Virtualization Report | David Marshall | March 2008

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March 2008

March 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware has just released a Beta 2 build of its very popular and free server virtualization software, VMware Server 2.0 (build 84186). Beta 1 brought about a lot of changes to the interface of the software, and added a number of feature improvements to enhance scalability and broaden guest operating system support.

The Beta 2 release continues the trend and offers an array of new features and increased performance and stability.

New features include:

Updated VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface: With the faster performance, improved stability and broader range of configuration options, the VI Web Access management interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive management experience. In addition, embedded help files are context sensitive based on the task being performed.
Independent virtual machine console: With the new VMware Remote Console, you can access your virtual machine consoles independent of the VI Web Access management interface plus resize the virtual machine console windows as needed.
Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.
Multi-tiered permissions: Configure different levels of permissions to access virtual machines in different ways, including browsing, interacting, configuring and administering virtual machines.
New hardware editors: Edit and add devices such as USB 2.0 devices and legacy devices such as floppy drives, serial and parallel ports.
Automatically start your virtual machines: Select which virtual machines that you want to automatically start when VMware Server starts. In addition, there is also an option to boot the virtual machine directly into the BIOS Setup Screen.
Link to Virtual Appliance Marketplace: Access thousands of pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. This speeds up time to value and simplifies software development, distribution, and management.

Join the three million people who have already downloaded VMware Server and participate in the latest Beta version by registering with VMware.

Posted by David Marshall on March 30, 2008 02:59 PM

March 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Phoenix Technologies pushes forward with HyperSpace

Why am I writing about Phoenix Technologies? You probably know them as one of the makers of the PC BIOS firmware that operates many of today's computer systems. However, back in November of last year, we talked about Phoenix in terms of virtualization and hypervisor technology.

The company has created something called HyperSpace which they claim will offer highly-efficient, instantly available applications with new levels of security, system reliability, remote management and ease-of-use to PC users. It is enabled by a lightweight virtualization engine, the Phoenix HyperCore, which can be embedded in the core system firmware or BIOS.

In trying to move towards what the company is calling PC 3.0 and Embedded Simplicity, the company recently acquired BeInSync and teamed up with CyberLink.

Israeli-based BeInSync provides an all-in-one solution that allows users to backup, synchronize, share and access their data online.

"This acquisition is a leap forward in our effort to redefine and significantly improve the PC experience by embedding simplicity for end users," said Woody Hobbs, President and CEO of Phoenix Technologies. "PC 3.0 eliminates complexity and provides users with the kind of convenience they expect from their digital devices. We are bringing new benefits to the hundreds of millions of PC users globally who require built-in functionality on PCs by enabling secure and easy online access and collaboration and automated data protection to help them manage their digital lives."

"The integration of breakthrough synchronization technology from BeInSync will allow Phoenix and its customers to help end-users alleviate concerns about the loss of important files and to give them complete mobile freedom to access their data from any Internet-connected computer."

The partnership with CyberLink will help to produce a multimedia suite that is optimized for the Phoenix HyperSpace platform. Within this secure environment, the platform will provide instant access to a DVD player and other multimedia capabilities within seconds of turning on a mobile PC.

Hobbs said, "Our partnership with CyberLink will allow people to see videos or play music or other multimedia content within seconds of turning on their laptop. At the same time, they can easily click back and forth to applications running on the primary operating system, without rebooting their PC. This collaboration illustrates how Phoenix HyperSpace is introducing a new world of possibilities, allowing people to use their mobile computer as a purpose-built multimedia appliance and as a full-featured PC."

More information about HyperSpace can be found on the Phoenix Website.

Posted by David Marshall on March 30, 2008 02:29 PM

March 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Parallels news about containers and server beta product

Parallels is offering a few different forms of virtualization to the market. Specifically in the server market, they have a container-based solution (from SWsoft) as well as a hypervisor/server virtualization solution that is currently in Beta.

Making a big move to get its product into the hands of end users, the company recently announced that it has signed an exclusive deal with Tech Data Corporation to distribute its Parallels Virtuozzo Containers offering in the United States. The agreement strengthens Parallels' channel program by offering value-added resellers (VARs) easy access to the company's container-based server virtualization software.

"Parallels Virtuozzo Containers takes a different approach to server virtualization than many of the other solutions available in the channel, and by doing, so offers enterprises large and small a unique set of advantages, such as better per-server density and superior performance," said Bill Portin, vice president of North American sales and operations, Parallels.

"This makes Parallels Virtuozzo Containers an ideal solution for VARs deploying data center-scale virtualization or for those deploying virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. Working with Tech Data's AIS Division, Parallels will ensure our VAR partners have access to the support, expertise and information they need to profitably deploy Parallels Virtuozzo Containers."

At the same time, the company is also moving fast to get their server virtualization solution from Beta to GA. Things must be heading in the right direction for Parallels' latest product. InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy recently put the Beta product through InfoWorld's Test Center and said it looks promising. Kennedy said:

"I did find Parallels Server to be quite responsive, allowing me to install Windows Server 2003 into a new VM at a very competitive pace. I also found the various performance and resource utilization counters to be both helpful and informative, with everything arranged neatly in a series of tabbed panes within the VM console window.
One feature I found most welcome was support for multiple virtual CPUs. Many server applications are tuned to behave differently on a single-CPU system, limiting scalability in non-SMP VM environments. Parallels Server's multi-CPU support should give these applications a healthy performance boost."

You can read Kennedy's full findings on the Beta product, here.

You can also check out the Parallels Server Beta product for yourself.

Posted by David Marshall on March 30, 2008 01:51 PM

March 27, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Iron speaks on virtualization monopoly and the SME

Earlier this month, Virtual Iron announced the hiring of former Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro as chief strategy officer. In this role, they expected Asaro to focus on business strategy, ecosystem development, evangelism and education of Virtual Iron to the market.

It looks like Asaro is coming out of the gate full steam ahead with his first post on his new Virtual Discourse blog site. In it, he describes a virtualization market that is dominated by VMware to the point where it becomes a monopoly. And in this monopoly controlled virtualization space, where does Virtual Iron see itself playing?

Virtual Iron is embracing the small to medium sized enterprise (SME) market, where the company says they have had most of their success. Asaro describes it:

Where does Virtual Iron fit into this picture? Right now, we are the little guy in a land of giants. Virtual Iron has a really good product. We have thousands of production implementations (and rapidly growing) and a healthy and increasingly strong channel. However, in spite of this, we are inconsequential to the ecosystem I've been talking about. But guess what? It really doesn't matter.
Where we win – where we matter – is with small and medium enterprises (SME). They have no loyalty to VMware. They are looking for a server virtualization solution that has all of the advanced capabilities and features they need to protect and manage their environments; they want an easy to use solution; and it has to be cost effective so that it doesn't consume the lion's share of their IT budget. That is what we bring to the table and it is really a no-brainer for them once they get their hands on it. We also matter to the channel. Many of our channel partners feel that VMware is oversaturated. Since everyone is selling it, they can't make any money. And their SME customers can't afford VMware, so they are looking for an alternative. We are that alternative.

VMware would argue that this isn't the case. That VMware's product is affordable by the SME market. In fact, an entire blogosphere of postings covered this argument from one vendor's blog to the next.

Price is but one area where the virtualization vendor ecosystem continues to go after VMware - hard. And without actually lowering prices, VMware is fighting back.

Posted by David Marshall on March 27, 2008 05:00 AM

March 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Dell and Egenera team for a dynamic datacenter

Dell and Egenera are partnering to deliver a fully integrated solution for employing dynamic data center environments. Egenera started out creating PAN Manager to operate with its own BladeFrame server technology; but last year, the company decided to open up its software to other hardware manufacturers. Fujitsu-Siemens was the first to sign an OEM agreement. And now, Dell.

The two companies intend to combine the Dell PowerEdge server line, a full suite of Dell's Infrastructure Consulting Services and Egenera's PAN Manager infrastructure virtualization software. The solution is designed to enable customers to simplify operations by creating and managing a single resource pool for both physical and virtualized servers.

"Dell is listening to customers and providing solutions that make the virtual data center easier to deploy and manage, regardless of platform," said Rick Becker, vice president, Dell Software & Solutions. "Dell and Egenera will help customers focus on company growth by delivering excellence in virtualized infrastructure from server performance, storage interoperability to dynamic data center management."

