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VMworld Europe Day 1 – Paul Maritz keynote unveils new vPrefix product naming convention and talks about upcoming VMware vSphere, Intel vPro partnership

February 24, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 1 Comment

After “day 0”, partner day, VMworld Europe opened its doors for the general audience today.

vSphere is the official name of the new VMware platform, but the VMware marketing department has not applied their new naming convention vPrefix to all products & initiatives yet. Some VMware partners are already doing the same, such as Intel with vPro. How long will it take for Vmworld to be renamed vWorld. Below are the six building blocks of vSphere:

vCompute (hardware assisted virtualization and extended live migration compatibility):
vStorage (storage management and replication)
vNetwork (for network management, look for Cisco here…
Security (where VMsafe innovates on firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection/prevention and compliance)
Scalability (dynamic resource sizing)
Availability (data protection and clustering)

Here’s a rush rundown of the keynote by VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

The theme of the conference is a continuation of VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas: “Virtualy anything is possible.” The unofficial theme seems to be the same as in Las Vegas as well: “cloud, cloud, cloud”.

Even though the next release of ESX is just around the corner, we don’t expect major announcements on that scale today.

Update: The stream of today’s keynote is now available.

Maurizio Carli, General Manager VMware EMEA

09.11 Maurizio Carli, General manager EMEA takes the stage.

Last year 4500 people attended VMworld Europe. Even in the current economic climate, 4700 people showed up this week.

9:23 Paul once again takes the blame for the massive proliferation of x86 servers in the datacenters. (Paul Maritz is a 14-year Microsoft veteran)

9:25 In the early 2000s, hypervisors introduced the concept of consolidation. Maritz points out that this is the point where most of VMware’s competition is now. VMware is now talking about “cooperating hypervisors”, and, of course: the cloud.

9:26 The VMware vision is that the Cloud will be built on industry-standard building blocks, starting with the “internal cloud”, based on the Virtual Datacenter OS.
VMware likes to call this VDC-OS the “software mainframe”.

9:27 When internal environments are “converted” to this VDC_OS, it becomes easier to take the encapsulated workloads and migrate them to external, federated cloud providers, in a non-disruptive way.

9:28 VMware knows that hardware and a hypervisor aren’t enough, but that security policies, quality of service and management are just as important.

9:30 Virtualization is the key to making this happen in an evolutionary way: existing applications can be put in the “Black boxes” virtualization provides.

– vSphere architecture

9:33 The product name for the new generation of VDC-OS products will be: vSphere. No surprises there..

9:39 No new stuff so far… vSphere requires a new management suite, now called the vCenter suite. (As opposed to VirtualCenter).

Apparently some stuff will be demoed later. Curious…

General overview of the VMworld stage

9:44 The second initiative, a logical extension of the VDC-OS, is vCloud, where customers will have the choice to go to an external service provider to get their IT infrastructure. VMware aims to build compatible clouds (based on VDC-OS of course), allowing users to build private clouds, where external and internal IT resources are pooled together and managed as one.
9:45 VMware will work with the formal standards bodies to make sure users aren’t locked in to one vendor’s cloud. There should be a broad ecosystem of clouds, giving users choice to move in and out of clouds as necessary.

9:46 (And again, it seems like Amazon EC2 doesn’t exist, even though with them “cloud” is a reality today, sort of.)

9:47 The first guest comes on stage, Kurt Glazemakers, EMEA CTO of terremark.

9:49
Terremark CTO Kurt Glazemakers

9:50

Terremark enterprise cloud

9:51 Pooling resources on a hosting platform gives users the possibility to leverage economies of scale of large environments, providing ample burst capacity if necessary. This reduces provision times. Users don’t have to worry about CAPEX, as the server capacity is treated like a service (OPEX).

9:52 Terremark created a self-service portal allowing users to create VMs as they please, within the limits of their resource pool. Users pay by the GHz of CPU power and GB of memory and disk storage.

9:56 Next guest: Joe Arnold, director of Engineering of Engine Yard, a Ruby on Rails company.

10:00 Engine Yard created a self-service portal to create RoR containers. Pretty short demo. Looks a bit like CohesiveFTs Elastic Server.

10:00 Another guest on stage: Zvi Guterman, CEO IT Structures
10:05 Paul gives some more examples of service providers. Savvis – one of the biggest hosting companies building a giant resource pool for customer VMs. Sungard, providing disaster recovery solutions as a service.

