and Citrix, and brings the company a notable set of OEM partnerships: with LANDesk (March 2007), with Provision Networks (July 2007), with BMC (September 2007) and with Macrovision (October 2007).

Given the strong focus of Thinstall on Microsoft platforms, the acquisition seems to validate an important point, often emerging in surveys: large majority of virtual machines contains Windows guest OSes.

At the same time this acquition validates once and forever the fact that application virtualization is considered one of the next mainstream technology for most major players: before VMware, Microsoft acquired Softricity, Citrix acquired Ardence, Symantec acquired Altiris and even Google acquired GreenBorder.

Thinstall is the 7th acquisition for VMware. Before it the virtualization player acquired Akimbi (June 2006), Propero (April 2007), Determina (August 2007), Dunes Technologies (September 2007), Sciant (October 2007) and Foedus (January 2008).

If the trend continues VMware will acquire a new company per month.

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

virtualization.info has learned from different sources that VMware just acquired an application virtualization vendor.

There is no confirmation at the moment so what follows is pure speculation.

Among the many listed in the Virtualization Industry Radar, one company seems the best candidate for this acquisition: FastScale.

FastScale doesn’t provide application virtualization and streaming solutions like Softricity (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), Thinstall, Endeavors Technologies and others, but introduces a new approach: through its Composer, FastScale is able to track down which libraries and OS components an application requires, and assemble them in an autonomous package, freeing the software from the operating system dependency.

Only available for Linux systems at the moment, VMware is adopting the startup’s technology since a long time, much earlier than the official launch date in August 2007.

On top of that FastScale Advisory Board includes a VMware veteran, Al Pappas, former CIO, and VMware seems to prefer acquisition of former employees (Akimbi, Determina).

While VMware is not an application virtualization company, FastScale acquisition would fit its strategy, much focus on virtual appliances.

While the idea of a modular data center, through virtual appliances, is interesting and would bring in some notable benefits, it woudl also lead to some major issues. Most of them are related to security and manageability issues.

FastScale capability to deliver incredibly low-footprint virtual machines, tailored around a self-sufficient guest application, would solve part of the security problems, while the just launched Update Manager (integrated into VirtualCenter 2.5) would solve part of the management ones.

Update: While the rumors were right virtualization.info speculation was not. VMware just announced the Thinstall acquisition.