So how will Dell benefit from this relationship? According to this blog post by Jim Burton at IDEAS, "Dell has traditionally been firmly positioned in the industry-standard server space, providing a wide selection of servers at a great value. For virtualization, Dell PowerEdge servers support a host of third-party software, including VMware. Dell servers can be managed using the Dell OpenManage framework."

Burton continued, "In today's market, Dell can compete very effectively with other vendors on simple server virtualization and SANs. But what it lacks is a management tool that can pull everything together into an entirely virtualized datacenter. That is where PAN Manager comes into play. With PAN Manager, Dell leaps over many of its competitors with the ability to create the virtualized datacenter of the future today using inexpensive industry-standard components."

Egenera's PAN Manager supports virtualization technology from Citrix and VMware, and it will add support for Microsoft once Hyper-V is released.

Posted by David Marshall on March 26, 2008 08:40 PM

March 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization capacity appliance and Sun's latest desktop virtualization offering

Virtualization capacity problems, such as planning and performance bottlenecks, are still an issue with many people in the virtualization world. To answer that problem, VKernel has a new virtual appliance coming out and it is currently in Beta. And people have also been exploring virtual desktop technology more and more. And now, Sun Microsystems has recently announced their own play in this market space - Sun's VDI 2.0. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on March 26, 2008 08:31 PM

March 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtual security switch technology launched by Montego Networks

Just before the start of the 2008 RSA Conference, Co-Founders Bob Darabant (CEO) and John Peterson (CTO) announced the launch of Montego Networks, a new company whose Montego HyperSwitch technology is described as an innovative virtual security networking solution that delivers policy enforcement, access control, and secure switching for virtual networks.

With everything happening around the announcement, I was still able to catch up with John Peterson so that I could find out more information about his latest venture.

Q: How did Montego Networks get its start? What brought your company into this virtualization space?

A: The founders of Montego Networks recently came from Reflex Security which is providing solutions in the virtual security space. After spending much time talking to customers about their security challenges in the virtual world our CEO (former EVP of Sales and Marketing at Reflex) and myself, CTO (Former Chief Product Officer at Reflex) saw an opportunity to solve a different, more pressing problem than what Reflex was trying to solve. Thus we decided to step out on our own to build a product / company. We chose the name Montego Networks because Montego Bay Jamaica, one of my favorite spots in the Caribbean, coveys an image of relaxation and ease of mind. Everything in Jamaica is said to be not a problem ("No Problem Man"). So, given that securing networks is always challenging and often stressful - we wanted to build a company that delivers solutions that were easy to use and helped removed some of the stress associated with security.

Q: As virtualization continues to expand in the datacenter, what are some of the challenges that people can expect to face, and how does Montego Networks hope to answer those challenges?

A: "Virtual server sprawl" means more resources to protect and more resources that have the potential to communicate with each other outside of security guidelines. Montego Networks offers products that allow virtual servers to be isolated from each other and allowed to communicate with each other - only if security policy has been defined. Early on, customers would put like types of servers/applications in the same trust domain but now customers are putting a mixture of virtual servers in the same trust domain. This development is driving an emerging need for virtual server isolation. The Challenge? How to do this in the environment (ie. In the vswitch) and how do you do this in a way not to cause major negative impacts on network performance.

Montego solves these challenges by offering a high performing solution that allows security controls between virtual machines. We've married security and networking to accomplish this - and do so through our Montego HyperSwitch product which is the world's first "virtual security switch". Montego not only has security technologies such as Firewalls, but we also have networking technologies such as server load balancing, QoS, Network Discovery, 802.1D Spanning Tree, 802.1Q VLANs, etc.

Q: A number of solutions recently appeared on the market, and others have been around for some time now, each trying to address security and virtual networking.
What makes you stand out? Or how does Montego differ?

A: Montego Networks only sees a new company called Altor Networks as a competitor. Their messaging is very similar to ours although we believe they will not have a product until late summer 2008. We don't see other competitors in the market and feel there are good reasons for them to want to partner with Montego. When people think of "security in the virtual environment" they think that everyone is in the same bucket and compete with each other. While we may compete for the same mindshare, we all offer very different solutions that address very different problems. For example, Blue Lane provides Patch Management, Montego provides Firewalling and Reflex Security provides IPS. All three technologies are needed and do not compete. Its like saying Trend Micro competes against NetScreen. Montego Networks will be able to partner with those types of companies because we believe we are an enabler for security within the virtual environment. We are able to extend our capabilities of VM to VM inspection to our partners. Today Blue Lane, Reflex and others are not providing VM to VM security. Through Montego's "Policy Based Switching" capability we can have either of those solutions hang off of our solution and send traffic to their inspection engines on a VM to VM basis. This also improves performance for those applications because now no longer are they forced to inspect 100% of the traffic like an inline device but maybe only 10% of the traffic because the user can now define policy around what he wants to have inspected by those 3rd party applications. For example, a network manager might want to set a policy that defines that only Virtual Server #1 will be inspected by Blue Lane (because it is a more critical asset).

Q: Can you tell us more about your HyperSwitch technology?

A: The HyperSwitch technology delivers an integration of security and switching - to provide a secure environment for resources managed by the HyperVisor (Virtual Servers and Virtual Desktops). The technology intercepts traffic from the vSwitch (the name used in the case of VMWare) and matches the traffic against its security policies and if allowed to flow we will deliver the traffic back to the vSwitch so that it can be delivered to its final destination. We basically grab the packets, inspect it and then switch it back. The security policies that can be put on the packets are by way of our multi-firewall and 3rd party inspection approach. We have a Layer 2 Firewall, L3-L4 Firewall, Identity Firewall, and Content Firewall. Outside of that we can forward traffic to 3rd party security applications such as Blue Lane, Catbird, StillSecure, Reflex and others. All of this is VM to VM which no one else on the market offers today (Altor just released claims to their ability to do this and although we believe they will some day, they do not today).

Q: What virtualization platforms do you currently support? And what are your plans for additional platform coverage?

A: Our initial release supports VMWare today - however the product technically works in Citrix, Virtual Iron, and other XEN based environments. We also plan to support Microsoft when they release. The reason we have not announced official support is mostly due to product testing, documentation and readiness vs. technical challenges. We plan to be heterogeneous.

For more information about the company and its product, you can listen to their podcast on their home page, or watch their product preview video.

Again, I'd like to thank John Peterson, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Montego Networks, for taking time out to speak with me.

Posted by David Marshall on March 26, 2008 04:42 PM

March 25, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware's big time spending and expansion in India

VMware announced that it plans to invest $100 million in India by 2010.

Part of that money is going to be used to expand the company's presence in India with a new, state of the art 82,000 square foot development center in Bangalore. The new Bangalore development center expands on existing R&D operations in Bangalore and Pune. The center supports new and ongoing research and development across the company's entire portfolio of solutions for datacenter and desktop virtualization.

They also plan to double the company's India-based engineering organization to more than 1,000 people over the next two years.

"Great products are built by great people. India has both an excellent technical education infrastructure and outstanding people. We highly value our Indian citizen employees," said Greene. "India is also one of our fastest growing markets and where we have increasingly important system integrator partners. For these reasons, we are now substantively increasing our investment in India."

Greene said in a press briefing that VMware is expecting 50% revenue growth this year - even with increased competition. And if companies are pinched by a recession, virtualization becomes even more attractive to those companies who are trying to do more with less.

The company's stock has also been on a rise again, recently closing above the $50 mark. Part of that reason, according to the Associated Press, is the claims from Citi Investment Research analyst Brent Thill who said concerns of competition were overdone and 2008 could be the year that VMware beats expectations.

Posted by David Marshall on March 25, 2008 07:58 PM

March 23, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Transitive ships latest cross-platform virtualization solution for Solaris

Only a few days ago, Transitive Corporation announced the release of QuickTransit for the Solaris operating system on SPARC to Solaris on x86/64 systems.

If you aren't familiar with Transitive or their products, you might be surprised. The Transitive technology is the basis of the Rosetta software built into all of Apple's x86-based Macintosh computers, and it also forms the basis of IBM PowerVM Lx86, which is available for IBM's System p range of enterprise servers. The company has also recently achieved a notable milestone - they have now shipped their products in more than 10 million computer systems worldwide. And their momentum is just beginning having signed distribution agreements with HP, Fujitsu and Red Hat.