10:06 The third leg of the future VMware stragey is the vClient initiative.

10:08 The management of user workloads should not be done at the device level, but at the user level. The workloads should follow the user wherever he is and whatever device he’s using.

10:09 VMware started as a client-side virtualization company, with “VMware”, now VMware Workstation.

10:09 To allow “offline VDI”, VMware will provide a client-side bare metal hypervisor. (A la Phoenix?)

10:10 This enables the user to checkout his desktop when working on a mobile device, and to check in and work on a thin client when at the office, leveraging central management and intelligent storage (with deduplication, …)

10:13 All the vClient / VMware View stuff announced so far (WAN optimization, thin client optimization, offline VDI, …) should be rolled out completely in 2009.

10:13 No news on the semi-recent mobile hypervisor acquisition so far.

10:14 New announcement: formal partnership with Intel.

Guest on stage: Gregory Bryant, VP Business Client Group at Intel.

10:16 VMware and Intel will work together on a client-side hypervisor.

10:18 The collaboration enables out-of band, centralized management, but gives the user the genuine local desktop experience.

Check back tomorrow for a more in-depth presentation by Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO.

Red Hat announced Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

February 23, 2009 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Today RedHat sent out 2 press releases obviously in an attempt to get Virtual visibility during VMWorld. Europe, The biggest news in those 2 press releases is the announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, or the RHEV . Red Hat announced their new strategy regarding to Virtualization which they call the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products.

First in the Lineup is

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat’s strategic direction for the future development of its virtualization product portfolio is based on KVM, making Red Hat the only virtualization vendor leveraging technology that is developed as part of the Linux operating system. Existing Xen-based deployments will continue to be supported for the full lifetime of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Red Hat will provide a variety of tools and services to enable customers to migrate from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Xen deployment to KVM.

Well, we already knew that, given the fact that Fedora is heading KVM-wards and that they have to support Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for the full life cycle of RHEL 5, therefore at least till 2014
KVM will enter the RHEL product line as part of RHEL 5.4, due to be released later this year
RedHat is also announcing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers

A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers will be able to manage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts, as well as the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

a framework based on LibVirt and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops ,

A new management system for virtual desktops that will deliver industry-leading VDI cost-performance for both Linux and Windows desktops, based on Qumranet’s SolidICE and using SPICE remote rendering technology.

With confirmation that the Qumranet code will be open sourced just as RedHat has done with all their other products so far.

And last but not least RedHat is launching a new standalone hypervisor : Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

Which is

KVM unbundled from RHEL, in a package dubbed RHEV-H(ypervisor). RHEV-H is a stateless hypervisor, with a tight footprint of under 128MB, which presents a libvirt interface to the management tier. Enterprise servers will no longer need to go through an installation process, and will instead be able to boot RHEV-H from flash or a network server, and be able to immediately begin servicing virtual guests. This stateless model drives down OPEX and enables the scalability required by terascale grids, large datacenters and cloud class compute environments.

RedHat also announced that its broad ecosystem of applications tested and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are certified to run in a Red Hat virtualized platform with no modifications.

Gartner: Worldwide Virtualization Software Revenue Will Increase 43% in 2009

February 12, 2009 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Worldwide virtualization software revenue will increase 43 per cent from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $2.7 billion in 2009, according to Gartner. Global virtualization penetration is on pace to reach 20 per cent in 2009 from 12 per cent in 2008. Its adoption within the IT organization is driven by the need to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), enhance the agility and speed of deployment of IT needs and minimize carbon footprint.

Gartner’s definition of the virtualisation market includes server virtualization management, server virtualization infrastructure and hosted virtual desktops (HVDs). Gartner estimates that revenue from HVDs will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009 while revenue from server virtualization management software will increase 42 per cent from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009. Revenue from server virtualization infrastructure will grow 22.5 per cent from $917 million in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.

“Virtualization helps organizations to cut costs, better utilize assets and reduce implementation and management time and complexity, all of which are crucial in this economic environment,” said Alan Dayley, research director at Gartner. “Server virtualization management will be the primary source of growth in the virtualization market as hypervisor software functionality – key to virtualizing a server – rapidly moves to hardware. Server virtualization management technology in particular is designed to reduce TCO, reduce associated availability risk, and improve quality of service. In addition, building more manageability into infrastructure components provides technology suppliers with an additional source of revenue and a basis for competitive differentiation.”

