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Rumor: VMware Is Acquiring EngineYard

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GigaOM says VMware is gearing up to buy EngineYard, the Ruby on Rails cloud provider that’s raised $37 million from the likes of Amazon, Benchmark, DAG Ventures and Bay Partners.

A VMware spokesperson told GigaOM that they won’t comment on speculation or rumors, so there’s no confirmation yet.

VMware has been buying startups such as Zimbra, SpringSource and others as it works to transition from providing a hypervisor to offering higher-value services. Earlier this year it released its VMforce platform as a service built on Salesforce.com’s infrastructure using SpringSource’s Java-based framework. Adding a Ruby-focused platform or capability makes a lot of sense, and EngineYard has been working on a transition of its own — moving away from startups and more toward the enterprise, where VMware’s focus is.

XenServer for Free !

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With VMWorld Europe coming up,it seems Citrix is trying to get VMWare out of its warm cozy mansion, it seems they plan to announce next week that they won’t charge anymore for XenServer.

Altough the underlying Xen technology is fully Open source , Citrix doesn’t plan on fully opensourcing XenServer itselve yet. So how will they make their money then you’d ask ? By shipping a new managment framwork that will support both XenServer and the Microschoft Hyper-V platform.

It looks like Citrix is also planning to announce a similar agreement with Micro
soft as RedHat already did earlier this week.

So what will VMWare do as a reaction next week ?

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

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Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …

Sneak Preview on VMworld 2008 and its artwork (video).

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VMworld 2008 under construction
Virtualization.com made it to Sin City. As of tomorrow and after a partner day, over 14.000 fellow Virtualization geeks will start gathering in The Venetian in Las Vegas for the latest vendor news and extensive networking activities. Virtualization.com is most interested in your stories from the datacenter trenches to the desktop victories. So feel free to share those lessons learnt when you see Toon Vanagt passing by with his camera.

We look forward to the real product innovations (is Cisco going to surprise us?). Judging from the amount of PR announcements we received, you can surely bet on a Virtualization product avalanche rolling over Las Vegas next week. VMWare is expected to release/announce ESX v4.0, with plenty of exiting features (continuous availability, alarms on physical hardware faults, 64bit kernel and COS and more). Information overdose guaranteed, especially with absent competitors, trying to spoil the VMware annual party, by hijacking some of that overal media focus on Virtualization.

VMware hired the prestigious design agency Cahan & Associates and they came up with edgy creations that underline customer ‘references/quotes’ and are supposed to make us all connect at a very human level. If you are into ‘minimalist cool’ and like the artwork too, you will be happy to learn that you can order your own illustration styled photo at YouAreArt. Simply sent your picture, receive a draft after 2 weeks, give the artist feedback and get an original canvas within another 2 weeks.
For the DIY die-hards or those with graphic insight, there is good news too, as they can easily assemble their own illustration styled avatar at FaceYourManga for free.

VMworld promises to be even bigger than last time (wear comfy shoes!) and all sorts of contractors and vendors are very busy gearing up The Venetian’s many meeting rooms: setting up banners, signs, booths, networks, registration desks, 38 Wifi hotspots, labs, etc…

Try not to spend all your money on the gambling floor, as over 200 exhibitors would like you to buy some of their latest products too 🙂

Here is to a great VMworld 2008 and a lot of fun!

Citrix To Jump On Cloud Wagon, But How?

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Tarry is hinting at a “big” announcement that Citrix will make on september 15th. He reveals nothing, apparently having signed an NDA, but hints that the news concerns his topic of focus of lately.

Tarry’s blog recently shifted from pure virtualization news to reports on virtualization and cloud computing. So our bet is that Citrix will be jumping on the “Cloud Wagon”, or should we say “Cloud Hype” somewhere next week. And why shouldn’t they?

(Update: one of our commenters suspects an acquisition of some sorts, and that’s not unlikely.)

Citrix has been in the business of remotely accessing applications and managing such environments since they started out, so it makes perfect sense for them to actually tebrand their whole product line from Citrix to Xen … and then to “XenCloud”.

Oh, and Intel obviously will announce a new chip, called the CloudCore, no more need to buy an octocore CPU, Intel will instead host them for you. 🙂

On the other hand: given next week’s VMWorld event, Citrix and Intel might also be announcing some real news to steal some of VMware’s thunder.

What’s your guess?

Stealth “Laptop Virtualization” Company Virtual Computer Readying Launch

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Mass High Tech is reporting on a new virtualization startup, currently in stealth mode, who is readying a public launch in the field of ‘laptop virtualization’ (for lack of a better term).

Update – per their blog: they’ve launched.

Westford-based Old Road Computing plans to publicly launch as Virtual Computer Inc., but isn’t revealing many specifics about its virtualization product, nor when it will be released. The company was founded in 2007 by Alex Vasilevsky (ex-CTO and founder of Virtual Iron) and Dan McCall (former Verisign executive and well-known consultant), both 25+ year veterans of the Boston technology community. The company is funded by top tier investors including Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures, Boston). To date, it has raised $6 million in a Series A round of financing.

The software would be designed to isolate a laptop’s four major components — hardware, operating system, applications and user data — and create versions on the laptop of those components that operate remotely, without a network connection. The software would operate transparently for the user and it would enable wholesale security updates and other types of upgrades when connected to the network. Isolating the portions of the system enables it to limit access to work-related applications while enabling users to install their own personal preferences on the device.

Virtual Computer (blog) is targeting laptops because that segment is growing faster than stationary desktops, according to the company.