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May 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft releases an integrated virtualization ROI tool

One of the hurdles keeping organizations from fully embracing virtualization is cost justification. To combat that, virtualization providers have been developing and offering their own ROI and TCO calculators, and many of them are quite good. It was just over a year ago that VMware launched its own TCO/ROI Calculator. To do it right, VMware's calculator was independently developed by a leading ROI and TCO consultancy - Alinean, Inc.

Microsoft has taken a page out of VMware's book. Like VMware, Microsoft has created its own ROI Tool, and it too was developed independently by Alinean and ex-Gartner TCO/ROI experts.

Microsoft's tool helps partners and customers examine current production server, development/QA lab, desktop and application virtualization opportunities, quantifying the potential savings, service-level and agility benefits, investment and ROI for implementing Microsoft Integrated Virtualization solutions. It even has an option to compare between Microsoft technology and that of its competition.

At first glance, the tool seems very impressive and thorough with the amount of data it collects. The calculator collects specific information about current infrastructure costs and opportunities for improvement, then uses research by Alinean to project potential costs and benefits for various optimization strategies using the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization solutions. All research was collected from the Alinean ValueBase of IT spending metrics, and Microsoft product and pricing experts to reflect typical costs and savings for similar company type and size.

You can try the calculator out yourself, but you will need to sign up for an account first. Once you've created an account and filled in the necessary information being asked in the calculator, you will be able to save your analysis, view the results, refine the analysis and run reports. And yes, it is free.

Posted by David Marshall on May 11, 2008 03:12 PM

May 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware announces a new virtualization certification

Even as competition continues to heat up in the server virtualization world, virtualization market leader VMware continues to dominate in yet another area of the technology - certifications.

Love 'em or leave 'em, those pieces of paper in the IT world can sometimes help an organization track down and identify key employee candidates to fill much needed positions. And right now, it can be frustrating and difficult for an organization to find "virtualization experts", so finding potential candidates with a certification certainly helps.

And VMware is further adding to their growing list of certifications. Recently, the company announced a new addition, the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) on VMware Infrastructure 3. This certification is an advanced certification program for VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) partners who are already VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and who want to take their VMware virtualization expertise up a notch.

The new VCDX program is for architects who design VMware enterprise deployments. The program measures technical professionals' abilities to assess their customers' needs and teaches them to design VMware Infrastructure deployments for an enterprise datacenter, as well as implement, test, document and then present the design. As of now, this certification represents the highest level of technical expertise in VMware virtualization.

To become a VMware Certified Design Expert, candidates must complete four core validation components:

Must be certified as a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3.
Pass the VMware Enterprise Administration Exam. Includes live labs and tests a higher level of skill set than the exam for VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3.
Pass the VMware Design Exam. This exam focuses on actual design scenarios and contains simulations and situational questions.
Submit, present and defend a successful VMware Infrastructure design and implementation plan.

The Enterprise Exam is available this month, and you can already view the blueprint for it.

More information is available on VMware's certification Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on May 11, 2008 02:10 PM

May 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Amazon EC2 and Sun OpenSolaris VMs together in Beta

Sun Microsystems announced the initial version of its opensource OpenSolaris operating system, previously only available in a developer preview release.

The OpenSolaris operating system is available as a free download for developers to develop, test, and deploy new Web services and network applications. The new OS includes Sun's 128-bit ZFS file system which scales better and allows developers to protect their work with its instant rollback and continual check-sum capabilities. It also includes Solaris Containers so that developers can build virtualization-aware applications that can be run on a single instance of the Solaris operating system.

At the same time, Sun announced that OpenSolaris would be made available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 gives businesses and developers a cost effective platform to build, test, and deploy their applications.

"Support for OpenSolaris and MySQL on Amazon EC2 expands the reach and convenience for developers who want to quickly deploy their applications on the Web by taking advantage of Amazon Web Services," said Rich Green, executive, vice president of Software, Sun Microsystems. "Sun aims to continue to offer additional options to use and deploy our open source platforms - covering the spectrum from small home-grown installations through to on-site data centers and hosted environments such as Amazon EC2."

Sun is offering two Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in the beta program:

OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 - Sun's first supported offering of OpenSolaris (formerly known as "Project Indiana")
Solaris Express Community Edition - Sun's binary release for OpenSolaris developers based on the latest OpenSolaris source base (code named "Nevada")

A select group of leading software vendors are already offering their solutions via Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2, including GigaSpaces, Rightscale, Thoughtworks and Zmanda. Sun is also making available the GlassFish application server. OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 is available for no additional charge. Customers pay only for Amazon EC2 usage, which starts at $0.10 per CPU-hour.

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta is currently available by invitation only. Request an invitation to join the program. Free technical support for OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta participants is provided by Sun and Amazon EC2 support is provided by Amazon Web Services.

Posted by David Marshall on May 11, 2008 06:13 AM

May 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Leostream's long virtualization journey reaches $3 million Series A funding

It has been reported by Private Equity Hub that Waltham, MA-based virtualization software company Leostream finally completed a $3 million Series A round of funding which was led by Meakem Becker Venture Capital.

