Archives for April 2008

Which Technology Is Cooking In The VMware Kitchen?

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

In a blog post aptly titled ‘Phwaar’, VMware System Engineer Andrew DugDell reveals absolutely nothing about a new technology that’s internally available, but makes us darn curious in the process.

Dugie writes:

“I’m a bit excited, infact I’m a lot excited. I saw an email today, and then it all hit home. The email was from one of the product teams announcing internal availability of a new technology. It’s one of the technologies that really make me go “phwaar“. (And I thought it was phwaar even before my life here at VMware) — and the phwaar is getting closer, every day.”

…

“It’s kind of like Christmas. You know it’s coming; you can expect [it] all year long, but it’s not until the Christmas decorations go up and the presents start arriving under the tree, that it really sinks in. Then once it arrives, it’s a flurry of wrapping paper, and eagerness, and, and …well you know the rest of the story. Anyway. It’s such a such a simple, (some might mistake it as almost trivial) technology, but it’s so fundamentally exciting that it will change the rules of “traditional computing” [again] completely.”

Anyone have any idea on what gets the man so excited?

VMware’s Financial Results For Q1 Are In, 69 Percent Revenue Increase Beats Wall Street Expectations

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced financial results for the first quarter of 2008:

Revenues for the first quarter were $438 million, an increase of 69% compared to the first quarter of 2007. (Analysts were expecting a top line of $422.4 million, according to Thomson Financial.)
GAAP operating income for the first quarter was $48 million, compared to $46 million in the first quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income was $106 million, an increase of 62% over the year-ago quarter.
GAAP net income for the quarter was $43 million, or $0.11 per diluted share, compared to $41 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $88 million, or $0.22 per diluted share, compared to $0.16 a year ago.

From the press release:

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, which increased 74%, were driven in part by triple-digit business growth across Australia and emerging markets including Brazil, China, India and Russia.

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.

As for the financial outlook:

VMware continues to expect 2008 revenue growth of approximately 50% compared to 2007.

Second quarter 2008 revenues are expected to increase approximately 55% compared to the second quarter of 2007.

The stock was up $1.95, or 3.5%, to $58.02 in after-hours trading.

“Our product suite has a very high return on investment,” Greene said. “That puts us in a very good position for getting wallet share as the economy gets a little more uncertain.” Large deals, valued at $1 million and up, made up 20% of bookings during the quarter, Greene said in an interview.

Total bookings were not disclosed.

[Source: TheStreet]

Raptor Networks And Pirelli Successfully Complete Chassis Virtualization Testing

April 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Raptor Networks Technology today announced the successful completion of interoperability testing and chassis virtualization testing over distance with Pirelli’s City+ CWDM & DWDM Multiservice platform (PDF). Joint demonstrations of both companies’ technologies are planned for the upcoming Networld Interop Show in Las Vegas from April 22 – May 2, 2008.

“We are pleased to collaborate with Raptor Networks to bring to market the value of the first distributed core switching combined with the optical bandwidth efficiency of the Pirelli City+ carrier-class system,” added Pierluigi Franco, senior vice president, Sales & Marketing for Systems at PGT Photonics (a daughter company to Pirelli).

Microsoft Puts Forth System Management As Key Differentiator In Virtualization Technology

April 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft is targeting system management as a way to differentiate itself from competitors in the virtualization market, the company reportedly stated today, as reported by PC World.

Anticipating that the market for virtualization software, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, eventually will be commoditized, the company sees management as the key revenue opportunity for competitors offering server virtualization, said Windows Enterprise and Management Division General Manager Larry Orecklin, speaking to reporters on Microsoft’s campus Tuesday.

Microsoft is apparently so keen on making management the corner stone of its virtualization strategy that it plans to open up management for other virtualization platforms, such as VMware and XenSource, with its System center Virtual Machine Manager tool, which it released last September.

Also interesting to note:

Microsoft plans to outline its virtualization strategy further at its Microsoft Management Summit next week, said Orecklin, who suggested Tuesday that a beta of Virtual Machine Manager with support for Hyper-V and VMware ESX also will be available at that time.

[Source: PC World]

Red Hat Embraces AMD Virtualization Capabilities In HP Servers

April 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Red Hat today announced its support for virtualization capabilities offered by AMD processors in new HP servers.

The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 platform supports AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, for more efficient use of memory management on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. HP is now offering systems equipped with these processors in its HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers, Red Hat said. Also, support for virtual guests configured with more than four CPUs has now been added.

“Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD. “We’ve been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away. We have been delighted with the excellent performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved. Red Hat, AMD and HP customers now have available one of the fastest and most scalable virtualization platforms on the market today.”

“Red Hat also is offering para-virtualized device drivers to make I/O workloads in virtual guests perform close to the bare-metal performance of the system”, said Doug Shakshober, senior consulting engineer at Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 has been shipping since November 2007.

[Source: Test Center Daily]

Ottawa Linux Symposium Issues CFP For Mini Summit on Virtualization

April 22, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

The Ottawa Linux Symposium today announced its Mini Summits that will be taking place on the Tuesday before the actual Symposium. One of these summits is the “Virtualization Technology & Management” Mini Summit which has just issued a Call for Presentations.

There will be two types of presentations

Full Presentations: These presentations will consume an entire 40 minute time slot. It is suggested that the presentation be planned for 25-30 minutes which will allow for a 10-15 minute period of dicussions with the audience.

Lightning talks: These talks will be scheduled for 5 minutes.

And the suggested topics are :

Virtualization Technology: Review and/or provide deep insight into the fundamentals of specific virtualization technologies. Exploration of project development opportunities. Discussion of ideas to improve the technologies.

Layered Tools and New Opportunities: How can virtualized environments be made manageable? What’s worked and not worked in the past? What new ideas are cropping up?

Virtualization Deployment Experiences: What’s the “Good, the Bad and the Ugly”? What has gone right? What has gone wrong? What are end users’ thoughts about the whole experience? Are folks meeting goals and saving money overall? What are the unexpected benefits?

Meet us there!