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

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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 🙂

To Virtualize or not to Virtualize (Windows Vista),That’s The Question

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Just in case you haven’t heard, Microsoft flip-flopped its earlier decision not to allow users to run Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium as guest operating systems on a virtual machine. Mac users, and virtualization software vendors such as Parallels can rejoice over the news, which has been extensively covered all over the web , with the best commentary coming from:

 CNET News ,  ZDNet blogs, Ars Technica and The Register .

Microsoft Betting Big on Virtualization; Acquires Calista Technologies. Citrix Up Next?

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Microsoft plans to announce today what it calls a companywide strategy to accelerate broad adoption of virtualization by its customers. As part of the its new approach, the Redmond-based software giant unveiled a suite of services aimed at reducing the number of servers businesses need to use, separating applications from operating systems, reducing costs and lowering carbon emissions.

Microsoft announced that it competed acquisition of Calista Technologies , a California-based startup that makes computer graphics for virtualized computers, and an expanded partnership with Citrix Systems, a VMware competitor based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Microsoft and Citrix will jointly market services that virtualize computers, operating systems and applications.

Microsoft wouldn’t disclose how much it paid for Calista, but Roger Kay, President of technology research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates,  speculates that the price tag was likely south of $100 million. He also says Microsoft may be interested in acquiring Citrix. “Citrix, on its own, has a small market share,” Kay says. “VMware was cleaning its clock.” A Microsoft-Citrix combination could present formidable competition to VMware, he suggests. Buying Citrix, however, would be a significant deal: The company has a market cap of $6.4 billion.

[Source: Forbes ]

Q-layer Announces € 7 ($ 9) Million Round.

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Belgian based virtualization start-up Q-layer just announced that it has closed a € 7 million ($ 9 million) round with Wellington Partners, Partech International and Big Bang Ventures.

This funding seems to confirm the industry trust among venture capitalists that 2007 will be the virtualization break-through year and that there is room in this market for more than VMware, Xen and Microsoft.

After a € 1.4 million first round in May 2006, Q-layer announced that Munich-based Wellington Partners and San Francisco-based Partech International have taken the lead in a € 7 million ($ 9 million) investment in the company. The lead investor of the first round, Big Bang Ventures will also participate in this round. Q-layer plans to use the proceeds of this round to build up its market presence in the US and Europe. As a result of this investment, Bart Markus of Wellington Partners and Nicolas El Baze of Partech International will join Kristof De Spiegeleer (founder & CEO); Niko Nelissen (VP Business Development) and Frank Maene of Big Bang Ventures on the board of directors.

BEA to run Java sans operating system

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C|Net reports that BEA Systems has created a version of its Java application server designed for virtualization technology, using an approach that cuts the operating systems out of the picture. At the company’s customer conference in Beijing this week, BEA will give details of a forthcoming product called WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and of related products, including an administration application.

WebLogic Server is a Java application server used to run Java programs, such as high-volume Web sites. The virtual edition is a break from BEA’s current offering in that it was written to run on VMware’s hypervisor, which is the basis for VMware’s virtualization software.

Some virtualization software uses a hypervisor that lets a single computer run several instances of an individual software package.

In BEA’s case, it created software called Liquid VM. Liquid VM is an addition to the company’s JRockit Java virtual machine, which runs directly on VMware’s hypervisor.

That virtual machine allows Java programs to interact with hardware servers without the need for an operating system, according to Stephen Hess, director of product management for the WebLogic Platform.

The goal of the virtualization push at BEA is to give IT administrators a set of tools to consolidate several Java applications on a single server and to optimize their performance, he said. Typically, virtualization is used in corporate data centers to improve the utilization of existing servers by putting several workloads on a single machine.

“Our goal was to double the utilization by running natively,” said Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic products, “and to double the performance.” The setup will allow companies to create new instances of Java applications to meet spikes in demand in a few seconds, compared with 45 minutes, as is the case now, he said.

WebLogic Server Virtual Edition is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of next year. An accompanying management console for administrators, called Liquid Operations Control, is due in the summer of 2007.

The company intends to create editions of its WebLogic virtualization software to run on virtualization packages from Xen and Microsoft, executives said…

Read more on this article by Martin LaMonica at source

Cassatt launches first cross-virtualization management solution

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VMware, Xen and Microsoft soon to be constrolled from a vendor neutral solution?

Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software and services to enable agile IT infrastructures, today announced general availability of the Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM).
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XVM helps customers rein in the growing problem of “virtual machine sprawl,” using a vendor-neutral architecture to automate control across virtual servers from multiple sources, including VMware, Xen, and Microsoft.
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XVM allows customers to host any combination of virtual machines, including VMware ESX, VMware Server, Xen, and Microsoft Virtual Server. In addition, customers can manage their physical servers from a range of vendors including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and others.
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XVM provides an array of control and automation capabilities including:

* Automated software deployment for both physical and virtual servers – including the ability to run the same software image on either a virtual server or directly on a bare-metal server.
* Automated responses to failures of both physical and virtual servers, enabling high availability for applications.
* Automatic scaling of applications by creating additional virtual servers on physical machines that have available CPU and memory capacity…

The Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM), with support for VMware ESX and VMware Server is now generally available. Support for Xen will be available in June 2006. Support for Microsoft Virtual Server is planned for the second half of 2006…

InfoWorld reports on their pricing:

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The XVM software costs $1,250 per physical node. Pricing for the Collage platform starts at $100,000 for a 40-node environment, and the WAM module adds an additional $5,000 per node…

Read the Infoworld article at source.