What's particularly interesting about this news to me is that I have somewhat of a personal history with Leostream. You see, Leostream is one of the oldest third-party virtualization software companies still around in this space. In the early days, VMware and Connectix were fighting it out as the two key server virtualization platforms on the market. However, neither company did a very successful job at managing their environments - let alone the thought of trying to manage each other's platform.

It was around 2002 when Leostream entered the virtualization market, and it was a small pond to fish in back then. I was working at a company called ProTier, and we were joined by a third company called PlateSpin. All three pioneering companies began fishing in the same virtual pond with their own virtualization management product that could manage both VMware and Connectix environments (Yes folks, we were doing heterogeneous virtualization management before it was cool).

As the pond grew larger and more people started adopting virtualization technology, all three companies started to move away from just simply trying to manage the virtual environment. At ProTier, we were the first to create a new market space which has since been dubbed "virtual lab automation". Our company was acquired by Surgient Networks in April 2003, and it still lives on today as Surgient, Inc., still creating virtual lab automation provisioning software (although I am no longer there). In March of 2008, PlateSpin was acquired by Novell. The company has gone from server management to P2V migrations and now offers a disaster recovery solution.

Leostream on the other hand has survived this long without Venture Capital funding. The company transitioned from virtualization management software to a P2V migration solution (P>V Direct) and finally settled on a VDI Connection Broker as it looked toward the hosted desktop market.

The company's founder, David Crosbie, is still with the company and is currently their CTO. Mike Palin is Leostream's CEO, and it is expected that Palin will discuss the investment details in more depth in the coming weeks.

One thing is certain, Leostream has a lot of work to do. The VDI market is poised to take off, however, they are going to be going up against the virtualization platform vendors themselves (VMware now has its own Connection Broker) as well as a host of new VDI vendors now entering the market. The company has made it this far and this long without any VC funding, so let's see what this virtualization player has up its sleeve after getting $3 million. Stay tuned.

Posted by David Marshall on May 7, 2008 08:16 PM

April 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware Q1 2008 revenues beat street expectations

VMware reported strong first quarter growth today, which seemed to calm many of the "buy and sell" folks over on Wall Street. The stock turned south earlier this year after VMware told investors that they wouldn't be able to double revenue growth every quarter. It seems these investors may have finally come to grips, at least for now. The stock has been bouncing around like a virtual machine with resource problems - thanks to DRS, HA and VMotion.

VMware's stock price rose 15 percent after late trading today, thanks to an impressive report on the company's first quarter. Revenues for Q1 2008 were $438 million, an increase of 69 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007. Net income for the same period also went up, from $41 million in 2007 to $43 million in 2008.

First-quarter U.S. revenues grew 65% compared to the year-ago quarter on increased demand from large enterprises standardizing on the VMware platform and an increase in the number of smaller transactions delivered through VMware channel partners. International revenues increased by 74% and were driven in part by triple-digit business growth in emerging markets.

Software license revenue grew 73% compared to the same period last year to $294 million and service revenue, including support, subscription and professional services, increased 62% to $144 million.

But remember the old saying - "You have to spend money to make money". Well, VMware spending on research and development more than doubled last quarter to $119 million. Sales and marketing spending also shot up, rising 72% to 149 million. With the threat from competitor hypervisor technologies, VMware will no doubt continue to spend money to advance their product through increased R&D, acquisitions and hiring more engineers. As it stands now, the company has more than 5,700 people in its employment. You can assume that number will grow.

VMware continues to expect 2008 revenue growth of approximately 50% compared to 2007. And second quarter 2008 revenues are expected to increase approximately 55% compared to the second quarter of 2007.

"Q1 was another quarter of increased demand for VMware virtualization products and solutions," said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. "Our strategy to continually deliver superb quality and market-expanding solutions well ahead of the competition is working and we’re advantaging our lead with our well developed multi-tier partner distribution model. We are seeing customers progress more rapidly through the virtualization adoption path; many are now moving right into a VMware-based architecture so that they can pool their resources, deliver capacity on demand, and also get an insurance policy for business continuity and disaster recovery."

In a declining economy, virtualization products tend to offer a very high return on investment. So if the economy continues on this path, it could put VMware in a pretty good position.

Posted by David Marshall on April 22, 2008 08:06 PM

April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Free VMware video education series now available

VMware is taking advantage of the popular video services provided by YouTube and Blip.tv by leveraging both Web sites to help educate and provide VMware users with free video training.

Here at the VMware ELearning channel, the company's education services team and affiliated parties have already provided 19 videos on each service that help with VMware Server 1.0. As of right now, it looks like most people are interested in learning about creating a virtual machine clone in VMware Server 1.0 as it is currently the most viewed video in the series.

These education videos range from topics such as Intalling VMware Tools, Using Snapshots, Creating and Modifying a Network, Creating or Deleting a Virtual Machine, Performance Tips and even how to Install the product to name but a few.

Kudos to VMware for doing this and making these videos available for free. In the near future, I hope to see more videos like this but for other VMware products.

To check out what's already available, you can either visit the VMware ELearning channel on YouTube or Blip.tv.

Posted by David Marshall on April 16, 2008 07:33 PM

April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware helps developers with a new Virtual Disk Development Kit

Without any sort of major fuss or media blitz, VMware released a 1.0 version of its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK).