“Although HVD is an emerging technology that currently represents 11 per cent of the virtualization software revenue market, it will account for a growing proportion of corporate users through 2013. Virtual desktop infrastructure feeds additional server virtualization needs because the users’ desktop data will now need to be managed in a virtualized server environment. Maturity and acceptance will result in a significant broadening of the addressable user population by 2010 and an acceleration in deployments. Gartner advises end-user organizations to define and optimize management processes for HVDs as they did for traditional PCs. Although HVD images are centralized and more standardized, the capabilities for managing them across their full deployment life cycles remain incomplete. To remedy this, they should budget for additional point-solution management capabilities.

“End-user organizations must build cost and benefit financial models to fully understand the financial impact of implementing HVDs, and make certain that cost and benefit exist as compared with those for traditional PCs,” said Phil Dawson, research vice president at Gartner. “There is a growing number of management providers, which represents an opportunity for end-user pricing leverage, but no vendor offers a complete set of server virtualization management functionality. IT organizations will have to undertake – or outsource – their own virtualization management system integration efforts or wait for better-integrated and robust toolsets.”

“From a vendor perspective, by 2013, Microsoft will challenge VMware as the dominant vendor in the server virtualization infrastructure market and will do very well in small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The server virtualization management market is currently wide open, with more than 100 vendors supplying products that meet some of the requirements in the management stack. As the management market matures, virtualization infrastructure vendors, the “Big Four” (BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM/Tivoli) and other management vendors will build and acquire more virtualization management capabilities, thus consolidating the market. On the other hand, the HVD vendor landscape is crowded, confusing, and full of opportunists.

Gartner recommends that vendors take advantage during this disruptive period by introducing leading-edge management tools in support of virtualization initiatives and ensure that virtualization-specific management products can integrate within existing management frameworks. Mr Dayley said: “The fast-growing server virtualization management and HVD markets are less consolidated, with scores of vendors trying to stake claim in the market.”

EMC/VMW Acquisition By Cisco Imminent?

February 12, 2009 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Great field work on Virtualization.info today about the fact that investors are buying heaps of VMware stock, signalling that something is up.

A small excerpt:

Monday’s SEC filings shows that Cisco posted a prospectus on raising $4 billion in senior bonds. The book building is run by all the major investment banks and is closing on February 17.
Cisco must be really confident for such a major issuance in these market conditions, but Standard & Poors is giving the senior unsecured notes an A+ rating with a stable outlook.
Cisco will use $500 million of the $4 billion to repay short term debt. When combined with sizeable cash holdings, this leaves them with with $4.7 billion in cash at the US parent company. According to CNET that amount excluded cash holdings at subsidiaries overseas.

EMC And Microsoft Extend Alliance On Virtualization And More

February 6, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

EMC and Microsoft have announced a three-year extension of their strategic alliance through 2011.

The two companies are committing to broader and deeper product interoperability and service delivery to address key customer requirements including virtualization, security and content management through the powerful combination of Microsoft’s data center solutions and productivity applications with EMC’s information infrastructure solutions and consultancy. As a result, joint customers will benefit from more productive and less costly dynamic IT infrastructures that can effectively respond to today’s rapidly changing business requirements and economic constraints.

At an invitation-only event for chief information officers and other IT executives, Joe Tucci and Steve Ballmer discussed how the two companies will continue to deliver value to mutual customers through collaboration including a deeper focus on storage and protection of information in virtualized environments, increased productivity through centralized management of content, and leading-edge security solutions to prevent data breaches.

Building efficient and dynamic IT infrastructures is a top priority for organizations across the globe. The two companies work together in many ways to help organizations achieve efficiencies. In recent years, technology advances in server virtualization, tiered storage and IT management have become key elements in IT planning, offering a range of benefits, from lower hardware, software and personnel costs to improved reliability and enterprise-class manageability and performance.

Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.

