History

Quoting from Enterprise Network And Servers:

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Virtualization provides too many benefits to just stand by and watch. According to the Yankee Group, 9 out of every 10 enterprises will have implemented virtualization into their IT infrastructure by the end of 2007…

Read the whole article at the source.

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

Two weeks ago at LinuxWorld conference Kevin Kettler, CTO at Dell, showed an OptiPlex 745 running Windows and Linux virtual machines on top of XenSource hypervisor.

Reports from sevearl news sources are vague and very different: InformationWeekk and others are reporting Dell will preload XenSource (now acquired by Citrix) hypervisor on its server line, while Linux Insider and others are reporting such offering will be available on consumers PCs as well, as soon as early 2008.

First scenario is very likely, considering Dell is working with VMware on upcoming ESX Server hardware appliance: the hardware vendor may want to offer more than one hypervisor to its customers.

VMware shares performances continues to improve: today, one week after IPO, VMW is still raising, surpassing $66 during the day and closing at $65.99, achieving another 15% of growth.

Despite shares value at IPO was $29, financial analysts at Barron’s say that current price is still cheap:

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By the way, the pre-IPO excitement contrasts with that leading up to the initial offering of Google, which had to cut the price of its shares. Whereas Google shares gained 18% on the first day of trading, VMware moved up 76%. I suspect that more than a few people who skipped buying GOOG in the early going were determined not to miss VMware…

Barron’s analysts have same opinion about EMC:

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For one thing, EMC will consolidate VMware’s results on its income statement, meaning it stands to benefit directly from VMware’s strong future. VMware’s profit will rise 59% a year for the next three years, according to Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert. And VMware’s 50% annual sales growth could add as much as five percentage points to EMC’s yearly revenue growth, says Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi…

This article was moved to the new section virtualization.info TechTalk.

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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 it has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance, a community of software and hardware vendors working to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems based on user feedback.

Joining the Interop Vendor Alliance enables Virtual Iron to continue to improve the performance of its technologies and solutions in customers’ multi-vendor environments. Other alliance members include Citrix, EMC, Novell and Sun Microsystems…

This news, announced same day VMware launched its IPO, is particularly important now that Citrix acquired XenSource: Virtual Iron is the first company which could be damaged by this acquisition, despite Citrix’s good intention about open source.

virtualization.info broke the news in April 2007, after a close analysis of IPO documentation VMware presented to SEC for its IPO. But virtualization leader never issued an official announcement in following four months.

Finally, a week after the launch of its successful IPO, VMware confirms the acquisition by redirecting Propero website to its own, and providing following note to readers:

Propero Limited Acquired by VMware, Inc. in April 2007

VMware expects to use the Propero technology and expertise to extend its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offerings and to provide a more complete solution for the discovery and management of virtual desktop machines.

There are still no mentions about the deal.

So far VMware acquired three companies: Akimbi in June 2006, a vendor focused on virtual lab automation, Propero in April 2007, providing a hosted desktop solution, and Determina in August 2007, a security firm busy on pro-active patch management and 0-day attacks defense.

After XenSource acquisition by Citrix, another breaking news is going to shake virtualization industry: young virtualization platform KVM, already included in Linux kernel, is being ported on Windows.

At the moment there are no more public details than a mention on official FAQs page:

3.4. Do you have a port of kvm for Windows?

Not in this release.

Company maintaining KVM, Qumranet is still in stealth mode but it’s expected to announce its first product before the end of September. During such occasion the virtualization startup may also unveil the upcoming port.

KVM for Windows would have a huge relevance in the virtualization industry, offering an open source alternative to commercial solutions made by VMware, Parallels and Microsoft itself.

Another young company offering an open source virtualization platform is german startup innotek, with its VirtualBox, but at the moment the product is oriented to desktop usage only.

KVM is also being ported on FreeBSD since May 2007.

FreeBSD is currently missing an enterprise virtualization platform and KVM may fill an important empty space.

More news about Windows porting as soon as possible.