The VMware VDDK is an open API and SDK that enables VMware customers and partners to develop applications that create and access virtual disk storage. And it allows partners to extend their solutions to support virtualized IT environments and offer solutions for the virtualization market place.

The VDDK supports virtual disk formats for VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI3), VMware Server, VMware Workstation and VMware Player products.

It enables a wide range of use-cases for application vendors including:

Creation of virtual machine disk files to store backup of physical images
Read access to virtual disks, enabling off-line centralized anti-virus scanning of virtual machines
Write access to virtual disks, enabling off-line centralized patching of virtual machines
Read access to virtual disks, enabling off-line software package analysis of virtual machines

The VDDK can be used in conjunction with VMware's other development tools, like the VI API or VCB. And it should help those companies creating solutions in the enterprise backup & recovery markets as well as with anti-virus and security and system management.

To obtain the software, jump over to the VMware Developer Center and under the heading SDKs and APIs, click Virtual Disk. In order to download it, you will need to provide your email address and a registered password.

Tools like this are great, as they can only help build up the virtualization ecosystem and hopefully spark new and interesting products from vendors.

Posted by David Marshall on April 16, 2008 05:15 AM

April 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Is IBM or Cisco really interested in buying Citrix?

Has virtualization technology finally come into its own? IT shops around the world are flocking to the technology in the hopes that they aren't too late to the party. And the financial sector has also been taking a much larger interest in the technology and the company's producing it. The rumor mill is spinning as well, with the latest piece of "information" coming out around the notion that IBM and/or Cisco may be interested in acquiring Citrix.

Citrix stock climbed last week with rumors circulating about a possible take over bid. Avian Securities analyst Jeff Gaggin stated in a research note that Citrix has a virtualization management offering that has become a real threat to virtualization rival VMware. But while an acquisition by the likes of IBM or Cisco makes sense, Gaggin doesn't know if there is any truth behind the rumors.

If you remember, Cisco has been marching toward their Data Center 3.0 plan that includes virtualization and automation. This plan included a $150 million investment in VMware, giving the company a 1.6 percent ownership and a possible seat on VMware's board. Moving toward this goal, Cisco also created VFrame Data Center - a hardware and software platform for provisioning resources together as virtual services. A Citrix acquisition would strengthen the company's Data Center 3.0 vision and would also enhance the company's networking line with products like NetScalar and WANScalar.

IBM is also looking to make its mark in the virtualization community - which may sound odd since IBM invented virtualization some 40+ years ago. Big Blue has been contributing code to various virtualization hypervisor technologies over the years, but it may come as no surprise to you that IBM isn't usually mentioned anywhere near the top of the list when people are having conversations about virtualization technologies. Within the application space, IBM continues to support virtualization technology with products like IBM Director and its latest Intrusion Protection System codenamed PHANTOM. And I'm sure the fact that VMware being owned by rival company EMC doesn't sit very well with them either, so perhaps having their own solutions like the one's created by Citrix makes perfect sense where IBM could make the XenServer hypervisor its preferred brand with their server offerings.

With a market cap of $6 billion, Citrix won't be an easy acquisition for most companies to undertake.

Posted by David Marshall on April 13, 2008 02:15 PM

April 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Make a switch. Make a video. And VMware may select you to win a MacBook Air.

Looking back in time, VMware was one of the only real players in the virtualization space for quite a number of years. Over time, they've made a great name for themselves in the virtualization space and built up a sizeable marketshare.

But now that people "believe" in virtualization technology (yes, people used to claim there was some sort of black magic taking place - "this can't be real, can it?"), the party has gotten much bigger and fairly crowded. VMware has witnessed increased competition, and it's only going to get hotter.

So while everyone attacks the virtualization giant, and VMware continues to attack everyone back - why wouldn't they spend time going after Parallels with a gimmick to try and get people to switch over, or at least tell their story about switching over in either a video or blog format.

Dubbed, "My switch to VMware Fusion" video contest, VMware is asking users to create a video about their switch to VMware Fusion. Switch from what? Parallels for Mac or course, but VMware doesn't really seem to go into "from what" that much. The winner of the video contest gets an Apple MacBook Air - tricked out with VMware Fusion installed on it of course. Enter and you automatically get a T-shirt and a bumper sticker. What IT person couldn't use another t-shirt or as I like to call them, office wear.

Haven't switched yet? No problem, VMware is offering a $30 mail-in-rebate incentive to get you to switch from a "competing" product. Oh, and they'll even offer you a tool to help migrate your virtual machines over to the Fusion format.

Parallels and VMware have really been going back and forth with great innovative features on their Mac product lines to try and grab marketshare. So Mac users are the obvious winners here as both products continue to expand their feature list at a fairly quick rate.

Want more information on the who, what, where and why? Check out this VMware Web page for more information.

Parallels has their own contest running, again with a view from the end user. If you have a great story to tell about your Parallels environment, post it and if selected, you could win a $25 VISA gift card.

And me without a Mac.

Posted by David Marshall on April 8, 2008 11:24 PM

April 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware predicts the death of the OS. Well, sort of.

