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Sun Acquires innotek, VirtualBox Desktop Virtualization To Extend The Sun xVM platform

February 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters 5 Comments

Sun Microsystems has just announced , in a surprising move, the acquisition of German desktop virtualization technology provider innotek , makers of the well-known VirtualBox family.

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is one of the only professional-quality virtualization solutions built on Open Source technology.

The acquisition by Sun, in essence a stock purchase agreement with undisclosed financial details, is a definite winner. With over four million downloads since January 2007, innotek’s VirtualBox product has been quickly established as one of the leading developer desktop virtualization platforms. As part of the Sun xVM portfolio, VirtualBox will have the support of Sun’s global development community, field resources and partners to make VirtualBox “even more compelling to developers and end users, driving greater adoption across a broad set of communities”.

From the press release:

“By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market.”

“VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently announced Sun xVM Server product,” said Rich Green, executive vice president, Sun Software. “Where Sun xVM Server is designed to enable dynamic IT at the heart of the datacenter, VirtualBox is ideal for any laptop or desktop environment and will align perfectly with Sun’s other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects, enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next generation of applications.”

The acquisition is also another sign EMEA is marking its territory in virtualization land.

Another Day, Another Funding Deal: VirtenSys Raises 8.1 Million Euro

January 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

UK-based virtualization company VirtenSys has secured a Series B funding round to the tune of € 8.1 million (USD 12 million). The syndicate consists of existing shareholders Scottish Equity Partners, Celtic House Venture Partners and the Belgian GIMV. VirtenSys will use the new funds to expand operations in the UK and US, and to launch its products and begin revenue generation.

“That the original investors subscribed fully to the Series B round is significant,” said Andy Roberts, chairman of the board of directors of VirtenSys. “It validates our strategy and demonstrates their confidence in the market opportunity and the demand for our products.”

VirtenSys is developing I/O virtualization solutions for data centers. VirtenSys’ technology enables data centers to better adapt to dynamic workloads, self-configure, and self-heal at a lower total cost of ownership and higher utilization than currently available systems.

VirtenSys predicts a growing demand for its solutions as workloads on data centers keep increasing and the dynamics of the IT workload are changing. According to the company these dynamics call for greater corporate agility in response to changing business conditions and require an IT infrastructure that can adapt equally fast. Organizations are trying to find new ways to increase data center utilization while reducing the total cost of ownership. This again requires greater dynamism in the management of the IT workload.

VirtenSys’ strategy is to protect IT investments with a standards-compliant migration path for servers to virtualized I/O resources. The I/O virtualization solutions are based on the industry-standard PCI Express I/O interface which is natively available on all servers.

Stuart Paterson, a partner at lead investor SEP said, “SEP is confident that VirtenSys has an excellent future. Virtualization is very much at the top of CIO agendas. VirtenSys virtualization solutions increase utilization, while lowering power and cooling requirements by as much as 50 percent. This is very attractive to many organizations seeking to optimize their data centers.”

Just recently, VirtenSys appointed a new CEO (Ahmet Houssein ), a new chairman (Andrew Roberts ), expanded its sales and engineering executive teams and opened its US headquarters in Oregon. The company was founded in December 2005 and raised its first round of funding in October 2006. Scottish Equity Partners, Celtic House Venture Partners and GIMV then invested a total of €9.5 million.

[Via Tornado-Insider ]

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Another Desktop Virtualization Player Enters The Market: Meet Propalms

January 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Propalms haso announced that it will be entering the desktop virtualization market in 2008 with the launch of its Virtual Desktop Manager technology within its new TSE product. Analyst firm IDC predicts the market for desktop virtualization software will be near $2 billion by 2011, with major players such as Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and SWsoft involved.

“We are pleased to be entering the desktop virtualization market in 2008 and excited about the opportunities this will open up for Propalms TSE by adding this technology. We believe our history of delivering tried and tested application delivery solutions to the server-based computing market gives us a key edge in this space and will allow us to be at the forefront of this market as its growth accelerates over the next year,” stated Owen Dukes, CEO of Propalms.

Propalms recently announced that the Company invoiced $992,383 in sales transactions through the 11 month period ending December 31st, 2007 and project over $1,000,000 for the Fiscal Year ending this month. These sales signify the Company’s accelerated growth, as they have added new customers and expanded the distribution of Propalms TSE. The sales transactions also include increased license renewals and maintenance contracts.