So how does it work? The company's QuickTransit hardware virtualization technology allows applications that have been compiled for one operating system and processor type to run on servers that use a different processor and operating system, without requiring any source code or binary changes. Sounds like magic? Try virtualization. Yet another member of the virtualization community that sounds like magic to the rest of the IT world, but for those of us who have embraced virtualization, it's just another day at the office with the chance to work with cool technology.

According to the company, this latest version of QuickTransit offers a solution to enterprise customers that have deployed the Solaris OS on x86 operating systems as it allows them to immediately run many thousands of additional applications. Customers that have opted to deploy the Solaris OS on x86 hardware platforms from Sun, IBM, HP, Dell and others can deploy QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC-to-Solaris/x86-64 to immediately start using a large range of Solaris SPARC-based applications that have been developed by independent software vendors (ISVs), open source developers and internal application development teams.

"The release of QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC-to-Solaris/x86-64 is another important milestone for Transitive and occurs at a time of accelerated momentum in cross-platform virtualization," said Bob Wiederhold, president and CEO of Transitive. "This release is also timely because of the increasing interest in the Solaris OS on x86 among enterprise datacenter managers seeking robust and reliable operating system options."

The company offers three configurations of its QuickTransit enterprise product line:

QuickTransit Workstation - for use on desktop and laptop PCs
QuickTransit Server - for large-scale datacenter consolidation projects
QuickTransit Legacy - a specialized version intended for application re-hosting from extremely old legacy hardware running operating system versions that are no longer supported.

Evaluation versions of QuickTransit can be downloaded from the Transitive Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on March 23, 2008 07:15 AM

March 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)

BMC to purchase BladeLogic for $800 million

On Monday, BMC Software said that it had agreed to purchase BladeLogic, a provider of next generation data center automation software, for $28 per share which translates to approximately an $800 million cash acquisition. And according to BMC, once the acquisition is complete, the company expects to add a significant, high growth revenue stream which should accelerate BMC's long-term growth expectations for revenues, earnings and cash flow.

"Organizations around the world will spend more than $140 billion dollars this year running data centers," said Bob Beauchamp, BMC's president and chief executive officer. "Automation is the only way IT can bring this spending under control and still meet the reliability and time-to-market requirements of their businesses. BMC's acquisition of BladeLogic will create the new IT Service Automation leader, unique in its ability to provide these critical capabilities. It is a natural and very significant next step in our vision of Business Service Management."

In September, BladeLogic was named the fastest growing data center automation vendor in 2006, based on its revenue growth. Analyst firm IDC said the company had year-over-year revenue growth of 105.6% in the 2006 calendar year. In Q4 of 2007, the company reported a revenue increase of 82% over Q4 the previous year. BladeLogic attributed their success to the company's demonstrable value and competitive advantage of their next-generation product architecture as evidenced by their large and growing base of customers across nearly every vertical industry.

BladeLogic's automation software helps IT organizations manage, control and enforce configuration changes in today's data center. Its products are key in provisioning machines in a virtual, Data Center 2.0 world. And as configuration management continues to heat up, there aren't a lot of standalone players left in the market. BMC rival Hewlett Packard recently acquired another data center automation vendor, Opsware, with a $1.6 billion price tag last year. Doing so put BladeLogic at the top of the acquisition list.

According to Timothy Stammers, Senior Analyst at Ovum, "HP paid a whacking $1.6bn cash for OpsWare, which at the time was growing fast and had reached around $150m run-rate annual revenue. That makes a multiple of over ten times revenue. BladeLogic is also growing fast, and saw revenue more than double last year, to reach $71m, meaning that BMC also paid over ten times revenue to acquire the company."

Stammers added, "Those multiples for fast growing young companies are not unusual, but they do show how much both HP and BMC wanted to own OpsWare and BladeLogic respectively. Relatively, it's a much bigger bet for BMC, because it is so much smaller than HP."

BMC said the acquisition would fit into its business service management portfolio and it comes on the heels of acquiring ProactiveNet, a maker of service analytics technologies that offers an "early warning system", and RealOps, an IT task automation and runbook specialist.

The key with all of these acquisitions will be to see how well they can integrate with each other. Beauchamp said that the redundancy between the companies' portfolios is minimal, and they expect to quickly offer customer-proven product integration.

Stammers said, "One threat to its future BladeLogic-driven revenues will be the development of provisioning tools from virtualisation suppliers such as VMware or Microsoft. BMC is banking on those suppliers leaving the management of heterogeneous physical and virtual servers to third parties such as itself. It is not a certainty, but it is a very reasonable bet."

But I wouldn't count on Microsoft to live up to that expectation. VMware and its VirtualCenter management product will probably remain homogeneous for some time, but Microsoft has already said that its management platform would manage Microsoft virtualization technology as well as VMware ESX Server and Xen. Consumers are asking for heterogeneity support, and BMC won't be the only company answering the call.

Posted by David Marshall on March 22, 2008 05:04 PM

March 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Everyone chimes in on VMware memory overcommitment and ROI

These past few days, we've seen some back and forth postings taking place on various corporate blogs around the topics of virtualization ROI and a unique feature found in VMware ESX Server called memory overcommitment.

VMware's Eric Horschman posted an interesting blog post on VMware's Virtual Reality Blog site answering remarks made by many in the industry that VMware's solution is overpriced. Many have said that with companies giving away platforms built on top of Xen, and Microsoft planning on charging $28 for their yet to be released Hyper-V hypervisor, it seems as though VMware's price tag could be a little steep and might have to come down to a price that is more "reasonable".

Horschman countered the 'high pricing' claim saying "Virtualization customers should focus on cost per VM more than upfront license costs when choosing a hypervisor. VMware Infrastructure's exclusive ability to overcommit memory gives it an advantage in cost per VM the others can't match." And he adds, "Our rivals are simply trying to compensate for limitations in their products with realistic pricing."

To back his claims up, Horschman lays out an elaborate presentation and example of how to calculate this cost per VM, and attempts to show readers how a free hypervisor ends up costing more money per VM than that of the more expensive ESX Server product because of the memory overcommitment feature currently exclusive to VMware.

Roger Klorese, Senior Director on the Product Marketing team for Citrix XenServer, answers Horschman's post with a blog posting of his own. As a side note, in addition to now working at Citrix on the XenServer product, Klorese was, in another life, an early member of the VMware family and so he draws on some of his past experience with the ESX Server product.

"The test he uses to support the claim is very impressive - if what you want to do is to power on virtual machines. If you're going to look at their screensavers all day while you do your work with a pencil and paper and abacus, power-on statistics are meaningful. And the moment you power on is the time you get the most out of page-sharing: nearly all pages are either operating system and services code pages (which are identical from guest to guest in many cases) or all-zero (which are all initially mapped to the same physical page)."

He continues, "What do you think happens when those pages start to un-share, as people start doing real work? How big do you need to expand those balloons, and how much do you have to starve those guests, to keep your 5:1 memory allocation? And if you can't balloon 5:1, how much do you further degrade it when you start using the hypervisor swap file?"

Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix Systems, writes on his blog: "The bottom line: VMware's 'ROI analysis' offers neither an ROI comparison nor any analysis. But it does offer valuable insight into the mindset of a company that will fight tooth and nail to maintain VI3 sales at the expense of a properly thought through solution that meets end user requirements. The very fact that the VMware EULA still forbids Citrix or Microsoft or anyone in the Xen community from publishing performance comparisons against ESX is further testimony to VMware's deepest fear, that customers will become smarter about their choices, and begin to really question ROI."

Citrix wasn't alone in answering Horschman's blog post. Microsoft blogger James O'Neill didn't agree with the numbers either. On his blog, he wrote, "They were able to start 40 instances of Windows XP to achieve the 40 VMs, with 512MB of memory on a machine with only 4GB of RAM - a 5 times over commitment ratio. Of course they didn't actually run anything in them, because if you and I fired up Outlook, and IE (with our own mail boxes and choice of pages) you open word and I open PowerPoint very few memory pages will be sharable (I've got 47 pages open in IE right now, and it's using over 300MB of RAM, almost all for data). That means a lot of paging will have to happen in the virtualization stack. Brace yourself for really poor performance."