If you've gone to one of the recent VMworld events, you might have heard once or twice that VMware predicted the death of the operating system. I've heard something to that effect, and found it quite interesting. Predicting the death of something so ingrained into my every day IT life for so many years really makes me take notice and ask more questions. I'm a virtualization freak, everyone knows that. But come on, the death of the OS? That's huge! I need to know more.

InformationWeek ran with a story last August, "VMware Predicts Death To Operating Systems". The article reads:

In the view of Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware, today's modern operating system is destined for the dustbin, a scenario unlikely to please Microsoft or any of the Linux vendors. Rosenblum's keynote on Thursday wrapped up the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, preaching the virtues of virtualization, which he believes will eventually make today's complex, some would say bloated, operating systems obsolete. "It's just going to go away," Rosenblum said.

eWeek was also fortunate to have time with Mendel Rosenblum and wrote up an interesting Q&A piece only a few days ago called "The Hypervisor's the Thing for VMware's Rosenblum". Again, the question was raised about the death of the OS. "Will the hypervisor eventually replace the operating system?" The article reads:

Clearly, the answer is no-the hypervisor is not going to get rid of the operating system.
The hypervisor that we are exporting is still a pretty low-level abstraction. Most programmers would much rather have a hierarchical file system that they can deal with instead of a raw disk, or the sort of raw memory of a machine versus the kind of nice virtual memory that we get on a modern operating system. Clearly, you want to have some kind of operating environment that makes that level of interface nice for the application that is going to be programmed for it and do the useful work.

I think the error of the one operating system that will be used for everything-[where] you buy a machine pre-installed with an operating system, and that operating system has to be as general and supportive of anything you might to do with it-is going to go away. Now, the operating system will be chosen by the applications.

Since I was no closer to figuring out whether or not my OS was going to be killed off from underneath me, I dug deeper. And since I use a Microsoft operating system, I figured I should ask someone at Microsoft if I should be worried.

I had the opportunity to speak with Zane Adam, Senior Director of Virtualization at Microsoft. Adam told me that the company hasn't seen a drop in operating system sales and that they don't anticipate that this will happen either. Ok, others are still buying the OS, so what else?

Adam said, "Microsoft has always viewed the hypervisor as a feature of the operating system and believe it will eventually become the default setting in the OS. The idea of the hypervisor as a separate, expensive offering is a barrier to customer adoption."

He continued, "Our goal is to make Hyper-V broadly available, easy to adopt and cost-effective while delivering powerful systems management capabilities for customers' physical and virtualized IT environments with the Microsoft System Center products. This combination of Hyper-V as a feature of Windows Server 2008 and the management tools that enable the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments through a single console, will help customers realize the full potential of virtualization."

So then I checked in with an independent thinker and found a whitepaper and blog discussion by Dan Kusnetsky from the Kusnetsky Group titled, "Top 10 Virtualization Myths". The number one virtualization myth in the paper - "OS is Dead?"

Kusnetsky writes:

Some of the statements made at VMware's VMworld event convinced some people that operating systems are becoming an endangered species and that shortly they'll be replaced by virtual machine software. This is a very unlikely scenario and let me address the reasons why this is so:
Hypervisors are small operating systems or components of general purpose operating systems, such as Windows, Unix or Linux. Replacing one with another doesn't mean that operating systems have gone away only that functions have been "re-hosted" to run on the hypervisor directly.
Most applications have been written to use the facilities of an operating system and related system software. Until hypervisors offer all of those features, applications would have to be rewritten to internalize those functions. Who's going to save money doing that?
Hardware suppliers offer support based upon a well-tested list of hardware and software options. It is not at all clear that these suppliers would support an application stack running directly on a hypervisor. This is something the organization would have to discover on a case-by-case basis.
What seems far more likely to me is that virtual machine software, and all of the other layers of virtualization technology that the Kusnetzky Group has examined will take its place in the toolkit of a developer.
When appropriate, such as when the organization wants to consolidate
applications from underutilized older machines onto a smaller number of newer machines, virtual machine software or a related technology, operating system virtualization/partitioning software, will be deployed.

Other virtualization technology will be deployed if high performance, scalability, agility or a unified management environment is needed. In these cases, virtual machine software either isn't the right tool or needs help from another tool. Let's not be overwhelmed by a single suppliers marketing hype and be driven to make short term decisions that have negative long term effects.

I've got my virtualization and I've got my operating system. Does that mean I have some sort of insurance policy? What do you think? Is the operating system doomed to die? Or is this marketing hype?

Posted by David Marshall on April 4, 2008 09:26 PM

April 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

What happened to the server in VMware ESX Server?

Without any press announcement or ticker-tape parade, VMware decided to quietly remove the "server" from the VMware ESX Server product line.

In case you missed it, VMware's hypervisor product is no longer called VMware ESX Server. At the same time, VMware ESX Server 3i, the company's thin, hardware integrated hypervisor product, also changed its name. (And I just got used to saying VMware ESX Server 3i).

The hypervisor technology found in VMware's VI3 product is now simply called "VMware ESX". And the embedded hypervisor technology formerly known as VMware ESX Server 3i is now known as "VMware ESXi".