In a recent blog post published by CNET News, Matt Asay, Vice President of Business Development at Alfresco, reveals Novell tried to acquire XenSource nine months ago:

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It’s also the reason that Novell failed to entice XenSource into an acquisition when it was knocking on Peter Levine’s door nine months ago. It tried the “fork” argument, and gave a low valuation as a result. Guess who acquired XenSource?…

After the XenSource acquisition by Citrix, a Xen fork may become a needed option for virtualization competitor Virtual Iron. If Novell was contemplating this scenario nine months ago, it may reconsider a partnership with Virtual Iron, or even an acquisition, to achieve the task.

As silently as with Propero acquisition, VMware acquired security firm Determina.

The news was passed to Gartner the same day the company launched its IPO:

On 13 August 2007, VMware informed Gartner that it has acquired Determina, a vendor of a host-based intrusion prevention system (HIPS) technology. There has been no public announcement of the acquisition.

Determina brings two HIPS capabilities to VMware. First, the Determina Memory Firewall HIPS solution protects an operating system (OS) and applications against unauthorized memory and program control-flow manipulation – for example, heap and stack overflows, buffer overflows, and similar techniques used by hackers to inject malicious code into running processes.

Second, as a byproduct of its memory protection approach, the Determina technology can also be used to inject new (or modified) code on the fly. This ability to perform “hot patching” is the foundation of the Determina LiveShield solution – a shielding alternative built by reverse-engineering patches used to protect vulnerable systems without a reboot until a permanent patch can be applied.

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We believe that these capabilities will be included at no cost in one or more future versions of VMware products, including the ESX hypervisor. The Determina technologies will be discontinued for stand-alone purchase, regardless of whether they would be used for VMware-based guest OSs…

Read the whole Gartner analysis at the source.

Determina solutions are interesting: read a 12-pages whitepaper about the technology approach here, and watch a 1-hour video about the kind of attacks the company can protect against here.

Like Determina, other security firms adapted their technologies to new virtualization scenarios, but all of them are simply deploying existing products inside a virtual machine instead of a physical server. With Determina acquisition, VMware will probably introduce the first real security solution to protect virtual machines at the host level.

VMware is working also on another security solutions called Update Manager, which is able to simplify and in some cases automate the patching of guest operating systems. Update Manager will be part of upcoming ESX Server 3.1 as virtualization.info revealed last week.

Thanks to SearchSecurity for the news.

In March 2007 Ulrich Drepper, the GNU libc maintainer, was defending KVM project against immaturity claims.

One day before VMware IPO he’s back again on the topic, this time severely criticizing Xen / ESX Server hypervisor architectures (which implies criticizing upcoming Microsoft codename Viridian architecture as well):

People are starting to realize how broken the Xen model is with its privileged Dom0 domain. But the actions they want to take are simply ridiculous: they want to add the drivers back into the hypervisor. There are many technical reasons why this is a terrible idea. You’d have to add (back, mind you, Xen before version 2 did this) all the PCI handling and lots of other lowlevel code which is now maintained as part of the Linux kernel. This would of course play nicely into Xensource’s (the company) pocket. Their technical people so far turn this down but I have no faith in this group: sooner or later they want to be independent of OS vendors and have their own mini-OS in the hypervisor. Adios remaining few advantages of the hypervisor model. But this is of course also the direction of VMWare who loudly proclaim that in the future we won’t have OS as they exist today. Instead only domains with mini-OS which are ideally only hooks into the hypervisor OS where single applications run…

Drepper is employed by Red Hat, which is integrating Xen in its distribution for a long time, but recently stopped mentioning the term Xen at all. Now that XenSource, employing many Xen developers, has been acquired by Citrix, Red Hat may find difficult to still stick with Xen.

Is Drepper offering persuasive argumentations to make his employer switch to KVM?

Ulrich Drepper is not the only open source code guru against virtualization players: yesteday it emerged that also Christopher Helwig, Linux SCSI storage maintainer, is openly against VMware ESX Server, considering the hypervisor a violation of GPL license.

Thanks to OSNews for the news.