History

A new Microsoft Knowledge Base article reveals company support policy for its application virtualization platform SoftGrid (acquired by Softricity):

…

We support SoftGrid Application Virtualization as an alternative platform when you run applications. We do not directly support any third-party applications that run in a SoftGrid Application Virtualization environment…

Read the whole article at source.

A couple of notes here:

• Softricty acquisition started 16 months ago, and this is the first time Microsoft publicly declares its support policy about SoftGrid.
• The article is very vague using expressions like doesn’t directly support and commercially resonable efforts: customers will not know what can be asked to Microsoft support and what needs to be asked to 3rd party vendor support.

virtualization.info recognizes software support as the first industry challenge in virtualization adoption. Discover other nine in Virtualization Industry Challenges report.

For September 24-25 IIR Deutschland, a German firm focused on conferences and seminaries, arranged first edition of IT-Virtualizerung Forum in Frankfurt.

I’ll be there performing the second day keynote, talking about virtualization market trends and industry challenges.

This event is just two weeks after VMworld 2007, where I’ll attend as VMware guest. So my speech will reflect all new trends emerged during this VMworld edition.

The complete agenda is available here, while registration is available here.

Germany is the second country virtualization.info readers come from, so I’d be happy to meet some of you there. Be sure to stop by and say hello.

(to see other events where I’ll have a lecture check my speaking schedule)

One day before VMware will held the biggest virtualization event so far, VMworld, in the same city application virtualization vendor Thinstall will open its first Annual Partner and Customer Day.

During this day, September 10th in San Francisco, Thinstall will deliver a couple of technical workshops, present a customer case study and will unveil some details about its roadmap. Keynote session will be transmitted live.

Register for it here.

For September 24-25 InfoWorld arranged new edition of its Virtualization Executive Forum at New York City.

The whole even is mainly divided in two tracks, one made of case studies and another made of technical sessions (pretty odd for an executive forum). Some panels are in the middle with representatives from virtualization vendors VMware, XenSource (now Citrix), Microsoft, SWsoft, IBM and Egenera.

Check the agenda here. Register for it here.

One of the biggest criticism VMware received during its phenomenal rising these years is that its strategy doesn’t care enough of SMB market: prices too high, complex technical prerequisites, features for niche audiences.

virtualization.info supposed how Microsoft still has a chance to take over VMware passing through SMBs, despite its hypervisor is not even here.

With new funds collected during its IPO, VMware may be finally ready to address smaller customers needs, launching new tools at upcoming VMworld 2007.

A signal of this change is coming from the company itself, with its Director of Small and Medium Business, Ben Matheson, which recently summarized what VMware did so far to lower virtualization entry costs: a cheap ($1,000) Virtual Infrastructure 3 edition, a free enterprise plaftorm (VMware Server), a free P2V tool (VMware Converter 3).

What else will be exposed at VMworld?

virtualization.info revealed a couple of major improvements which will positively impact the SMB market:

• the hardware appliance form for ESX Server 3.5 (formerly 3.1)
• the second version of VMware Server (finally will be centrally managed by VirtualCenter 2.5)

but there is a serious chance VMware will have other announcements for small companies at VMworld: SMB market is where XenSource (now with renewed energies, after Citrix acquisition), Virtual Iron, SWsoft, and soon Microsoft, will embitter competition most.

Initially planning to release it as ESX Server 3.1 and VirtualCenter 2.1, VMware changed its mind and relabeled it as ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, aka Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

The change is well justified by impressive amount of features it sports, which virtualization.info exposed two weeks ago.

New numbering comes along with highly expected beta 2, which launched last week.

The new build exposes serveral features detailed in beta 1 release notes, but not really available inside the product, and few important minor ones, like:

• Swapfiles-less VMotion
  With VirtualCenter 2.5 virtual machines’ swapfiles are no more required for VMotion operations, so they can be saved locally instead of inside a shared volume
• Provisioning across datacenters objects
  With VirtualCenter 2.5 a virtual machine or template stored in a datacenter can be cloned and deployed in another.
• Support for Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (IOAT)
  ESX Server 3.5 supports new Intel chipset improving memory copies through TCP/IP.
• Support for Jumbo Frames
  ESX Server 3.5 supports 9Kb frames for Windows 2003, RHEL 5.0 and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 guests.
• Support for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)
  VMware introduces a new virtual hard drive format, aimed at simplifying virtual machines portability through different virtualization platforms.
  
  It implies a conversion of existing virtual machines files (.vmdk, .vmx) with a specific tool.
  Once traditional files are compressed, all informations to decompress them are stored inside the new .ovf file along with other details such as compatible platforms, licensing details, etc.
• Inclusion of Wyse multimedia redirection engine
  ESX Server 3.5 VMware Tools will include a DLL provided by Wyse to simplify delivery of multimedia contents when VMware Infrastructure 3.5 is used as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in conjunction with Wyse thin clients.