VMware's John Troyer turned the name change into a quick game to find out which of VMware's VMTN blog readers would find the information out first. It didn't take long for astute readers to find it, and at the same time, they noticed that VMware dropped the tagline of "an EMC company" from the corporate logo.

It doesn't look as though the company has quite finished changing everything over yet, but the Web site is being updated with the shortened version of the product name. The VMTN challenge concluded but without any official explanation as to why the product name was changed in the first place.

Interestingly, after looking around the Internet, it seems as though the original meaning for the "ESX" product comes from "Elastic Sky X", while the old GSX Server product (now called VMware Server) comes from "Ground Storm X". I'm sure there is an interesting story there as well.

Posted by David Marshall on April 4, 2008 04:49 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 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 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 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)

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 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 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)

PlateSpin acquired by Novell for $205M cash

While attending VMworld Europe in Cannes, France, I was surprised to hear the announcement from Novell that it was going to acquire PlateSpin for $205 million in cash.

What I wasn't surprised about was PlateSpin finally being acquired. And I wasn't even surprised at the amount. I've heard rumors for a while now that PlateSpin was being looked at by a few companies but that the 'offers' weren't high enough. What did surprise me at first was that Novell was the company that finally coughed up the right amount of cash to acquire PlateSpin. And after talking with people on the VMworld showroom floor, I wasn't the only one who was initially surprise to hear the news.

After thinking more about it and after talking with PlateSpin employees and other convention goers at VMworld Europe, things started to take shape and make a little more sense to me. Novell's interest in virtualization and the virtual infrastructure is nothing new. They've been on this course for a while now with their early involvement with Xen. Another interesting acceleration down this path was when Novell announced its collaboration agreements with Microsoft in November 2006. Also taking place that same month, Novell announced its ZENworks solutions to take control from the desktop to the data center.

Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell, said, "The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy. With the addition of the PlateSpin product portfolio, Novell will be uniquely positioned to deliver the next generation infrastructure software that is at the core of the data center. Together, we will have the most comprehensive workload management solution that allows customers to monitor and analyze what to virtualize, provide the tools to seamlessly virtualize and unvirtualize workloads, automate the management of workloads, and provide the leading open source platform from which to run virtualized work."

Virtualization isn't new technology to Novell. The company already packages the Xen hypervisor as part of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 operating system and it also offers its own virtualization management capabilities in its ZENworks software. But on a conference call, the company said they were still missing a few key pieces.

PlateSpin offers Novell three main solutions to fill that void: PlateSpin PowerConvert, the company's long time anywhere-to-anywhere workload conversion tool which offers physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-virtual (V2V), virtual-to-physical (V2P) and physical-to-physical (P2P) portability. PlateSpin PowerRecon, an advanced analysis and planning tool that provides such functionality as capacity planning and profiling, chargeback allocation and reporting for workload visualization. And PlateSpin Forge, the company's latest product, which offers an appliance to help protect an environment with an out of the box disaster recovery solution.

It sounds as though Novell will continue to use the PlateSpin name, at least for the short term, and they also plan to keep the PlateSpin products closed. However, it is always possible that at some point down the road, Novell could open source the PlateSpin solutions - nothing has been ruled out.

The acquisition deal is expected to close during Novell's second fiscal quarter 2008. PlateSpin's CEO Stephen Pollack and the rest of the PlateSpin employees are expected to remain with Novell as they get integrated into Novell's Systems and Resource Management business unit.

The PlateSpin acquisition will give Novell a new stream of revenue and will help to further propel the company as a virtualization player in this expanding market.

Posted by David Marshall on March 2, 2008 04:08 AM

February 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization continues to flow through the channels

The server virtualization market is continuing to grow year over year, where IDC currently targets the annual growth rate at around 60%. The key is to continue to get consumers onboard with the technology through education, increasing ease of use, relaxing pricing, and by continuing to open up new channels of delivery to get the product into the hands of the people.

Virtual Iron is trying to address the pricing and complexity gap with their enterprise virtualization solution, and they also just announced the expansion of their European distribution partnership with Avnet Technology Solutions. Already in Belgium, Germany and Italy, this agreement futher pushes Virtual Iron's product into Europe by expanding into Australia, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Ukraine.

"The market for virtualization is expanding rapidly across Europe and our channel partners are looking for solutions that create new opportunities and enable their value-added services," said Sukh Rayat, vice president for EMEA sales at Avnet Technology Solutions. "Virtual Iron has differentiated itself from other solutions with very comprehensive capabilities in the industry's easiest-to-use package. The product is well-suited to address a wide variety of data center initiatives and opens up a whole new market segment for our channel partners."

Virtualization giant VMware is also expanding its efforts. The company just announced a new channel distribution agreement with the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) Division of Tech Data Corporation. AIS has been supporting value-added resellers that are implementing virtualization solutions to enhance IT operations for end users from the small sized business to the very large enterprise.

Tech Data has trained more than 200 inside and field sales representatives, product managers and systems engineers, who are either certified VMware Sales Professionals (VSPs) or VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs). The company plans to more than double the number of VSPs and VCPs as it trains additional resources in the coming months.

