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Last Week’s Virtualization Headlines

May 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

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.

KVM Forum 2008 Schedule Has Been Announced

April 28, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

The schedule for the upcoming KVM 2008 forum in Nappa, CA is up.

Qumranet, as the main KVM sponsor, is inviting all KVM developers to their second KVM summit on June 10 to 13th at the Marriot Napa Valley, California.

Many of the world’s top kernel developers will gather to discuss the state of the union on KVM and virtualization technology in general. More specifically, the group will plan the technology roadmap and future of KVM.

Avi Kivity will be keynoting, and off course Qumranet will also talk about KVM in Solid ICE. Apart from that, there will be a variety of presentations from Red Hat, IBM, Transitive and Intel representatives.

Gerd Hoffmann of Red Hat (SUSE in a previous role) will be talking about mixing Xen and KVM with xenner, which is a utility able to run Xen paravirtualized kernels as guests on Linux hosts, without the Xen hypervisor and using kvm instead.

Different IBM people will be discussing the state of KVM on Big Iron and PowerPC. And there will also be some talk about Open-ovf , an open source software project around the Open Virtual Appliance Format.

Stay tuned for more!

(Full disclosure: Virtualization.com is a media partner of the KVM Forum 2008)

Motorola Joins Investors Behind VirtualLogix (Update)

April 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

According to PC World, Motorola has joined Cisco, Intel and Texas Instruments in funding mobile virtualization company VirtualLogix (see our previous coverage). Update: the official release went over the wire.

VirtualLogix lets a user access two separate operating systems on the same handset with its VLX for Mobile Handsets product line – allowing them to share some resources like memory, but also keeping other areas, such as applications, securely apart.

Today, the company plans to announce that Motorola is a new investor in the company. Motorola is interested in VirtualLogix primarily for its mobile phones, but has also expressed an interest in using it for virtualization in its network equipment, reportedly said Peter Richards, CEO of VirtualLogix.

More when the official announcement comes in!

Update: the official word is in, but doesn’t provide much more details. Motorola made the equity investment through Motorola Ventures, its strategic capital arm, without disclosing the size of the investment.

Motorola joins VirtualLogix’s current investors Atlas Venture, Cisco Systems, DFJ Esprit, Index Ventures, Intel Capital and Texas Instruments. The company raised $16 million in series B last July, and got an extra (undisclosed) equity investment from Texas Instruments last December. The total amount invested in the company so far is $28 million, and the company says it is open to more strategic investors joining the club.

Noteworthy, however, is the comment that was added by our media contact, which shows Motorola’s ambition:

“Motorola is rising to the challenge of competing against competitors like the iPhone to develop disruptive new handsets, that will be less expensive to develop, while providing a much richer user experience. Virtualization can give one phone two different personalities, making it possible to switch between work functionality and fun applications, even between plans and accounts on one device.”

[Source: SMS Text News]

Ars Technica Directions Symposium – Virtualization And Server Consolidation

April 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The great tech blog Ars Technica announced about two weeks ago that it would host a brand new community program in collaboration with Intel, dubbed ‘Directions: a Web Symposium’.

This week’s topic of the Directions Symposium is centered around virtualization and server consolidation. Intel has rounded up ten of their top virtualization experts, including a few Intel Principal Engineers, for participation in the new round of conversations.

Jump in if you’re interested!

Intel Hearts Virtualization

April 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

In a piece on Channel Insider, Steve Dallman, Channel Chief at Intel, says he and the company’s channel partners are seeing incredible growth in the server market, despite – and even thanks to – the increasing use of virtualization technology which should help reduce the number of servers.

“You would think with virtualization that you’d see fewer servers, but that’s not happening. The need for servers and server capacity is phenomenally large,” especially from the SMB (small and midsize business) market, Dallman said. “SMBs just don’t need to consolidate server farms,” he added.

Research firm Access Markets International said in January that global SMB server spending will reach $19.8 billion in 2008, a double-digit growth over 2007. While growth in the server space is still accelerating, Dallman said without virtualization, the growth in the space might be out of control.

“All virtualization is going to do is to moderate the growth in the server space to a level that’s manageable for both vendors and partners”, he said.

[Source: Channel Insider]

The Gap Between Hardware and Software

April 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Interesting read over at EE Times Asia, titled “IC industry addresses multicore, programming software gap“.

An excerpt:

“The semiconductor industry is starting to address what’s being called a software gap between a rising tide of multicore processors and a lack of parallel programming tools and techniques to make use of them.

The gap came into stark focus in the embedded world at the Multicore Expo, where chipmakers Freescale Semiconductor, Intel Corp., MIPS and a handful of silicon startups sketched out directions for their multicore products. Others warned that the industry has its work cut out for it delivering the software that will harness the next-generation chips.”

“There is a major gap between the hardware and the software,” said Eric Heikkila, director of embedded hardware research at Venture Development Corp. (VDC).

About 55 % of embedded system developers surveyed by VDC said they are using or will use multicore processors in the next 12 months. That fact is fueling the company’s projections that the market for embedded multicore processors will grow from about $372 million in 2007 to $2.47 billion in 2011.

In the PC market, the figures are even more dramatic. About 40 % of all processors Intel shipped in 2007 used multiple cores, but that will rise to 95 % in 2011, said Doug Davis, general manager of Intel’s embedded group.

But on the software side, vendors reported that only about 6 % of their tools were ready for parallel chips in 2007, a figure that will only rise to 40 % in 2011, VDC said. As much as 85 % of all embedded programming is now done in C or C++, languages that are “difficult to optimize for multicore,” said Heikkila.

Standardization

The Multicore Association announced at the Multicore Expo it has completed work on an applications programming interface for communications between cores, and is now working to define a standard for embedded virtualization.

“The ultimate goal of every computer scientist is to create a new language, but my personal view is we should not do it this time around,” said Wen-mei Hwu, a veteran researcher in parallel programming and professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, referring to a flowering of languages developed for big parallel computers two decades ago, many of which never gained traction. I believe there will be new language constructs in C/C++ to support some of the new frameworks people will develop, but even these constructs, if we are not careful, will not be widely adopted,” Hwu said. “Ultimately, I think we will make a small amount of extensions to C, but I think it’s too early.”

On-chip fabric

For their part, Freescale and Intel sketched out design trends they see on the horizon for their multicore chips.

“Freescale is now sampling the first dual-core versions of its PowerQuicc processors, aimed at telecom OEMs. The chips are part of a family that will eventually scale to 32-core devices”, said Dan Cronin, VP of R&D for Freescale’s networking division.

The processors will use a new on-chip interconnect fabric. They will also embed in hardware a hypervisor, a kind of low-level scheduling unit, co-developed with IBM according to specs set in the Power.org group. “Freescale will release an open source reference design for companies that want to build virtualization software that taps into the hypervisor”, Cronin said.

[Source: VMBlog]