Where to begin? All of these blogs are starting to get wonderful responses. And the battle over memory overcommitment and product pricing continues.

What's interesting to note is that it sounds like Citrix may already have the memory overcommitment capability in the Xen product. But they haven't gone further down that road because of performance issues. Microsoft is also supposedly planning on adding this very feature into the next version of Hyper-V according to a recent interview done with Bob Muglia.

All of this discussion around memory ballooning, paging and memory overcommitment made me remember something I heard in a break-out session back at VMworld 2006. The memory overcommitment feature was described to me as an automobile airbag. It's one of those features you are glad to have in case of an emergency, but you certainly don't use it on an everyday basis.

From the responses that many of these blog postings are receiving, it sounds like a mix bag review of the feature. Some say it works great for them in their environment - and they do get a bump in consolidation densities. Others are saying that it drags down performance of their virtual machines. Again, sounds like a case by case issue. And the battle... er, discussion, rages on.

Posted by David Marshall on March 20, 2008 08:29 AM

March 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization security and the NSA; and what are hardware vendors up to?

In case you hadn't already seen it, you should check out what InfoWorld found out about virtualization and security while speaking with a member of the NSA. Executive editor Galen Gruman wrote a really interesting article that you need to read called "Virtualization's secret security threats". And then, I’ll jump around a bit as I take a look at what some of today's hardware vendors are doing to mix it up with virtualization. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on March 19, 2008 05:38 PM

March 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft surprises industry with Hyper-V release candidate

Microsoft's virtualization hypervisor product has seen its share of delays, but now, it looks as though the product is right on track and could even be out sooner than last expected. Today, the company put out a release candidate of Hyper-V that provides updated, near-final code.

According to Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager for virtualization strategy, "This milestone is important to the hundreds of customers and partners in the early adopter programs, and those of you trialing Hyper-V on your own, because it's feature complete, better performing than the beta, and you'll have a better experience using it."

Neil published on his blog that external deployments have exceeded Beta coverage goals and external TAP deployments have increased significantly. And amongst the early adopter customers, the three most common Windows Server 2008 roles run within Hyper-V are IIS, application server and Terminal Services.

Microsoft is reporting that the release candidate features an expanded list of tested and qualified guest operating systems, which now includes Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2), Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3. Host server and language support has been expanded to include the 64- bit (x64) versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter, with English, German and Japanese language options available as well as enablement of Hyper-V on international locales, and further language options and support available in the final release. In addition, the release candidate comes with support for more hardware configurations and offers improved performance and scalability. It also includes the option for installing Hyper-V Manager Microsoft Management Console on Windows Vista SP1 for remote management.

As Hyper-V's release draws closer, announcements of third-party add-on solutions will begin to come out in support of the new hypervisor as well.

One such solution has already been announced from virtual lab management provider Surgient who has been providing a similar solution for Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware ESX Server for years.

"Surgient has seen growing customer interest in adding support for Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to our virtual lab management software so that our mutual customers can streamline application life cycle operations, reducing capital and operating expenses," said Tim Lucas, president and CEO of Surgient Inc. "Our customers need to be able to replicate production application configurations in virtual labs using any virtual or physical infrastructure. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V delivers in all these areas, and we're excited to add support for it to our virtual lab management platform."

Customers and partners can download the release candidate, here. And if you are already operating the Beta version, it is expected that the Windows Update service should refresh your copy to the latest release.

Posted by David Marshall on March 19, 2008 05:11 PM

March 18, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Another look at VMware's VMsafe with Blue Lane and Catbird

Security in the virtualization space, or virtsec as its being called by some, is supposed to be a big deal. Why? For one, security is a huge topic of concern in the physical world. Consumers and businesses spend large sums of money every year to protect their physical end-points and keep malware from entering their datacenter or homes. And when you transition over to a virtual world, why wouldn't you still be concerned about the very same problem and issues? After all, just because a machine is virtual doesn't mean it's impervious. And security seems to be one of the top reasons why many people in the industry are slow to adopt virtualization into their production environments. And so, VMware has introduced us to their solution called VMsafe.

I was originally exposed to this concept back at VMworld two years ago (it didn't have a name like VMsafe back then - it was just an idea or concept at the time). But now, the VMsafe initiative was finally launched at VMworld Europe 2008 and the cat has been released from the bag. The technology allows security software vendors like McAfee to write anti-virus and malware protection software against an API that will be provided with the VMware ESX Server hypervisor environment.

Everything I heard made sense to me at the time, but I wanted to know more about the security of the security end-point. VMsafe can stop the malware before it gets to the virtual machine, but what keeps the malware writers from focusing their attack on the API or the VMsafe virtual machine? According to an article in a VMworld Europe magazine, this shouldn't happen.

"Security purists and VMware's competitors will undoubtedly argue that providing access to the hypervisor, albeit in a highly controlled manner, increases the risk of the hypervisor's own integrity being compromised, and with it the security of every virtual machine that runs on top of it. VMsafe is architected in a manner that eliminates this threat by having the security product run in an isolated space outside of the context of the hypervisor."

Good. So VMsafe is safe. But safe from what? Interestingly, while describing this whole concept of security and VMsafe during the keynote presentation, Christopher Bolin, CTO of McAfee talked about academic and online discussions over the potential threats to VMware and other virtualization technologies. And despite these discussions, Bolin said that they haven't yet seen any real malicious attacks against virtualization and VMware specifically. That's impressive.

Michael Montecillo, a security analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, believes that virtualization security is a moving target. He says, "Organizations are still trying to determine what is the best, most effective way to implement virtualization within their environments. This has caused variations in practices involving the technology utilized and the management processes designed to implement those technologies. From a security perspective, this makes designing a strategy very difficult as there is no standard technology or management method. Therefore, security strategies need to be very flexible and highly capable to address the risk to virtualized environments."

Montecillo added, "VMsafe is an initial effort to bring attention to the fact that security is playing a larger role than ever in the adoption of virtual technologies. VMsafe is beneficial to VMware as it helps VMware address the security voice which has likely slowed the adoption of virtualization technologies in certain environments. VMsafe is also very beneficial to the security vendors involved as it has put the security issue of virtualization at the forefront of the thinking of a lot of executives."

So McAfee is now onboard. But there are two other companies who have been protecting VMware's hypervisor for well over a year now, Blue Lane Technologies and Catbird, and they agree with Montecillo's assessment that VMsafe is bringing the security issue to the forefront.

Gregory Ness, VP of Marketing at Blue Lane Technologies said, "VMware finally uttered the 'S' word, signaling their serious intentions to virtualize production data centers. It is a kind of declaration of independence from the world of ASIC and gig-based security that was also signed by some of the leading players in security." And added, "VMware has articulated an advanced security vision that promises to do for security what virtualization has done for devtest."

Tamar Newberger, VP of Marketing for Catbird, is also a firm believer that VMware's coming out and their affirmation about VMsafe is good for the industry. The feeling is that reducing security concerns will help accelerate virtualization adoption and move the technology into production environments.

Newberger said that VMsafe is an important announcement and shows that VMware is now onboard with the need for security around its product. Saying, "In the shift from P to V, we see best practices for security being inadvertently left behind. Indeed, frequently the security team is left out entirely by the infrastructure team when they are mapping out VMware deployment plans, either because they simply didn't think about it or because they are concerned it might slow things down. Businesses have spent so much time and money figuring out their security topology on their physical networks – but then almost entirely ignore it for their virtual network. It's weird!"

Companies like Blue Lane and Catbird originally came into the virtualization market to specifically address the growing security concerns found within virtualization. And even without the availability of VMsafe APIs, both companies have been able to architect a solution to help address the security problem. Catbird has been shipping its V-Security product since last summer and offers a 'Security as a Service' approach. Likewise, Blue Lane started shipping its VirtualShield product in March 2007. So because both of these companies already have products on the market to address this security concern within VMware environments, how does this announcement affect and change each company's roadmap or long-term vision? After all, creating a set of APIs that can easily be leveraged must certainly take a toll on the barriers of entry into this virtsec space.