"Virtualization is doing much more than transforming data centers through server consolidation," said Senior Vice President and General Manager, Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Pete Peterson. "The applications for virtualization extend way beyond the data center, providing VARs and their end-user customers with significant opportunities to implement more efficient and cost-effective IT strategies. From secure application access through thin client and blade PC solutions to enhanced data protection and business continuity, VARs and their CIO customers need to understand the far-reaching benefits of implementing virtualization solutions like those from VMware."

Posted by David Marshall on February 20, 2008 05:13 AM

February 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Amazon's S3 data storage service hit with outage

In 2006, Amazon.com launched several pay-as-you-go services that were aimed at the developer community: Simple Storage Service (S3) which offers unlimited Internet storage, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which lets developers create and manage virtual machine instances, and Simple Queue Service for message delivery.

For the most part, these services have been fairly robust and worked as advertised. And the services have remained fairly inexpensive since they don't offer a '5-nines' guarantee SLA behind it.

However, Amazon Web Services were dealt a substantial blow yesterday when it was struck with a temporary outage that reportedly took thousands of Web sites down - each of which relied on the company's hosted storage solution. Reports of Amazon's S3 services being unavailable appeared around 4:30 AM PST and then the service was later restored within a three hour window.

A message thread quickly popped up on the Amazon Web Services Forum titled 'Massive (500) Internal Server Error.outage started 35 minutes ago' where consumers of the service demanded answers to their questions.

Comments were being made such as: "and this is why you have to setup a fail-safe", "the s3 service is great but this just proves you can't rely on it", "My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong. I'll have to reconsider using the service now.", "Errors happen, but there MUST be a fail-safe way of reporting them."

All of the comments weren't negative. Some said, "While I'm surprised this kind of error is possible, a big thanks to Amazon for getting onto this so quickly" and "its at least good that amazon fixed the issue within 2 hours thats fast if you compare other companys that might fix it in a day or two".

The Amazon Web Services Team commented throughout, but finally responded with the following update of information:

Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations. While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests. Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.
Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls. The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place. In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles. This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST. By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.

As we said earlier today, though we're proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements. We are taking immediate action on the following: (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls. Additionally, we've begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.

If Cloud Computing is going to take off and become widely adopted, the service needs to reach 5-nines (99.999%) of reliability and uptime - even if that means the price has to go up. At the very least, the option has to be made available to users. Until that can happen, it sounds like most users would at least be happy with a dashboard of information and a notification system from Amazon that would alert end users if something goes wrong. Without notification from Amazon, many consumers spent time and money trying to troubleshoot the problem on their end, until they finally realized the problem was on Amazon's side of the fence.

Posted by David Marshall on February 16, 2008 12:54 PM

February 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Parallels Virtuozzo Containers offers 350 templates

Parallels will announce the availability of a Template Catalog for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers tomorrow. The company says it will offer a library of more than 350 software downloads that can be used to easily create and manage operating systems and applications running in virtual environments.

This seems like another great way for Parallels marketing to get the word out about their container solution. With so much confusion generated around the term virtualization these days, it becomes difficult for companies to market their virtualization products unless they are specifically going head to head with something like VMware ESX Server - the virtualization product that most people think about or hear about when the term virtualization is thrown out there. People are becoming more and more familiar with the term "hypervisor", but the understanding of "containers" doesn't appear as wide spread.

When looking at it, the Parallels Virtuozzo Templates remind me somewhat of VMware's Virtual Appliance Marketplace. And perhaps, much as the marketplace has been a great marketing tool for VMware and an added bonus for VMware users, so too can the Template areas do the same for Parallels and its users.

Describing it, Parallels says that when using templates, only a single instance of a software package is required and managed on a physical machine, regardless of the number of containers using the software. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers templates are very small according to the company and can be deployed rather quickly - within seconds they said.

The company lists the following advantages of this approach:

Templates reduce the duplication of software used multiple times on a virtualized server, making it possible to manage a single instance of software on a server.
Templates can be deployed and updated online without any downtime or restarting the physical server.
Because multiple containers can share real memory, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers enables 3-10 times greater density for typical workloads, as compared with other virtualization technologies.
Patches and updates can be applied to a single template, and then the changes can be automatically propagated across all similar templates that reflect the update, dramatically cutting maintenance time.

The Templates Catalog includes a number of Linux distributions, such as CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Ubuntu, as well as applications like MySQL, Spam Assassin, Wordpress and more.

"Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is the only virtualization technology that uses this innovative templates approach, which enables software to be deployed in seconds and managed once thus greatly reducing the administrative management tasks and associated time," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "Our partner community is working with us to provide and extend the list of available templates."

Parallels is actively pursuing partnerships with companies and OS vendors that are interested in making their software available as a Parallels Virtuozzo Containers Template, which is located, here.

Posted by David Marshall on February 13, 2008 08:25 PM

February 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Canonical to resell Parallels virtualization software

Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced the availability of Parallels Workstation for Linux through the Ubuntu Partner Repository - giving Ubuntu users the ability to quickly find, install and run Parallels software.

The deal gives Parallels direct access to users of the most widely used Linux desktop distributions.

