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Microsoft Management Summit 2008: Birth Of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 Beta

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

At the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 in Las Vegas, the Redmond-based software giant released its virtualization management platform, now named System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, into public beta testing. The release comes well within the 60 to 90 day window Microsoft promised after the public beta delivery of its ‘Viridian hypervisor’, now formally known as Hyper-V. So where’s the beef?

The new platform enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.

Microsoft’s hypervisor and virtualization management platform will likely be used predominantly by Microsoft-centric customers in Windows-centric environments (for your reference: Microsoft owns about half of the server OS space so that’s not too bad a proposition), but support for VMware ESX will be welcomed by many as well (VMM 2008 connects to Virtual Center’s public web service APIs to provide support for most day-to-day administrative tasks on VMware, including VMotion), although most critics are already pointing to the lack of live migration capabilities in SCVMM 2008.

A number of partners, including Brocade, Dell, EMC, Emulex, HP, NetQOS, QLogic and Quest, announced they will deliver management packs enabled for PRO. These management packs enable partners and customers to integrate their domain-specific knowledge directly into Virtual Machine Manager and further integrate physical and virtual management.

[Source: Virtualization Review]

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]

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]

EMA Research on Virtualization: VMware Still Leading The Pack, Microsoft And Citrix Following Closely

April 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a US-based IT management research and consulting firm, today announced the release of its latest research report titled, “Virtualization and Management: Trends, Forecasts and Recommendations.”

“The promise of IT virtualization continues to be significant as it rightfully gains traction across servers, desktops, applications, networks, storage and more,” said research director Andi Mann. “This latest research report identifies what is really happening within the exploding virtualization marketplace, the impact it is having on IT professionals and the technology options that are available today.”

When looking across all virtualization technologies, Enterprise Management Associates’ research shows that VMware still has the highest overall market penetration. However, Microsoft continues to grow its market share and — even before the formal release of Hyper-V — is within 10 percent of VMware’s lead. Citrix also poses a threat, coming in at 20 percent behind VMware, again with major product yet to be formally released.

Mann believes desktop virtualization will show the strongest growth of any virtualization technology during the next one to two years. However, the overall virtualization market will continue to be very healthy because, as this research reveals, enterprises are seeing substantial benefits in cost reduction, server consolidation, security improvement and more from virtualization technologies. The EMA study also clearly shows that virtualization is not just a test and development tool, finding that up to 75 percent of all enterprises are now using virtualization for production use cases — indicating a steady increase in outcomes and confidence since 2006.

As virtualization proliferates, it will continue to deliver many valuable outcomes. However, most companies will face multiple barriers to success. Enterprise Management Associates’ research shows that the largest challenges facing successful virtualization deployments lie with “human issues.” Key among these are the unique political challenges that virtualization creates as a result of sharing data center resources, shifting responsibility and functionality of desktops or changing the way departments access applications, storage and networks.

In addition, companies face a potential skills crisis as they find it harder to attract and retain virtualization resources. In fact, enterprises have seen a 25 percent decrease in their ability to manage virtual environments adequately with the skills they have in place.

Complexity is also a critical issue in virtualization. EMA finds that the vast majority of organizations implement virtualization on multiple platforms, using multiple technologies, from multiple vendors — adding multiple layers of complexity onto already complex physical systems. This study also shows convincingly that virtualization will not overtake existing architectures at least through 2010. “For the vast majority of enterprises, virtualization will coexist with physical deployments for the foreseeable future, so complexity will continue to be a major headache,” said Mann.

“The key to success is to approach virtualization as a strategy, not just a series of projects, and to approach it with more realistic expectations,” said Mann, “Companies need to adjust their goals, and find ways to deploy and manage virtualization in more effective ways. This report will help them to do exactly that.”

[Source: The Earth Times]

Qlusters Releases openQRM 3.5

April 9, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 3 Comments

Qlusters has released openQRM 3.5 to SourceForge.net. The 3.5 open source release succeeds release 3.1.4 and includes a set of new features based on input from various data centers and test/dev labs. Release 3.5 is available for download now.

openQRM is a Datacenter Management Tool that can manage different Physical and also VirtualMachine instances. It allows seamless deployment of physical and virtual machine instances and also supports P2V, V2P and even V2V migration across different technologies.

With this release they also announced that this will be the last openQRM release by Qlusters and they hope the community will continue to evolve and develop openQRM.

Matt Rechenburg will remain active project leader and Qlusters wishes him and the openQRM project a future of prosperity and continued success.

Qlusters also appointed a new CEO, Dror Nemirovsky, who joined the companty in 2007. Prior to joining Qlusters, Dror held various senior positions in both the US and Israel with companies such as Amdocs Marcam Corporation and Iscar in Israel. He replaced Qlusters founder Ofer Shoshan who had been CEO until October 2007.

With openQRM, Qlusters was working on one of the leading opensource data center management tools. Apart from their involvement in openQRM, they also offer enterprise level services and support for Nagios.

Matt Rechenburg left Qlusters and with him, the openQRM project got a new home and new direction. The initial code of a revamp of openQRM wihch will make it more flexible and more performant; adding more PHP to the code base will for sure attract a bigger development crowd.

Qlusters has yet to announce where it is heading next.

Is Virtualization The Biggest Security Vulnerability In IT Today?

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

The question is asked by Senior Reporter from Forbes Andy Greenberg, who attended the security industry’s big annual confab, the RSA Conference, and wrote up an article aptly titled ‘Virtualization Dark’s Side’. He writes:

“In the past few months, security researchers have revealed bugs in practically every piece of virtualization software, including products from virtualization heavyweights VMware and Microsoft.

Exploiting those bugs, attackers can use what researchers call “virtual machine escape,” or “hyperjacking.” By taking control of the hypervisor, the piece of software that controls all the virtual computers within a machine, an attacker can “escape” from any single virtual computer hosted on the machine and quickly multiply his or her access to a company’s data.”

Virtualization security researchers and experts were quick to point out the weaknesses of virtualization and several techniques to breach the security.

Joanna Rutkowska, the founder of security research firm Invisible Things Lab, reportedly described a new type of virtualization-based malware that could be used to take control of a machine running virtualization software. Because virtualization allows companies to store many virtualized software “images” of computers on a single physical machine, an attack like the one Rutkowska envisions would allow a hacker “not only to control a single machine but to siphon data from any virtual machine it contains”.

Rutkowska also described how an intruder could install what she calls a “blue pill,” a second, malicious hypervisor that controls the original hypervisor and all of the virtual machines beneath it.

Fortunately, she also said that the attacks she discussed are likely too new to have ever been used by real-world cybercriminals, and are unlikely to become common.

What do you think?