Ness believes it will be a big boost for all virtsec players - including Blue Lane. "I think the data center virtualization prospects have been waiting for VMware to step up, articulate a vision and delineate who will do what. They have removed any uncertainty that clouded/confused the early market. Because virtualization is a disruptive technology for security it levels the playing field in many ways, including de-emphasizing specialized network IPS hardware, increasing the importance of app/protocol fluency and moving the security industry away from headaches like signatures, tuning and cottage 'intrusion suspicion management' industries. More layer 7 intelligence will be required by virtsec. All of these trends point toward our advanced architecture and away from solutions architected when hackers were living at home and targeting desktops for fame."

Newberger said that it hasn't altered Catbird's roadmap per se, since the type of functionality that VMsafe enables was already on their roadmap.

"We do believe that we can demonstrate how using VMsafe – and security as a whole - will accelerate VMware adoption by reducing the security concerns that have been dogging the market. There have been lots of analysts and CIOs warning of impending doom and gloom – but most of their concerns could easily be addressed by products already in the market, such as Catbird. And VMware supports this approach."

According to Montecillo, "Blue Lane and Catbird currently sit in an excellent position with regards to virtualization. These companies are on the cutting edge for a growing concern for organizations looking to consolidate servers and move to virtualization solutions. With the innovations that come with the move to virtualized environments, so too comes new security concerns. Technical concerns such as the security of the hypervisor are complicated by management issues like trusted zone spanning and network activity monitoring. Companies such as Blue Lane have a head start on addressing these concerns through product portfolios and thought leadership. Of course the VMsafe announcement has allowed some larger security vendors such as McAfee or Symantec to enter into the realm of virtualization security as well. However, as they do not currently have the technology to secure the virtualized environments in the manner that Blue Lane, Catbird, or some of the others do, acquisitions are likely."

Posted by David Marshall on March 18, 2008 04:32 PM

March 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)

One of the big takeaways from VMworld Europe - management tools are needed

One of the big takeaways from my VMworld Europe trip was that VMware is definitely responding to the need for management tools. During the show, I couldn't escape from the word "management". VMware announced a number of management products just before the start of the show, and then each of these (Lifecycle Manager, Stage Manager and Site Recovery Manager) applications took center stage during the keynote, the exhibit floor, the break out sessions and the hands-on labs.

Don't get me wrong here; I applaud them for this management bombardment. I think the application stack and the management of virtualization are of the utmost importance in today's virtual datacenter. Some of the problems and concerns with managing the virtualization environment have been key deterrents to people fully implementing the technology into their datacenters.

However, at the same time, what we can't afford is more confusion added into the virtualization mix. Specifically, I'm talking about VMware Lab Manager, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager. I sat through numerous break-out sessions covering these tools and even attended their hands-on labs in hopes of getting a better understanding of them. Afterward, it was my understanding that these products were all designed to solve different use cases (specifically, VMware Lab Manager and Stage Manager) or handle different situations. And because of that, VMware thinks of them and treats them as separate products.

VMware Lifecycle Manager comes from the technology acquired in the Dunes acquisition. The product allows companies to implement a consistent and automated process for requesting, approving, deploying, updating, and retiring virtual machines.

VMware Lab Manager comes from the technology acquired in the Akimbi acquisition. It addresses the needs of development and QA engineers by providing them self-service provisioning of multi-tier virtual machines.

VMware Stage Manager is an extension of the Akimbi technology. It addresses the needs of the IT and application administrators responsible for rolling new and updated IT services into production. And it enables the streamlined and accelerated transition of complex, multi-tier IT services through the pre-production stages into production.

VMware Lab Manager is the only one of these applications currently available. The others are still in Beta with an expected Q2 release. Once the applications come out and people start to bang away at them, I would assume that some sort of VMware Management suite would then take shape and the applications would get wired together for a more powerful workflow experience.

According to Ravi Gururaj, founder and CTO of VMLogix, all of the customers that VMLogix has spoken with have expressed an interest in seeing a subset of the best features of Lab Manager + Stage Manager + Lifecycle Manager built into a single management framework/tool, and that this is the direction or view of the market that VMLogix is taking long term.

One of VMware's partners and competitors, Surgient, is also taking a closer look at these new management tools - for obvious reasons.

Erik Josowitz, Surgient Vice President of Marketing, said the real issue is the notion of staging into production. And that to him, this requires 2 things: a real understanding of what is in production and the ability to model a change process on objects that maintain that context.

Josowitz said that VMware fails right now on both counts.

He stated, "VMware continues to build products that expect or require everything to be running in VMware. No customer environment we have ever seen looks like that. It rarely even looks like that for a single application." Josowitz continued, "VMware's model assumes that all production apps will ultimately be installed in VMware virtual machines and that's just not workable. Until they have a software lifecycle management solution that doesn't presume the endpoint is VMware it just won't work in most enterprises. Add the strong support and growth we expect to see around Citrix XenServer and MS Hyper-V this year and the picture becomes worse for VMware's management approach."

When talking about the change process on objects, Josowitz said, "Stage Manager addresses many of the shortcomings of Lab Manager and gets a bit closer to what Surgient does (by adding support for multiple resource pools and a workflow model) but still doesn't have any of the active resource management (scheduling, guaranteed reservations) or library management capabilities we provide. Our analysis of Stage Manager is that it's just Lab Manager 2.0. They also haven't addressed any of the issues around fencing, which is really what primarily prevents Lab Manager from working in real world scenarios. Fencing can't span physical hosts, can't model multi-tier networks, can't address and manage more than 1 virtual NIC per VM - makes it really hard to even model a basic production MS Exchange configuration!"

Many people have been bringing up the fact that VMware is either acquiring or building out technology that directly competes with its partners - like Surgient and VMLogix.

However, if VMware wants to remain the virtualization leader, it has to keep developing and providing these types of management products as fast as possible. The differentiation between virtualization vendors will come down to add-on applications. And if the hypervisor does end up becoming a commodity as many people claim, then VMware would need to provide these types of applications to its customers in order to continue to post its impressive financial numbers.

Posted by David Marshall on March 15, 2008 02:52 PM

March 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Finding out more about virtual networks from Altor Networks

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Altor Networks CEO, Amir Ben-Efraim, so that I could find out more information about virtual networks and what Altor Networks is trying to do with them.

Q: So if you would, please tell us about Altor Networks?
Altor Networks is a virtual network security company whose vision is to make the virtual network more secure than its physical counterpart. Our team consists of world-class experts in network security, with experience from some of the most respected vendors in the industry.

Q: And what does the company do or provide?
Altor Networks has announced two products: Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) – available now and Virtual Network Firewall (VNF) – available in Summer of 2008.

Altor's VNSA provides unprecedented, granular visibility into virtual switch traffic hidden inside virtual servers such as VMware's ESX. The virtual switch is no longer the 'blind-spot' it was for legacy security and monitoring solutions. The VNSA's comprehensive dashboard assimilates traffic information across multiple physical servers and surfaces security issues like port scans, unwanted protocols, etc. Data center administrators can use the detailed information to improve operational efficiencies by quickly isolating and troubleshooting virtual network issues.

Altor's VNF is the first security product built from scratch for the virtual environment. It brings forth great innovations like:

The first firewall designed specifically for the virtual datacenter, with full support for all the dynamic features of virtualization
Security that stays 'attached' to the VM as it is moved, paused, or re-started
Security policy that can be defined and enforced per-VM
Hierarchical policy infrastructure that achieves maximum security with low administrative overhead.

Q: Is the product monitoring physical switches and networking or just virtual switches and adapters? And does it only work with VMware? Or does it also work with other virtualization platforms as well?
We are focused uniquely on monitoring and securing the virtual network. Virtual switch/bridge is a universal construct for all virtualization platforms, and is considered a standard feature of the 'virtual infrastructure'. It exists in VMware, Citrix-Xen, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun.

Altor Networks' products monitor and control virtual switches, not physical switches.

Q: What is it that you have seen that says virtualization is plagued in the networking security space? And is there a big threat happening?
Virtual servers are just as vulnerable as their physical counterparts. Security best-practices must be implemented, much like they were in the physical world. However, best-practices in the virtual environment must also consider the new characteristics presented by virtualization. Three main things have made this interesting from a security perspective:

As the number of virtual machines per physical server increases, the virtual network becomes the true network access layer. Given the fact that this network cannot be monitored or controlled makes it ripe territory for security mishaps.
Legacy security solutions have not kept pace with the innovative productivity features of virtualization – live-migration, rollbacks, pause-restart, are not common place in the physical world. As such, legacy security solutions cannot adequately protect the virtual environment.
Last but not least, during server consolidation, intentionally or unintentionally, servers with varying security postures and risk profiles are consolidated onto one physical server, but security best practices do not follow them into the virtual world.

