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Last Week’s Virtualization Headlines

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We apologize for the limited reporting of last week, and we just wanted to let you know we’re going to pick up our usual pace as of today. For now, these are the most apparent stories we came across with regards to what happened in virtualization land:

  • Virtual Iron and Surgient both lost key marketing executives. Mike Grandinetti, who had been working for Virtual Iron since 2003 (see our video interview with Mike at VMWorld Europe 2008), has moved on to become Managing Director of Southboro Capital, presumably his own venture. Similar story at Surgient, who saw the leave of VP of Marketing Erik Josowitz who had been with the start-up since 2004. No word on what Josowitz is up to next.
  • Quest Software reported (PDF) its 2008 Q1 results. Total revenues increased to $172.8 million compared to the prior year’s first quarter revenue of $149.8 million.
  • Parallels has updated Parallels Desktop to build 5600. With the update, the company has added full support for Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, and improved compatibility with the MacBook Air, along with some minor bugfixes and performance enhancements.
  • Stealth startup DynamicOps, a venture-funded spinout of management technology developed by Credit Suisse’s research and development organization, launched its virtual machine management application Virtual Resource Manager.
  • HP joined Desktone‘s Service Provider Partner Program.
  • VMware announced that VMware Site Recovery Manager, a product for disaster recovery management and automation, will be available for order this week with general availability expected to follow within 30 days. Both 3PAR and NetApp have already announced integration / support for VMware SRM.
  • Check Point Software Technologies announced the general availability of ZoneAlarm ForceField, which it claims to be a comprehensive, virtualized browser security solution.
  • AMD announced enterprise customers now have more choices for rack-mount and blade systems based upon Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with the launch of six new servers from Sun Microsystems.
  • EMC could very well be planning to sell off all or part of its majority stake in VMware, a rumor spread by Bloomberg. EMC will be able to do a tax-free distribution of shares in January 2009, and some are already citing Intel as a potential acquirer of the assets.

$500 Million For XenSource, Where Did All The Money Go?

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Over at Cambridge Cluster , Philip Baddeley wonders where the $500 million that Citrix paid for Xensource has gone.

In August of last year, Citrix and XenSource agreed on an acquisition price of $500 million in a mixture of cash and Citrix stock. The deal came trough in late October of 2007. Now 7 months later, Philip wonders where all the money went.

“You don’t hear as much about Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sevin Rosen as you used to. Kleiner Perkins is busy investing in anything but consumer Internet companies while Sevin Rosen decided against raising another fund last year. But, they are still cashing checks. The pair invested $6 million in a first round investment in January 2005 into. That’s a big hit for the duo. Other beneficiaries include Accel Partners, Ignition Partners and New Enterprise Associates.”

Philip mainly wonders how much of that money stayed in Cambridge:

“Was Cambridge Enterprise involved? It would have ranked as one of their top investments. If not, why not? Why was such a good deal funded outside of the Cambridge Cluster? Did any of the Cambridge Angels or the other groups invest? There is no trace of XenSource on the Cambridge Evening News website. It would make a great Equity Fingerprint and case study but I guess it was registered in Delaware and so all the details are not available. Hopefully the Cambridge Cluster has a couple or ten of new angels to keep turning the wheels. Just think what the Cambridge Cluster could have done with $500 million …”

Obviously the University of Cambridge played a big role in the conception of Xen. But did it get a return on its investment?

Interesting question.

Xen Summit Boston, Partial Schedule Announced

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Stephen Spector has just announced the current agenda for the upcoming Boston Xen Summit.

Ian Pratt and Keir Fraser will kick off the event with an overview of the Xen roadmap.

After that there will be talks about XenLoop, A Transparent Inter-VM Network Loopback Channel and trusted VMs. Tamura Yoshiaki from NTT will be talking about Virtual Machine Synchronization for Fault Tolerance using DomT and other topics are still under review by the Program Committee.

More news when the final schedule is announced .

KVM vs Xen, Who Will Win The Fight?

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Ian Pratt and Benny Schnaider are using strong words against each other.

As KVM is gaining more and more popularity by being adopted in several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, the battle between different virtualization technologies continues to be interesting.

While KVM is being adopted by a variety of software and distribution vendors, Xen is being adopted by hardware vendors to be shipped directly with the iron.

We asked Ian at FOSDEM if he felth the Xen community was changing and if he thought the contributions from the community were slowing down.

“We certainly haven’t seen that. If you think about the life of the Xen project, there have been a number of significant changes. When we left the University to set up XenSource, people were worried we might go off and take Xen in closed source or something, but we didn’t. One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency by setting up the Xen advisory board and the Xen.org website. The advisory board has members from companies like Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, … big companies that are now contributing to Xen and have oversight from the advisory board, so I think the community is pretty happy and it’s going from strength to strength.”

According to ZDNet, Ian also claims that “KVM is not a true hypervisor. It tries to add virtualization capabilities to the Linux kernel but it’s not a true hypervisor approach. The Xen community is alive and well. Xen is a true hypervisor architecture that’s better for scalability, security and availability.

One of the biggest arguments against Xen is that KVM is already in the kernel. Theodore Ts’o thinks “it’s inevitable that Red Hat and Novell will standardize on KVM because of its inclusion in the kernel.” Xen never finished their efforts and KVM was quickly adopted into that same Linux Kernel.

Strong words also from the KVM front:

“If Xen will die or not die, I don’t know. But KVM will take over and be the virtualization selection of choice,” said Benny Schnaider, CEO and co-founder of Qumranet.

KVM or Xen? Time will tell, today both have different features and it will take some time until their feature set is similar, so the choice is about what YOU need, not about what the vendors claim you need.

[Source: ZDNet]

Forrester Analyst: Storage Virtualization Is Overhyped

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An interesting article at ITPro cites Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman claiming storage virtualization to be still a marginalized business despite being a hot topic for a few years now. Reichman told attendees of Compellent’s C-Drive customer conference in Minneapolis that just 17 percent of companies have virtualized their storage systems in some way, with another nine percent in the process of rolling out the technology, while 28 percent are interested in the idea.

“Virtualisation of storage is tepid,” Reichman said. “I would characterise it as tepid.”

Reichman said that virtualization is still seen as a little bit leading edge for some companies, and that they’re waiting for others to adopt the technology first.

“Any change is tough – storage is probably the most conservative part of data centres. People don’t want to take the chance on disrupting their data,” he said, adding companies are “kicking the tires but not really buying it.”

Read the rest of the article here.

VMware Formally Releases Project Northstar (Previously Thinstall) Beta 2

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VMware has today formally announced the release of Project Northstar Beta 2, the immediate result of its acquisition of desktop & application virtualization startup Thinstall earlier this year.

VMware Project Northstar

New features include:

  • Application Link: allows administrators to dynamically link Thinstall packages to one another, making it possible to create separate packages for interdependent components (such as Java or .NET) and use them across multiple Thinstall packages.
  • Application Sync: allows customers to execute updates to virtual applications through a secure Internet connection, increasing application portability while reducing security and patch risks to offline and out-of-network machines

Edwin Friesen has a great preview write-up with a helpful step-by-step guide.