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Parallels Appoints Microsoft Vet Birger Steen As Its New CEO

February 25, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Parallels has announced the promotion to CEO of current company President Birger Steen.

Parallels founder and outgoing CEO Serguei Beloussov will continue his full-time role as Executive Chairman of the Board and Chief Architect driving the company’s strategy and innovation.

Steen has been charged with managing and accelerating the growth Parallels has experienced in recent years. The profitable company generates more than $100 million in revenue.

Steen joined Parallels from Microsoft in September 2010. Since joining the company, Steen has overseen sales, marketing, product management, and customer support and services. He has also been integral in working with Beloussov to prepare the company for its next stage of growth.

As company president, Steen oversaw the launch of Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac and Parallels Plesk Panel 10.

In his expanded role, Steen will also be responsible for all day-to-day execution including engineering sales, partner relationships, support, marketing and deployment services.

Steen will work to further the company’s leadership in Cloud services enablement and desktop virtualization, where it has 78 percent market share according to NPD Group.

Prior to joining Parallels, Steen was Vice President of Small and Medium Business and Distribution at Microsoft. He held several other senior positions at the company since joining in 2002. He started his Microsoft career at as General Manager in Norway and then moved on to serve as General Manager and Vice President of Microsoft Russia.

Before Microsoft, Steen was CEO of Scandinavia Online AB, which was listed on the Stockholm and Oslo Stock Exchanges in 2000 under his leadership. Birger holds a Master of Science in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim and earned his MBA from INSEAD in France.

ManageEngine Adds Hyper-V Support To Application Management Software

January 21, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

ManageEngine, makers of a suite of network, systems, applications and security management software solutions, today announced support for monitoring Microsoft Hyper-V servers is now part of ManageEngine Applications Manager, the company’s server and application performance monitoring software.

ManageEngine started with VMware monitoring last year.

ManageEngine Applications Manager’s new monitoring capabilities help IT administrators gain insight into the health and performance of Hyper-V servers as well as the virtual machines configured in those servers. The software helps Operations teams troubleshoot problems quickly, reduce VM downtime and eliminate performance bottlenecks.

With the help of performance stats and in-depth reports, IT administrators can ensure their virtual systems are performing at optimum levels.

A 30-day fully functional trial edition of ManageEngine Applications Manager can be downloaded from the website. Pricing starts at $1,590 for the Professional Edition with the Hyper-V Monitor.

Quest Software’s Virtualization Monitoring Solution vFoglight Will Support Microsoft Hyper-V

September 1, 2010 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Quest Software today announced that vFoglight, its solution for virtualization monitoring and capacity planning, will support Microsoft Hyper-V and provide increased automation of virtual infrastructures with vFoglight 6.5, currently planned for release in Q4 2010.

vFoglight now also supports Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange.

Quest is working to set a new standard for analyzing and monitoring performance and capacity across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures while easing administration through automation.

Features and enhancements included in vFoglight 6.5 include:

Extended Hypervisor Support – Manage multiple hypervisor platforms, including VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, more consistently and effectively.
Administration – Reduce time and costs of empowering administrators to start, stop and pause VMs, in the context of daily activities.
Event Remediation – Administrators can view alarms then speed mean-time-to-resolution for problems by launching workflows to automate resolution.
User Perspectives – Designed to provide administrators tailored views for understanding performance monitoring, capacity planning, chargeback, and more.
Enhanced FAQts – First introduced with vFoglight 6.0, the enhanced FAQts in vFoglight 6.5 provide factual information about the dynamic infrastructure, displayed clearly for administrators.

Is The Virtualization Market “Up For Grabs”?

August 28, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Read-worthy article from InternetNews writer Stuart J. Johnston, claiming that the virtualization market is up for grabs based on a report by Information Technology Intelligence (ITIC), who surveyed 700 corporations worldwide and found that server virtualization deployments “have remained strong throughout the ongoing 2009 economic downturn.”

Among its conclusions are that Microsoft, despite a late start in most virtualization markets, is becoming the come-from-behind favorite, at least in the area of application virtualization.

“Thanks to the summer release of the new Hyper-V with live migration capabilities, with Hyper-V 2.0, Microsoft has substantially closed the feature/performance gap between itself and VMware’s ESX Server,” the report states.

