History

MontanaLinux published a very long interview with OpenVZ Product Manager Kir Kolyshkin.

It doesn’t reveal anything new but clarifies relationship between OpenVZ and Virtuozzo development inside SWsoft.

Read it here.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class software for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management, today announced that it has certified LeftHand Networks’ open iSCSI storage area network software…

LeftHand obtained compatibility certification also from VMware in February.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced the appointment of Charles F. Kane to the company’s Board of Directors. Mr. Kane is the chief financial officer of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.

Prior to OLPC, Mr. Kane held CFO roles at RSA Security (acquired by EMC Corp.), Aspen Technology, and Informix Software (acquired by IBM Corp.). He also served as president and CEO of Corechange Inc. (acquired by Open Text Corp.), in addition to executive positions at Stratus Computer, Prime Computer and Deloitte and Touche. Mr. Kane is a CPA and a Senior Lecturer teaching International Finance at the Sloan Graduate School of Business at MIT…

virtualization.info has learned VMware is about to drastically reduce VMware Infrastructure 3 (aka ESX Server & VirtualCenter) price.

In September, possible with a launch at VMworld 2007, VMware will announce a new promotion called Foundation, bundling together three ESX Servers Started Edition and one VirtualCenter (capped to manage those three virtualization hosts) for $3,000.

This move will make harder compete for rivals XenSource (now acquired by Citrix) and Virtual Iron, which are focusing their marketing efforts in providing low cost alternatives to ESX Server.

Just last week virtualization.info published a brief analysis of how VMware strategy is slightly changing to address SMBs needs. This upcoming price reduction is part of that strategy and will possibly give VMware more market shares before Citrix and Microsoft arrival.

Update: VMware just confirmed this promotion through its corporate blog.

virtualization.info covered complex evolution of application virtualization startup Endeavors Technologies since it launched on the market a spin-off called Stream Theory.

After many lawsuits and loss of Stream Theory brand, Endeavors worked to build a new company image starting since June 2007, when hired its new CEO Peter Bondar.

Now the company is ready for its second step, pushing its technology in a new, uncommon way to clearly demonstrate benefits of application virtualization.

Endeavors launches Stream 24-7, a website allowing readers to use a virtual version of popular apllications like Blender, Paint.NET, Notepad++, OpenOffice, FileZilla, and many others.

Each application has been virtualized and will be streamed for free to any desktop visitors will browse from, after installing the Endeavors client called Application Player.

Stream 24-7 is powered by Endeavors AppExpress 3.0, which is also available as a trial on the company website.

For potential adopters this is probably one of the best ways to get capabilities of application virtualization and streaming. It really worths a visit.

Endeavors has been included in virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Quoting from Barron’s:

CRT Capital’s Ashok Kumar offers a provocative take this morning about Citrix’s (CTXS) plan to take on VMware (VMW) in the virtualization market by acquiring XenSource for $500 million.

…

Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource is an exploration of how a successful software company has underestimated the difficulties of entering a tangential market,” he writes. “Half a billion dollars is just the beginning of the investment Citrix will need to pull off its vision of a working system software ‘stack.’ Ironically, the ‘stack’ is meaningless to customers. VMware’s success has nothing to do with a stack, but instead on the opposite concept – widespread partnering.

…

Kumar notes that Citrix has forecast that the XenSource business can grow to $50 million a year in revenue next year from $5 million this year; he thinks that “it should feel happy if it achieves $15 million.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Earlier this month virtualization.info disclosed features included in beta 1 of upcoming Virtual Infrastructure 3.1.0 (aka ESX Server 3.1 & VirtualCenter 2.1).

Later it revealed VMware decided to rename the suite as VMware Infrastructure 3.5.0 (aka ESX Server 3.5 & VirtualCenter 2.5).

Now virtualizaiton.info, thanks to its generous readers, is able to also disclose features included in just started beta 2.

Check the whole list at following links:

• Virtual Infrastructure 3.1 beta 1 feature set
• Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 beta 2 feature set

Hosted desktops segment seem the most active recently, with consolidated vendors and new startup launching a connection broker every month.

This time is the turn of a US company called Pano Logic, which is lead by XenSource founder and former CEO, Nick Gault.

Pano doesn’t offer a stand-alone connection broker like other companies in VDI space, but a complete remote virtual desktop solution made of a software agent, which must be installed inside every guest operating systems (Windows XP and Vista only at the moment), a connection broker and a sort of Keyboard / Video / Mouse (KVM) over IP hardware box.

In this first version Pano supports VMware platforms, integrating its connection broker with VirtualCenter, and even provisioning a VMware Server to those customers without a full VDI infrastructure in place.

The Pano offering will be generally available in September 2007 with pricing as low as $20 per month on a subscription basis.

Quoting from the Intel official announcement:

…

New in this product is Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT, formerly codenamed LaGrande). Intel TXT protects data within virtualized computing environments, an important feature as IT managers are considering the adoption of new virtualization-enabled computer uses. Used in conjunction with a new generation of the company’s virtualization technology – Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O – Intel TXT ensures that virtual machine monitors are less vulnerable to attacks that cannot be detected by today’s conventional software-security solutions. By isolating assigned memory through this hardware-based protection, it keeps data in each virtual partition protected from unauthorized access from software in another partition.

…

Businesses can also enjoy energy-efficient performance, PC security and manageability along with wireless mobility on notebook PCs with Intel® Centrino® Pro processor technology which started shipping in May…

FastScale is one of the youngest startup in virtualization market: launched in April 2007 the company proposes an innovative approach to application virtualization able to build around an application (just Linux at the moment) a tailored operating system, with only libraries and kernel modules really needed by the software (so called DABs).

This way FastScale, through its Composer, creates the slimmest virtual machines possible, dramatically reducing deployment times and resources demanding.

But the company is already moving forward, entering the hardware virtualization market with an enterprise management solution for virtualization platforms: Virtual Manager.

First edition of Virtual Manager is able to control VMware platforms only, including ESX Server, Server and Workstation.

The product is able to provision virtual machines, virtual hard drives and even physical machines on demand (depending on network workload).

FastScale also claims its new solution is able to boot virtual machines much faster than other competitive solutions, and that it’s able to deploy 3 times more virtual machines per physical hosts, but both metrics only refer to scenarios where you are deploying FastScale DABs and not ordinary virtual machines.

Virtual Manager is available since last day of August at the starting price of $20,000.

FastScale exclusive support for VMware products doesn’t come with too much surprise: the virtualization market leader is internally using startup technologies since the company was still in stealth mode, and there must be a tight connection between the two.

But the most interesting thing about FastScale is that they are grouping together such different products in a single solution: hardware virtualization and application virtualization together, along with smart datacenter automation tools, can build tomorrow’s liquid environments.

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