We believe that deploying security as part of the virtual infrastructure and following security best practices will increase adoption of virtualization and maximize the return on investment.

Q: Is network usage a really big resource problem when it comes to DRS and VMotion? Would you expect high spike network traffic to cause a DRS response? What if both network activity and CPU is high? Would CPU trump network traffic?
When there is high network traffic, it is typically accompanied by a spike in CPU usage as the VM processes the network requests/traffic. As such, DRS and VMotion which use CPU usage as decision criteria are including the possibility of high network traffic among other things.

Our assertion is that if two VMs are exchanging a lot of network traffic, then it is more efficient for them to reside on the same physical server. With Altor's VNSA, administrators can use the inter-VM information to create efficient VM groupings for DRS and VMotion.

Q: Is your company currently in stealth-mode?
Altor Networks will be publicly launched on March 17th.

Q: And is this a beta product? If so, when is the GA version expected out?
Altor's VNSA will be released with the launch of the company on March 17th. It has been in beta with many customers for 2-3 months. Customers interested can go to www.altornetworks.com to download a full-featured free version to get familiar with the product, features, and benefits.

Altor's VNF will be available for beta in Summer 2008. Customers interested in participating in the beta can send an email to vnf-beta@altornetworks.com

Q: So who is currently using the product? And have you heard any feedback or stories from these customers yet?
VNSA is installed at many customer sites.
A sample list of the customers is at - www.altornetworks.com/customers
Here is a small sample of some interesting customer discoveries when VNSA was installed on their environment:

"This puts VMs on a level playing field with physical servers."
This was the story of a senior VMware administrator having a difficult time getting buy-in from the rest of the IT team.
"We can use this for our compliance audit."
This was from a HIPAA director at a county hospital who had been asked for a detailed access report during a compliance audit.
"I did not realize there was so much multicast traffic on our network."
This was from a VP of IT at a software services organization with many Windows VMs. He was particularly surprised since he had his team build the VMs with the explicit intent of turning off unnecessary services that are on by default.

While we did not find any real-time security breaches, VNSA can detect and alert on port scans, VMs in promiscuous mode, unwanted protocols, etc.

Q: Why is it that your company claims that a virtual datacenter can be made more secure than a physical one?
By closely integrating with virtual infrastructure APIs (e.g. VMware's VMsafe) and virtualization management systems (e.g., Virtual Center), our products can articulate and enforce a security policy-per-VM. This locks down each VM to its defined services and network communications, achieving a fine-grained level of isolation. This level of security granularity is rarely found in the physical data-center. Our products can thus achieve an unprecedented level of access and control over virtual-switch traffic, which is not possible to achieve in the physical world.

Q: One last question, can you explain why the existing security tools already present in the datacenter aren't able to properly protect the virtual environment?

Network Firewalls and IDS/IPS

Live-migration of VMs (i.e., VMotion) breaks legacy firewalls and IDS systems.
Perimeter policy framework was not designed for 'policy-per-VM', which we believe is absolutely necessary in the new dynamic, on-demand, data center.
Legacy solutions lack both integration with virtual platform management to enable ease of use and the performance tuning required to be a good citizen in a shared environment. Many security solutions deployed as an appliance or as a dedicated server were not architected to work in a shared environment.

OS Firewalls

Many customers using the free OS firewalls are quickly abandoning them due to management overhead. OS firewalls lack central management and consistency across different OSes.
The more important reason OS firewalls are not an option is because of their lack of availability on legacy OSes which are often the first to get virtualized.

VLANs

VLANs lack traffic inspection, are complex to manage, and limit features like live-migration of VMs.

I'd like to again thank Amir Ben-Efraim for his time and for explaining more about virtual networks and how his company, Altor Networks, fits within our virtualized world.

Posted by David Marshall on March 15, 2008 05:48 AM

March 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft expands its virtualization vision with Kidaro acquisition

With another bold move and strategic acquisition under way, Microsoft is continuing the aggressive advancement of its virtualization vision.

It wasn't long ago when the company was being accused of moving at a rather slow pace after it had consumed the desktop and server virtualization intellectual property from Connectix Corporation in 2003; and then more of the same seemed to happen after they acquired Softricity's application virtualization in 2006.

But since then, Microsoft has been moving rather aggressively to grab more of the virtualization market share. The latest move has Microsoft buying enterprise desktop virtualization solutions provider Kidaro for an undisclosed amount. Although some market sources are reporting that the acquisition could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. Kidaro entered the virtualization scene about 17 months ago when they gave me an exclusive on their launch right here on the InfoWorld Virtualization Report. At the same time, I was also given the opportunity to speak to the company's founder, Ran Kohavi. And I've been following the company's journey since that time.

Kidaro's Managed Workspace product allows enterprise data and applications to operate wrapped within a transparent virtual machine layer that provides enterprise class management and deployment. Doing so will also breathe new life into Microsoft's Virtual PC product. In April of last year, InfoWorld reviewed the product as Randall Kennedy put it through the InfoWorld Test Center process.

The new technology will give Microsoft an enormous boost on the security side of the equation and will give the company its own offering to compete with VMware's ACE product. When asked about this comparison to ACE, Kidaro CEO Kevin Brown told me that while Kidaro certainly provides an answer to the features of VMware's ACE product, the impact of Kidaro's technology as part of Microsoft has an opportunity to be much broader. And I completely agree.

Andi Mann, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates told me that he believed this was a great acquisition for Microsoft. Mann said, "Kidaro has a very strong solution for local desktop virtualization, with real benefits in security, manageability, DR, continuity, and migration - strong enough that EMA rated Kidaro as a Rising Star for Desktop Virtualization in our latest EMA All-Stars report."

Talking about what Kidaro offers the end user, Mann went on to say, "They also have some substantial customers. I spoke to a Fortune 500 Wall-St firm that avoided an annual cost of $4 million on laptop refreshes alone, and solved a difficult requirement to provide a highly secure mobile banking platform, by using Kidaro."

Microsoft said that Kidaro's technology would be rolled up into a suite of desktop management tools known as the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance which currently includes five key technologies that help enterprises manage their desktops: Microsoft Application Virtualization, Microsoft Asset Inventory Service, Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management, Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset and Microsoft System Center Desktop Error Monitoring. In order to access the Kidaro capabilities, Microsoft Software Assurance customers will need to subscribe to an add-on service.

Mann described how this acquisition helps further fill out Microsoft's virtualization portfolio. "They now have virtualization solutions for server, OS, local desktop, remote desktop, application/streaming, and even grid/cluster." Mann continued, "With a management solution, and partnerships (like Citrix and Novell) that extend the portfolio even more, even VMware looks a little sparse next to that sort of lineup."

When asked if he would be joining Microsoft, CEO Kevin Brown said "We're still in the planning process, but it's safe to say that people and technology are a very important part of this deal."

Brown also said that in his opinion, "virtualization will be a powerful vehicle for delivery of many desktop computing features; we're looking forward to working with our major customers to maximize the value to them."

More information about the acquisition of Kidaro and its role in Microsoft's virtualization strategy is available at the Windows Virtualization team blog.

Posted by David Marshall on March 14, 2008 06:36 PM

March 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Iron builds on management team by hiring Tony Asaro

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure software, is continuing to build out its management team with effective and key players. Back in November 2007, we talked about the company changing their focus to maximize their market opportunities. To that end, Virtual Iron brought in Ed Walsh, a former EMC executive, to lead the company as its new CEO. At the same time, they also brought in another former EMC executive, John McCarthy, as its senior vice president of sales.

Now, Virtual Iron announced that it was able to hire former Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro. Asaro will act as the chief strategy officer to help with the company's focus on business strategy, ecosystem development, evangelism and education of Virtual Iron to the market. He will also complement the company's worldwide go-to-market efforts.

"Tony Asaro is a great addition to the Virtual Iron team as we continue to expand our presence in the fast-growing server virtualization market," said Ed Walsh, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. "We will leverage Tony's deep experience and abilities to sharpen our business, marketing and product strategies and continue to increase our visibility across our user, partner and channel communities."