Another top level take away for Microsoft: “Three out of five — 59 percent of the survey respondents — indicated their intent to deploy Hyper-V 2.0 within the next 12 to 18 months.”

“With Hyper-V, Microsoft has a very credible, competitive offering,” DiDio toldInternetNews.com. “Hypervisors, in general, have been commoditized” due to Microsoft’s commodity approach to virtualization.

For instance, Citrix is the market leader in desktop virtualization with a 19 percent market share.

In the same market, Microsoft holds a 15 percent share and VMware has 8 percent.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Microsoft will have the whole pie.

Full report is here.

Guest Post: “Fault tolerance a new key feature for virtualization”

August 6, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Below is a an article originally published on the guest author’s blog. Who’s the author, you ask?

Kevin Lawton! Bio: pioneer in x86 virtualization, serial entrepreneur, business and technology visionary, prolific idea creator, news and business book junkie. Founding team member in a microprocessor startup, the author and lead for two Open Source projects, a public speaker, and at the forefront of what is now a multi-billion dollar x86 virtualization industry. I have a degree in computer science and started my career at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

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Fault tolerance a new key feature for virtualization

VM migration has been a key feature and enabling technology which has differentiated VMware from Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Though as you may know, Windows Server 2008 R2 is slated for broad availability on or before October 22, 2009 (also the Windows 7 GA date), and Hyper-V will then support VM migration. So you may be wondering, what key new high-tech features will constitute the next battleground for differentiation amongst the virtualization players?

Five-Nines (99.999%) Meets Commodity Hardware

One such key feature is very likely to be fault tolerance (FT) — the ability for a running VM to suffer hardware failure on one machine, and to be restarted on another machine without losing any state. This is not just HA (High Availability), it’s CA (Continuous Availability)! And I believe it’ll be part of the cover-charge that virtualization vendors (VMware, Citrix/XenSource, Microsoft, et al) and providers such as Amazon will have to offer to stay competitive. When I talk about fault tolerance, I don’t mean using special/exotic hardware solutions — I’m talking about software-only solutions which handle fault tolerance in the hypervisor and/or other parts of the software stack.

Here’s a quick summary of where the various key vendors are w.r.t. fault tolerance. Keep watch of this space, because the VM migration battle is nearly over now.

VMware’s product line now offers Fault Tolerance, which they conceptually introduced at VMworld 2008. This was perhaps the biggest wow-factor feature VMware talked about at that VMworld. FT is not supported in VMware Essentials, Essentials Plus or vSphere Standard editions. It’s supported in more advanced(/expensive) versions.

In the Xen camp, there are two distinct FT efforts, Kemari and Remus. Integration/porting to Xen 4.0 are on theroadmap. If/when that occurs, the Xen ecosystem will benefit. After battle-testing, it’s easy to conceive of Amazon offering FT as a premium service. It does after all chew through more network capacity, and will necessitate extra high level logic on their part. There’s also a commercial FT solution for XenServer from Marathon, called everRun VM.

Microsoft appears to be leveraging a partnership with Marathon for their initial virtualization FT solution. This is probably smart given it allows Microsoft a way to quickly compete on fault tolerance, with a partner that’s been doing FT for a living. One would imagine this option will come at a premium though, perhaps a revenue opportunity for Microsoft for big-money customers, with an associated disadvantage vis-à-vis similar features based on free Xen technology and massive scale virtualization (clouds). That may make Marathon a strategic M&A target.

Licensing Issues, Part II

Just when you thought software-in-a-VM issues were mostly resolved, the same questions may be raised again for FT, given there is effectively a shadow copy of any given FT-protected VM. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft aggressively taking advantage of this situation, given they live at both virtualization/OS and application layers of the stack.

Networking is Key

Fault tolerance of VMs is yet another consumer and driver of high bandwidth, low latency networking. The value in the data center is trending from the compute hardware to the networking. FT is another way-point in the evolution of that trend, allowing continuous availability on commodity hardware. You probably won’t run it on all your workloads (they will run with a performance penalty), but you might start out with the most critical stateful workloads. If you want to do this on any scale, or with flexibility, architect with lots of networking capabilities. For zero-sum IT budgets, this would mean cheaper hardware and better networking, something that might be a little bitter-sweet for Cisco, given its entrance into the server market.