"Partnering with Canonical is a great way for Parallels to bring user friendly desktop virtualization to the ever-expanding global community of Ubuntu users," said Bryan Goode, director of business development, Parallels. "Parallels Software provides Ubuntu users with added flexibility to any program from almost any operating system, without having to give up their Ubuntu desktop, even for a few minutes."

The company is making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the operating system's built-in software update tool interface and using a feature called the Ubuntu Partner Repository. The repository supplements the thousands of free and open source applications available through other Ubuntu repositories, and contains both proprietary and open source applications provided by Ubuntu Partners.

The Parallels Workstation virtualization software allows users to run both Windows and Linux operating systems simultaneously on a single system.

"We have always been committed to providing Ubuntu users with choice," said Randy Linnell, consumer services manager, Canonical. "Parallels is excellent virtualization technology which many users have requested. Being able to come to a commercial arrangement to make it available is great for Ubuntu users and the project itself. We look forward to users supporting it."

The version of the Parallels virtualization software available through the Ubuntu Partner Repository is a trial version. However, users can purchase permanent keys for the software through the online Canonical store, shop.canonical.com or direct at the Parallels Web site, www.parallels.com.

Posted by David Marshall on February 10, 2008 05:21 PM

February 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VKernel gets $4.6 million in Series A investment

Virtualization giant VMware may have watched its stock price drop, but that hasn't stopped venture capitalist firms from investing money in VMware's partners.

VKernel, a creator of virtual appliances that manage virtual server environments, announced that it had raised $4.6 million in its first round of institutional funding. The Series A round was led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.

"The server virtualization market is growing explosively," said Mitchell Kertzman, managing director at Hummer Winblad. "This has us very excited about VKernel's vision as it is providing the essential tools for IT staffs to virtualize their environments faster, more cost-effectively, and with greater confidence."

Founded in January 2007, VKernel is creating a suite of virtual appliances that address systems management challenges within virtual server environments. The company's current chargeback appliance enables IT groups to immediately solve today's critical pain points by providing cost visibility into the resource consumption of each virtual machine, resource pool, host, or cluster.

"Organizations of all sizes are virtualizing their server farms, which is creating a new set of systems management challenges," said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. "To be successful, IT groups need tools that address their most pressing issues. Unlike traditional systems management products that are difficult to install, learn, and use, VKernel is delivering tiny virtual appliances designed to solve specific issues."

VKernel's Chargeback Virtual Appliance is available for download on the company's Website.

Posted by David Marshall on February 10, 2008 05:00 PM

February 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Ardence Technology now integrated within Citrix

Back in December of 2006, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced that it would acquire privately held Ardence for their operating system streaming technology in order to further the Citrix strategic end-to-end application delivery infrastructure. Since the acquisition, Citrix has been working toward integrating the technology into its own product line. And the integration is now complete with Citrix Provisioning Server 4.5.

Citrix Provisioning Server for Desktops uses a streaming technology to delivery a single, standard desktop image, operating system and software stack on-demand to physical desktops.

By delivering server workloads on-demand rather than deploying them on individual desktops, Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5:

Uses software-streaming technology to deliver operating systems and applications on-demand to physical desktops as a service from the network.
Desktops with the same OS/application stack can be provisioned on-demand from a single, standard image.
No software is pre-installed or permanently installed on the desktop hardware.
Application processing takes place at the desktop.
Desktops can operate disklessly.

Citrix is probably still best known to many for its old Metaframe and now its Presentation Server thin client computing platform. Since the acquisition of XenServer and the company's continued journey towards its end-to-end strategy, Citrix has been trying to educate the IT community and its sales channels that the company is more than just application provisioning. With acquisitions and integrations like Ardence, the message continues to grow.

You can watch a video demonstration of Citrix Provisioning Server, here.

Posted by David Marshall on February 6, 2008 04:58 AM

February 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware's stock drops: question of faith?

VMware stock was the Wall Street technology darling with a story book beginning last year. Originally priced at $29, VMware stock (VMW) quickly soared as high as $125 last fall. However recently, the company's stock plunged by more than 30% after VMware posted "disappointing" earnings. So what was so disappointing in the news?

VMware unveiled their financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2007. The company showed total revenues for Q4 as $412 million, an increase of 80% compared to a year earlier with an amount of $229.5 million. Net income for the fourth quarter more than doubled to $78 million, or 19 cents per share. This was also up from the previous year of $31 million, or 9 cents per share.

Great numbers, but not what analysts were expecting. They expected VMware to report sales of $417 million and earnings excluding special items of 24 cents per share. And when they didn't, the market reacted with disfavor and sent the price per share tumbling down. As of this writing, the stock has been moving back up, slowly, and closed at $59.30.

Along with not meeting analyst expectations, analysts also seem concerned with the competition. Perhaps they only just recently found out about Xen, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Microsoft, SWsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc. After all, these technologies have only just recently surfaced, which may have caused alarm and uncertainty for some. Tongue in cheek.

On a serious note, these other companies have started making a lot of moves and stepping up the competitive marketing campaigns. Citrix and Microsoft have been doing a bang up job lately with their talks of co-operation and product interoperability. Citrix and Virtual Iron Software have both announced new versions of their products each with added features. Microsoft just announced RTM of Windows Server 2008 and an included beta of Hyper-V, making their virtualization platform that much more real on the competitive front. Intel and AMD continue to add virtualization capabilities directly into the x86 processor, breaking down the barrier walls of entry for others to more easily enter the market.