Posted by David Marshall on March 13, 2008 06:02 AM

March 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware administrators find value in Microsoft PowerShell

While not as popular a term as virtualization, PowerShell is starting to find its own place in this virtual world.

For those not familiar with the technology, PowerShell was created by Microsoft as an extensible command line interface shell and associated scripting language. It is an operating environment for commands, such as cmdlets, functions, scripts and executables. While perhaps unknown to some, it has actually been around for a while in one form or another. Back in 2003, Microsoft started developing the new shell environment and called it Monad. Now, renamed PowerShell, this technology is popping up in numerous places and is built into Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as an optional feature. And it's being adopted by administrators and developers alike.

Microsoft has put a lot of faith and effort into PowerShell. Case in point, the technology is one of the cornerstone features of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Their entire GUI layer is built on top of PowerShell.

And now, it seems VMware and VMware administrators are starting to turn the corner as well with their support for this technology. VMware has added a dedicated section to it on the company's blog list, the VI PowerShell Blog. And recently, VMware showcased the technology at their latest event, VMworld Europe 2008. And according to one of its recent blog posts, there seemed to be a lot of excitement for PowerShell at the show - the PowerShell lab at VMworld Europe was attended by over 250 students who seemed to give the lab experience a lot of their time.

I in fact also attended the lab during the show and found it quite interesting and compelling. For me, this was the first time I had actually used the PowerShell cmdlets to operate and manage a VMware environment. I spoke with VMware's Product Manager of API & SDK, Carter Shanklin at length. Like the people being exposed to PowerShell for the first time, Shanklin seemed very energetic about the possibilities that this scripting feature brings to VMware environments.

The VI Toolkit for Windows will Beta sometime this month. In the mean time, if you weren't able to attend this lab at VMworld Europe, you are in luck. VMware has made the lab manual available for download, here. While not quite the same experience as hammering away at it during the trade show event, still, the manual has a lot of great examples to walk through to get you on the right path of thinking about PowerShell uses in your VMware environment.

Posted by David Marshall on March 12, 2008 05:02 AM

March 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Is VMware Infrastructure plug-in mania happening?

Since James Brown rightfully took the title of "the hardest working man in show business", I suppose that it is only right that we start calling Andrew Kutz the hardest working man in VMware Infrastructure Plug-ins.

Last month, I told you how Andrew reverse engineered plug-in capabilities for VI3 VirtualCenter. And to kick things off, he not only created what many called an extremely useful or much needed GUI plug-in tool for VMware's Storage VMotion, but he also started to document the process so that other interested developers could begin to create their own useful plug-ins as well.

Andrew and his company, lostcreations, clearly state that these documented procedures and the plug-ins being created are in no way endorsed or supported by VMware. They are provided "as-is".

While at VMworld Europe, I heard the name Andrew Kutz and lostcreations mentioned in at least two break-out sessions and one hands-on lab. VMware is well aware of what Andrew has started, and in fact, I was told by at least one VMware employee that VMware is going to be releasing their own documentation and procedures on how to create your own "supported" plug-ins. Until that time however, lostcreations is moving full steam ahead.

Kutz has launched a new Web site for this very purpose, aptly called viplugins. Here, lostcreations intends to provide developers with a location to store and distribute other VI plug-ins that are being developed.

Already, there is quite an impressive list of plug-ins being made available.

One of the latest entries and perhaps most interesting additions to the list is Invoke. Andrew describes it like so:

"Invoke allows third-party applications, such as Perl scripts, Java applications, or other .NET programs, to be launched directly from within the VI 2.5 client using the currently authenticated session cookie. Aside from our original SVMotion plugin, Invoke is the most important piece of software designed to extend the VI client to arrive on the scene to date. Invoke is by its existence proof that a simple idea can be incredibly powerful in implementation. Download the Invoke plugin and see what kind of mash ups you can create!"

"Invoke will allow IBM or VizionCore, or anyone, to launch applications directly from the VI client using an existing session. This preserves experience continuity for users by enabling single-sign-on. It also allows non C# languages to act like plugins. You could launch a modal Java window (swing, awt, it doesn't matter) and it would act like a plugin, using the authentication token from the VI session."

See? What did I tell you? Extremely interesting.

But in addition to these newly added plug-ins, the VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Plugin and Extension Programming Guide from lostcreations has also been updated, with the latest version (1.3) being released today. You can download the guide, here. And remember, once you read through the documentation, feel free to share your creations on this site.

Posted by David Marshall on March 11, 2008 07:27 PM

March 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware stock prices slide below opening day of trading

VMware is known as the virtualization market leader with control of anywhere between 50 and 80 percent of the market. So much so, that the company has become synonymous with x86 server virtualization. It is almost to the point where the word VMware (virtualization) has become another Kleenex (tissue) or Xerox (photo copy) in discussions. To continue to grow and demand even more market share, it seemed like the logical choice was to take the company public.

And so, EMC did just that. VMware announced that it had raised $957 million with 33 million shares of stock sold with its initial public offering (IPO) of $29 a share. And this fast growing virtualization company was quickly being called the next Google of technology stocks.

And by the close of the first day of trading on August 14 2007, the stock price had jumped to a closing price of $51 a share.

After that, the price of the stock continued to skyrocket, and the technology darling reached as high as $124.38 a share on October 31, 2007.

But now, the company's stock has fallen. And as of the close on Monday, March 10 2008, the stock was priced at $47.51 a share, dropping below the price at which it started some seven months earlier.

So why was there a sharp decline in the stock price? Good question.

The company took a hit back in January 2008 when it announced its Q4 2007 earnings reports. The stock declined by more than 30% with a steep drop from $83 a share down to $54.87. And it never seemed to recover. While VMware's earnings were impressive, they fell short of analyst expectations.

The company is always under constant fire. As the leader of the market space, you always have a target painted on your back. And VMware is no exception. Big names like Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle, Sun, Novell and Red Hat are all gunning for a piece of the action. And then others like Virtual Iron Software and Parallels are also coming up fast looking for their slice of the market.

So competition is heating up. And people are saying that the hypervisor is becoming commodity. I'm sure VMware doesn't like hearing that, but you can tell from the acquisitions that the company has made and its new product announcements that VMware is well aware of the fact that there is more to this game than just the ESX Server hypervisor. With Citrix and Virtual Iron significantly cutting the cost of their solution compared to VMware VI3, and Microsoft on the verge of releasing their $28 stand-alone version of Hyper-V, pricing will be an issue.

So while VMware continues to play down the threat of cost and competition, it seems as though analysts and investors are going to keep open a watchful eye on what happens next.

Posted by David Marshall on March 11, 2008 05:29 AM

March 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware users unhappy with management? And is Cisco using KVM?

Are VMware users unhappy with their current management tools? Yes, according to a recent survey from Netuitive. The company recently surveyed a number of VMware users, and the responses were extremely interesting. And what's going on with Cisco? They've invested big dollars into VMware, but is it true that they are using KVM virtualization in their routers? listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on March 10, 2008 06:00 PM

March 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VKernel virtual appliance identifies virtualization bottlenecks

VKernel is well known for their use of the virtual appliance. And the company is continuing down that virtual path with its latest offering - the VKernel Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance.

The virtual appliance is said to identify current and future capacity bottlenecks to help ensure the performance of the VMware ESX Server environment. It does so by continuously monitoring CPU, memory and storage utilization trends in the environment - three of the leading virtualization bottleneck areas and the three areas that have big influence over the performance of the entire environment.

Do you want to increase your virtual environment's performance? Who doesn't? Start by checking these bottlenecks. If your CPU is being over utilized because of your server consolidation plan, then you've just swung to the opposite side of the fence from the "my server is being underutilized at 5%" way of thinking. If you aren't paying attention to the RAM consumption on your host, your system could start swapping to disk. And we all know that disk is way slower than RAM. This leads us to disk I/O bottlenecks. The more virtual machines you are able to pack onto your host server, the more contention across the disk I/O subsystem. If everything is waiting on disk I/O responses and data returns, it doesn't matter how fast the other components are in the system.

According to the company, organizations can increase performance and significantly reduce downtime problems that lead to escalating business and IT costs and negative perceptions of virtualization within business units by properly managing capacity bottlenecks. In minutes, the VKernel capacity bottleneck analyzer can be deployed to show where capacity bottlenecks are today and where problems are predicted to occur in the future.