The last feature is particularly important: VMware is preparing to release its own connection broker after silent Propero acquisition, and this addition clearly states what is VMware preferred companion for its solution.

While the acquisition of an OEM seems unlikely, a thin client provider like Wyse may fit VMware strategy, mostly now that Citrix is a direct competitor with XenSource acquisition.

A further confirmation of this comes from integration of another 3rd party component: the virtual printer produced by ThinPrint, .print, already integrated in ACE 2.0, and ready to appear in ESX Server 3.5 as well.

Last but not least, this beta 2 introduces possible final name for new ESX Server edition aimed at hardware appliances VMware is building in partnership with OEM vendors like Dell, IBM and HP: previously known as ESX Lite, Embedded ESX and ESX Server HW, it now seems to be ESX Server 3i.

(you may want to check virtualization.info subscriptions to stay up to date on this topic)

InformationWeek published a brief but interesting interview with Citrix Corporate Vice President of WorldWide Marketing, Wes Wassom, and XenSource CEO, Peter Levine, obviously about recent acquisition.

A couple of answers are exposing crucial details to figure out Xen future developments:

How many of the hypervisor developers are employed by XenSource?
There are five to six guys who do a lot of work on the Xen project that are part of XenSource.

…

How will you maintain that community?
We started in parallel with the acquisition discussions to elevate the Xen project and community by appointing a panel to provide oversight during the transition. It will maintain a distinction between the open source code and commercial efforts. … We are working on that collaboratively with IBM, Intel, HP, Novell, and Red Hat. We are just coming up with a model for that in the next 45 to 60 days…

virtualization.info also published an interview with Citrix’s Wes Wassom, and XenSource CTO, Simon Crosby, exposing more details about upcoming strategy about partnerships and competition.

In the last two years the most popular virtualization book has been for sure VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide, written by two exceptional authors: Ron Oglesby, CTO at RapidApp (now acquired by Glasshouse), and Scott Herold, former Director of R&D at Vizioncore and now Vice President of Engineering at Invirtus.

Despite the book, focused on ESX Server 2.x version, is yet to be considered old, Oglesby and Herold are already offering it for free, while working on next book: Virtual Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide.

This new edition sees Mike Laverick, well-known VMware trainer based in UK, joining as third author and taking care of a special section of the book: Advanced Operation Guide.

A 110-pages free preview of VI3ATDG is available online and covers:

• Part 1 – Chapter 4 – VirtualCenter and Cluster Design
• Part 1 – Chapter 10 – Recovery and Business Continuity
• Part 2 – Chapter 1 – Installing ESX 3.x

Download it at the official website.

While waiting for this release, you may want to check several other new books about VMware Server, ESX Server, XenEnterprise and Virtual Server that virtualization.info Bookstore is now listing.

Quoting from Bloomberg:

…

VMware, which went public last week and has a market value a seventh of Google’s, is wooing code writers with salaries that recall the dot-com heyday of the late 1990s, headhunters and analysts say. The salaries are more than other software companies in the area are offering, said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research.

Chowdhry estimated that Palo Alto, California-based VMware is paying $130,000 to $160,000, plus stock options –compensation that only Google can match, he said.

…

VMware’s hiring push “is a preemptive move against XenSource and Microsoft,” Chowdhry said. “Virtualization is very hot right now, and a lot of companies are thinking about buying it. That’s why VMware is engaged in aggressive hiring, with aggressive compensation, to stave off emerging threats…

Read the whole article at the source.

A demonstration that VMware is not the only company looking for talented virtualization developers is provided by virtualization.info Job Board: every day there are tents of new announcements from popular companies all across US.

Network World published a short interview with Mike Neil, General Manager for Virtualization Strategies at Microsoft.

The interview is interesting mainly because of two statements.

First:

Server virtualization is still a developing market and technology. Since, to a great degree, the utilization of virtualization has been in relatively confined areas, typically in large enterprises or infrastructure products like [VMware’s] ESX Server, Microsoft will be able to have a much broader approach and make virtualization available to a wider swath of the industry.

And second (talking about VMware VMotion feature):

From a competitive standpoint, it is a sexy feature and sounds really exciting. But, of the Microsoft customers using VMware or other virtualization technology, few are actually utilizing that type of functionality. It is a relatively sophisticated piece of technology to set up. The capabilities we do have and are shipping — our ability to cluster virtual machines and the ability to migrate quickly — will meet most customers’ needs.

So Microsoft basically believes virtualization is still at its beginning. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Challenges report is demonstrating this is very true.

But Microsoft is also downplaying value of virtual machines live migration, which instead is where virtualization is expressing its highest value at the moment.

When using virtualization in production environment there’s no customer, enterprise or SMB-grade, that would ever refuse such capability if it comes affordable and reliable. The fact that VMware VMotion in particular is currently demanding expensive and complex pre-requisites is another story.