IT departments everywhere are trying to cope with growing amounts of information spread across disparate systems, such as file shares, content servers and team sites — making information increasingly difficult to harness and govern for business impact and regulatory requirements. IDC states that information under content management is growing at an exponential rate, more than doubling between now and 2011. Today, organizations can link the EMC Documentum® platform with Microsoft’s widely used platform including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office Outlook, and Microsoft SQL Server to improve how knowledge workers utilize information wherever it lies, ultimately helping mitigate risks, reduce costs and improve IT efficiencies. Leveraging a unique blend of industry, design and technology acumen, EMC Consulting also helps customers maximize the value of information and decrease time to value through the use of field-tested tools, proven methodology and familiar Microsoft products connected with powerful EMC Information Infrastructure.

As part of deepening the strategic alliance, EMC will develop solutions that leverage and extend Microsoft Office SharePoint. In addition, EMC will continue to develop solutions that enable customers to use the familiar Microsoft Office and SharePoint user interfaces to interact through business processes and workflows with content that is stored, protected and managed by EMC. Ultimately these solutions will empower customers to direct SharePoint content and Microsoft Exchange messages, along with other business content, to integrated archives for long-term preservation, thus improving operational efficiencies, enabling scalability of production systems, and facilitating sound information governance and litigation readiness.

IT environments are increasingly reliant on their corporate information, meaning data loss, data unavailability or data corruption of any kind can cause severe business challenges. The two companies will collaborate on building information protection solutions across the Microsoft application. An example of this is how EMC and Microsoft are responding to the new demands of information security, including a record number of data breaches, by building industry-leading Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies from RSA®, the security division of EMC, into the Microsoft platform and future information protection products. The collaboration is designed to empower organizations to centrally define information security policy, identify and classify sensitive data virtually anywhere in the infrastructure, and use a range of controls to protect data at the network, data center and endpoint levels.

As a first step, the new RSA DLP Suite 6.5 has been engineered with tight interoperability with Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services. As a result security managers can successfully implement information access and usage polices throughout the datacenter and on endpoints based on the sensitivity of information. Microsoft will continue to integrate data-loss prevention technology from RSA into its products to enable security managers to help monitor sensitive data and block unauthorized use.

Here Comes Citrix XenDesktop 3

February 5, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Citrix Systems today announced Citrix XenDesktop 3, the newest release of its desktop virtualization solution. XenDesktop 3, a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, incorporates several of the company’s new Citrix HDX technologies, giving virtual desktop users a richer “high-definition” experience with enhanced support for multimedia, audio and video.

XenDesktop 3 also dramatically improves scalability, hosting twice as many virtual desktops per server as previous versions. And with version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first product on the market to deliver Microsoft Windows desktops from a common set of centrally managed images that can be run either in the datacenter (hosted), or directly on a PC or thin client device (local). This new capability gives IT organizations far more flexibility, reducing desktop management costs by making efficient use of distributed processing power across both servers and end point devices.

XenDesktop 3 includes several enhancements that dramatically improve virtual machine density and efficiency in the datacenter, allowing customers to host up to twice as many hosted virtual desktops per server as previous versions. These new optimizations cut server acquisition costs in half and dramatically reduce ongoing management and power consumption costs, allowing significantly larger deployments than before at no additional cost.

With version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first solution on the market to deliver both hosted virtual desktops and local streamed desktops from a single image store, leveraging the same delivery infrastructure. Most virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions on the market offer only hosted virtual desktops, in which each desktop runs inside a virtual machine in the datacenter.

Adding support for local streamed desktops lets XenDesktop administrators stream desktops from the same golden master images, and execute them locally on any network-connected endpoint capable of running a desktop operating system. This powerful combination adds significant flexibility and cost savings, allowing IT to centrally manage desktops for office workers and run them wherever it makes the most sense, leveraging the distributed processing power of both servers and endpoint devices.

XenDesktop 3 also includes a variety of new features to support simpler management, easier user personalization and enhanced security. Most significant among these new features is fully integrated user profile management, making it far easier for IT to provide a consistent, personalized experience for each unique user every time they log in. Version 3 also includes broad support for smart card security authentication systems which are widely adopted throughout government, financial services and healthcare organizations. XenDesktop not only enables this added level of security for gaining general access to the desktop environment, it also ensures that this information is seamlessly and transparently passed through to individual applications within each virtual desktop.

Citrix XenDesktop 3 will be generally available from authorized Citrix partners in February 2009, and from the Citrix website at http://www.citrix.com/xendesktop. Suggested retail pricing begins at $75 per concurrent user.