"At the velocity organizations are virtualizing their server environments, IT groups must proactively monitor and eliminate their capacity bottlenecks or they risk facing serious downtime and performance issues," said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. "With our Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance, we are empowering IT staff with a very simple and easy-to-learn UI from which they can instantly identify their most critical bottleneck problems and take proactive measures against predicted future bottlenecks."

The virtual appliance is currently available as a Beta trial download, but the full production version is expected to be available by March 31, 2008.

Posted by David Marshall on March 9, 2008 08:50 PM

March 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Parallels Server Beta 2 is now open to the public

Parallels announced today that it was going to open up its Beta 2 program for its Parallels Server product to the general public. Parallels Server is the first server virtualization platform to come out of Parallels, now famous for their desktop virtualization software on the Mac. The company announced the first round of beta testing only 2 months ago. And I knew back then that it wouldn't be long until the beta reached the general public.

"We are extending beta testing to everyone based on the positive results from our closed beta," said Corey Thomas, Vice President of Consumer and Business Marketing, Parallels. "Feedback has been that it is easy to install and use, reliable and fast. We've incorporated feature requests and fixes into this latest version and feel confident that it's ready for a broader set of beta users to experience."

Ben Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications at Parallels, was demonstrating the product while at VMworld Europe 2008. And it looks like the company has come a long way with it. The product performed very well on the Mac server that Rudolph was using. And with the Beta 2 release, the company has added a number of impressive features. Key among them:

A Full Bare-metal Hypervisor that allows users to run multiple virtual machines directly on the host physical machine's hardware. The company has been promising a bare-metal platform for some time now, and they are finally about to deliver on that promise.
An Integrated Toolset that enhances and simplifies the user experience. The toolset includes: Parallels Tools, a set of helpful add-ons that make working with virtual servers easier and more productive: Parallels Transporter, a built-in, wizard driven migration tool that can move the entire contents of a real machine to a virtual machine: and an integrated, single-click backup utility. Tools like this will be important to help further adoption of the platform.
Virtual Support for 4-way Symmetric Multi-processing (SMP), which lets users assign up to 4 virtual cores to a virtual machine for exceptional performance under heavy workloads. Long ago seems the day when we only had support for a single virtual processor in a virtual machine.
Experimental Support for Intel VT-d, enabling users to leverage full hardware-acceleration technologies for faster, more stable virtual machines and better resource management. Using VT-d, users can also directly assign hardware resources such as graphics and network cards to virtual machines, giving them native access to that hardware for optimal service levels.

Parallels Server supports an impressive list of 50 different x86 and x64 guest operating systems, including Windows Server 2008. Many people are interested in virtualizing Mac OS X. Right now, because of license limitations, Leopard Server is the only version currently supported. Although Rudolph said that the feature is currently disabled in this Beta build. Hopefully, support for this operating system will get added back in soon.

A full list of features and specifications are available on Parallels' Web site, and you can now download the Beta 2 build of this server virtualization platform as well. Go here to find out more details and to download the product.

Posted by David Marshall on March 5, 2008 05:07 PM

March 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware security: another look at VMsafe

With VMworld Europe 2008 behind us, looking back, one of the more interesting announcements from the show was around virtualization security and VMware's VMsafe. VMsafe is the company's new security architecture that includes an API for security vendors to gain much needed access to the hypervisor layer.

According to VMware, the APIs will allow its partners to develop security solutions for virtualized applications in ways previously not possible with physical environments.

As virtualization continues to gain in popularity, so too will it grow to become more of a target to malicious code writers. VMware's thin hypervisor code has thus far proven to be secure, but in order to keep security concerns to a minimum, VMware's introduction of VMsafe is raising the bar on its security.

At VMworld Europe, VMware announced approximately 20 partners that have already signed up to make use of VMsafe. Companies signed up include MacAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, IBM, RSA, F5 and Fortinet. Using this new technology, these companies will be able to achieve an even deeper level of security to protect the virtual environment from attacks.

I think VMware is definitely on the right track here with VMsafe. Security concerns have been raised for years when discussing server virtualization - so perhaps this new offering will help to eliminate some of the uncertainty. Obviously, it won't eliminate it any time soon since the technology isn't yet publically available, and there are still many questions to be answered.

I'm also hopeful that VMware takes VMsafe on a similar journey as OVF - leveraging an industry standards body such as the DMTF. In that way, like OVF, third-party security vendors would be able to create cross virtualization platform security products that could be used to defend all hypervisors and virtual machines no matter which platform you are running in your environment.

Posted by David Marshall on March 4, 2008 07:22 PM

March 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Citrix XenDesktop reaches open beta

Citrix XenDesktop, announced in October of 2007, is the company's VDI solution or their virtual desktop delivery system. XenDesktop integrates several distributed components such as Desktop Delivery Controller, Provisioning Server and XenServer.

The product has now reached open beta, and with it, Citrix has revealed a number of features across key components of the product:

Desktop Delivery Controller - Connects office workers to their personalized desktops with the best performance, ease of use and rich desktop experience.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Enterprise-class virtualization infrastructure that creates the foundation for delivering virtual desktops and offers advanced management features.
Virtual Desktop Provisioning - Stream a single desktop image to create many virtual desktops in the data center on demand, enabling simplified management and lower network storage costs.
XenDesktop Setup Tool - A simple wizard to enable IT to quickly create and deliver hundreds of virtual desktop.

Posted by David Marshall on March 4, 2008 06:45 PM

March 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMworld Europe 2008 keynote recap

VMworld Europe 2008 took place in Cannes, France; and much like VMworld in the states, just before, during and after the event, it seems like virtualization news was coming from every direction. The European version of VMworld was much like the US version in that both CEO Diane Greene and Dr. Mendel Rosenblum both teamed up in order to present the keynote sessions on Day 1 and Day 2 respectively. In addition to the information from partners brought out on stage, the VMware co-founders were able to announce a number of new VMware technologies between them.

VMware has made available both of the keynote sessions via webcast for those of you who couldn't attend the show. You can register and watch them here, http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/static/europe-webcast.html. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on March 4, 2008 04:50 AM

March 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Application virtualization: a conversation with Symantec/Altiris

Application virtualization is one of those technologies that has been around for a little while now, but it just doesn't seem to get the same attention as its older sibling -- server virtualization.

There are a number of application virtualization products on the market, and yet, it took the acquisition of one of them -- Thinstall -- by VMware to really make people take notice of the technology. What is it about this application virtualization technology that made VMware reach into its IPO pockets to pull out money in order to acquire someone like Thinstall?

To find out more about the technology, the market, and what life is like after a virtualization giant like VMware enters your domain, I spoke with someone who is very familiar with all three scenarios -- Scott Jones, product manager at Symantec.

Q: With VMware's acquisition in the application virtualization market, people who haven't heard of this technology are finally taking notice. Can you give us a little background on Symantec/Altiris SVS? What is it and what does it offer?

A: Virtualization for the sake of virtualization introduces additional complexity and does not provide true value to the business. Symantec is focused on helping business better secure and manage the endpoint. The introduction of Altiris Software Virtualization Solution two years ago introduced a fundamental shift in how IT manages and users consume software.

Our customers are now doing things they never thought were possible by virtualizing applications using SVS. But it is important to keep in mind that the wow factor is secondary to being able to help customers resolve application conflicts, streamline software break / fix, and deliver software on demand all while maintaining the typical end user application experience.

Q: How do you guys define application virtualization?

A: We've just tweaked the Wikipedia definition of virtualization to fit application-level virtualization. It is, "The process of presenting a logical grouping of application resources so that they can be accessed in ways that give benefits over the original configuration."

Q: What impact do you see application virtualization having on the market?

A: Application virtualization is the future of software management and consumption. The old model was and is fundamentally broken. We feel that the majority of software applications should be virtualized and have made significant inroads with the power user and IT communities. The next frontier is to get ISVs to start packaging and selling their software as virtualized.

Whether it is the home power user, the IT admin, application packager, or the software vendor, the benefit is similar. SVS offers a significantly improved software experience that reduces support costs, eliminates many of the headaches inherent to software, and maintains a pristine computing environment.

Q: How easy is it to use SVS and package an application? Is there a huge learning curve involved?

A: To put SVS usability into perspective, we offer it free for personal use and t