[Via Virtualization Journal ]

Internal Memo From VMWare Staff Criticizes Microsoft And Questions Its Partnership With Citrix

January 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

When Microsoft issued a long press release last week on its ‘Vision and Strategy to Accelerate Virtualization Adoption ‘, the internal sales channel at VMWare apparently got a memo downplaying MSFT’s announcements and instructing their commercial team to further question the Microsoft-Citrix partnership and its ability to survive Redmond’s plans with virtualization in front of their clients.

Here are some of the quotes a blogger reposted from an obtained copy of the memo (emphasis ours)

…Microsoft announced a hodge-podge of items related to virtualization in a desperate attempt to make it look like it had a new, coherent vision and strategy for virtualization…

…MSFT includes many recycled items in the announcement to make it look substantive. In actuality, they are just rehashes of old items. Microsoft is not delivering anything new, substituting marketing in place of real substance…

…The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision…

…Microsoft’s announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question “When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?” Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?…

…Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop…and Citrix is allowing it to happen…

…New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management…This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix’s stated business model for virtualization – to generate revenue from the management of Windows VMs with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors…

…New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA)..This acquisition strikes at Citrix’s core business since ICA is Citrix’s key differentiator and competes with RDP…

Microsoft and Citrix are longtime virtualization partners, but VMware is using Microsoft’s own advances in the market to argue that the two companies are also becoming bigger competitors with each other — despite their recently announced plan to develop interoperability between Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008. As Microsoft prepares to launch Windows Server 2008 — featuring the Hyper-V hypervisor — next month, the battle for VMware’s server virtualization market share lead should grow even more intense. Which makes it all more interesting for us, of course 🙂

Patch Management Coming to a Citrix XenServer Near You

January 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Roger Klorese , Product Marketing Manager for Citrix XenServer , wrote a blog post revealing a major upcoming new feature in XenServer: pool-wide Patch Management.

“XenServer has had a relatively small number of patches, and in the case of security advisories, we’ve been consistently able to announce the fix for an issue very quickly, or in one case, even before the vulnerability was publicized.

But it’s true that virtual platforms can add complexity to patch management. While other Citrix technologies — Provisioning Server, for instance — can reduce the impact of patching significantly, the maintenance of the virtualization server platform itself is an major concern.

We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.”

In conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, there will be a possibility for you to:

* Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
* Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
* Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
* Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
* Apply the patches
* Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

No word on timing for the public beta.

Hat tip to Tarry Singh .

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe Outlines Technical Strategy for 2008

January 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Jeff Jaffe , Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer for Novell, published a blog post 2 days ago outlining the company’s technical strategy for 2008. This is what he had to say about its focus on virtualization:

We see agility and customer focus as key in our progress on virtualization – one of the hottest areas in the industry. In SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, we introduced open source virtualization into a commercial Linux distribution before anyone else did. Once we introduced this, we spoke to customers. We spoke to partners. We spoke to analysts. We spoke to everyone! By listening, we discovered that we had not yet nailed it. In 2007 we listened, and in a very short time we became a leader in virtualization.

Our Open Enterprise Server customers told us that they wanted NetWare virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server – to take advantage of all of the drivers provided by Linux. And it needed to perform. After all, file and storage performance for NetWare is critical. A unique partnership between our Workgroup team and our Open Platform Solutions team has resulted in virtualization capability in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 that is higher performance and more manageable than any other open source solution. This is the basis for OES 2.

We talked to other customers. They did not want virtualization as a bare technology. They wanted it to be managed. Novell quickly turned around and built technology to manage workloads and provision virtual machines. ZENworks Orchestrator. The best managed open source virtualization solution.

And we listened to customers and partners some more. They said get a tight partnership with Microsoft to optimize Windows on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Build a joint lab for testing – so customers have the confidence that our solution works best with Microsoft. We did all of that!

Here is the totality. From a barebones hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we now have an industrial strength hypervisor, supporting the demanding NetWare workload, optimized for Microsoft, SAP and others, with a joint lab for testing. It is manageable with ZENworks and will address low latencies.

How did we do this? We listened!

Virtualization clearly is a key topic for the industry, and with the 2007 results we have both staked a claim and demonstrated our agile processes. Look for this to continue to be an area of significant investment in 2008.