But that hasn't stopped VMware. They continue to advance their own product. They continue to announce new products like Virtual Desktop Manager 2. And they still have, by most accounts, the most stable and feature rich, long-running virtualization platform on the market.

So perhaps the stock will remain flat for now, as analysts figure out what the Q4 numbers mean to them and what they believe Q1 will look like for them; and they will continue to monitor competition from Microsoft and the various Xen camps as well.

Posted by David Marshall on February 5, 2008 08:31 PM

January 31, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Venture capitalists can't get enough of virtualization - Thank Goodness!

Yes, you've heard it before: Virtualization is a hot, growing market. The strange thing is, it isn't just the analysts and media talking about it anymore. And it's not just those people in the virtualization community talking about it either. Venture capital firms have recognized the trend and can see where virtualization is going. Because of that, we've seen an increase in the funding of these companies. Why, just in the last week or so we've seen a number of press releases hit the wire about additional funding.

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Cirba, a provider of data center intelligence software, today announced that it has raised $12 million in its second round of institutional funding led by Sigma Partners. Existing investors including Edgestone Capital Partners and others also participated in the round. The funding will enable Cirba to further accelerate growth on a global scale, with investments in sales, marketing and product development.

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Virtual Iron Software, as provider of enterprise server virtualization, today announced that it has secured $20 million in new venture equity financing. The funding, provided at an increased valuation, will be used to accelerate product development and expand global sales, marketing and distribution efforts. The investment brings Virtual Iron’s total venture funding to $65 million in invested equity capital and includes Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures.

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Pano Logic today announced it has completed a $12 million series B funding round led by Goldman Sachs, and joined by existing investors ComVentures and Foundation Capital. Pano Logic leverages existing server virtualization technologies to create a new approach to client/desktop computing that dramatically lowers total cost of ownership while increasing security, management and mobility. To keep up with the growing demand within the enterprise for desktop virtualization solutions, the company will use the funding to accelerate product development, expand sales and marketing efforts, and secure additional channel/SI partners to address the midmarket.

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VirtenSys, a provider of I/O virtualization solutions -- a crucial new technology that enables organizations to optimize the data centers in their IT infrastructure, to improve performance and reduce total cost of ownership -- announced it has received USD 12 million in its Series B funding round, all from its original investor syndicate. The syndicate comprises Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Celtic House Venture Partners (CHVP), and GIMV. The investment will be used to expand its market, to grow its operations in the U.K. and the U.S., and, shortly, to launch its products and begin revenue generation.

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Hopefully, VC firms continue to fund new and innovative solutions in the virtualization space. We've only just begun to see where virtualization can take us.

Posted by David Marshall on January 31, 2008 08:17 PM

January 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft's broadened virtualization strategy

Over the last few years, I've read and listened to numerous complaints from people about Microsoft not being fully invested in virtualization, that the software giant was simply sticking their big toe in the virtualization water to test it out. Well, if that were true, then last week the Redmond giant did a cannonball from the top most diving board, making a huge splash in the virtualization community.

Microsoft wants virtualization to change the way IT organizations work - from the data center to the desktop. And with that, the company announced several strategic changes in its virtualization strategy in order to make virtualization more attractive to a wider audience.

Along with the company's announcement about what it calls its new Dynamic IT vision, Microsoft also officially announced the following:

The acquisition of Calista Technologies;
Interoperability and collaboration between Microsoft and Citrix;
New Microsoft Virtualization Solution Accelerators;
Expanded virtualization licensing options for Microsoft Windows Vista;
Microsoft Office support using Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization.

Bringing virtualization to the data center with Windows Server 2008 is only one piece of Microsoft's larger vision. They want to leverage virtualization to change the way IT works from one end of the enterprise to the other - from desktop to data center.

"Very few customers are able to reap the benefits of virtualization today," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. "We estimate that less than 5 percent of companies are utilizing virtualization technology because it is simply too cost-prohibitive and complex. We believe Microsoft's comprehensive approach - from desktop to datacenter - is unique to the industry by delivering solutions that address virtualization at the hardware, application and management levels. Our approach is not only one of the most comprehensive in the market today, but we believe it is also one of the most economical. This combination brings a big strategic advantage and cost savings to customers."

Early last week, Microsoft announced that it was buying Calista Technologies, a provider of graphics technologies for next-generation desktop and presentation virtualization solutions. The addition of Calista's technology to future Microsoft presentation and desktop virtualization products will enable remote workers to receive a full-fidelity Windows desktop experience without the need for high-end desktop hardware, while enabling software vendors to deliver additional capabilities.

Microsoft and Citrix plan to co-market a broad portfolio of new client computing offerings. The offerings will be based on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Optimized Desktop solutions, extended with Citrix's XenDesktop and Presentation Server products and managed by Microsoft System Center. The two companies will work together to ensure that the Citrix XenDesktop connection broker works well with Windows Optimized Desktop solutions.

At the same time, Citrix is developing a software tool that will allow customers to easily transfer virtual machines between Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to help ensure greater interoperabi