Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Paul Maritz

Industry Moves: VMware Taps Tod Nielsen For Chief Operating Officer Role

by Leave a Comment

VMware announced today the appointment of Tod Nielsen to the newly created role of Chief Operating Officer. Nielsen will report directly to President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz.Nielsen, 43, joins VMware from Borland Software Corporation where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer since November 2005. Prior to Borland, Nielsen held several key executive management positions at leading software companies including Microsoft, BEA and Oracle.

Nielsen brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in enterprise software and application development to VMware. Prior to Borland, Nielsen served as senior vice president, marketing and global sales support for Oracle Corporation. Prior to Oracle, Nielsen was the chief marketing officer and executive vice president of engineering at BEA Systems, where he had overall responsibility for BEA’s worldwide marketing strategy and operations, as well as all research and development operations. Nielsen joined BEA after the acquisition of his private company, Crossgain Inc., where he served as its chief executive officer. Nielsen also spent twelve years with Microsoft Corporation, in various roles, including general manager of database and developer tools, vice president of developer tools, and, vice president of Microsoft’s platform group.

VMware Takes Virtualization To Mobile Phones

by Leave a Comment

VMware today announced plans to bring virtualization to mobile phones through the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), reports The New York Times and plenty of others. Built on innovative technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008, VMware MVP should help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone.

We didn’t know about the acquisition of Trango VP, but we did write about the company before.

“VMware is excited to extend the benefits of virtualization, which we pioneered for x86 hardware, to the mobile phone market,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, we expect that virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users. We look forward to working closely with our partners to bring new mobile solutions to market faster.”

VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It will be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP is planned to enable handset vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.

As NYTimes writes:

You can bet that Intel, an investor in VMware, will back the technology. The chip maker has a new line of mobile device processors sold under the Atom brand.

VMware Earnings Call: Solid Q3, Maritz Not Afraid Of Microsoft

by Leave a Comment

VMware reported better than expected financial results today and said it was standing by its forecast for the rest of the year, albeit at the lower end of its guidance.

Revenue for the third quarter was US$472 million, up 32 percent from the same period a year ago. That’s slower growth than VMware has reported in the past, but still ahead of the $463 million that financial analysts had been expecting, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.

Net income was $83 million, or $0.21 per share, up from $65 million, or $0.18 per share, in the third quarter last year. That too was ahead of the analyst forecast, which called for earnings of $0.20 per share.

VMware maintained its forecast for 2008 revenue growth of 42 percent to 45 percent, but it cautioned that the economic uncertainty makes it difficult to predict demand for its products. It said there was “an increased likelihood that 2008 revenue will be at the lower end of the guidance range.”

VMware CEO Paul Maritz called the figures “solid” in the face of a “challenging economic environment.” During the call with financial analysts, Maritz also said VMware has not seen its sales drop off since Microsoft introduced Hyper-V into the virtualization market in June. Maritz is also confident that VMware’s product roadmap is a full 12 to 24 months ahead of Microsoft’s virtualization roadmap.

The Virtual Infrastructure Evolves Into The Virtual Datacenter OS

by 3 Comments

More and more details on what VMware calls the “Virtual Datacenter OS” are starting to come out of VMworld. The new CEO, Paul Maritz, is expected to elaborate on this new strategy in today’s keynote. (update: check our live blog coverage)

(Update 2: also check the coverage on Between The Lines and Virtually Speaking, both ZDNet blogs)

The VDC-OS is not a new product per se, but an umbrella name for a set of products and features, much like VMware Virtual Infrastructure is composed of ESX server, VirtualCenter and features like DRS, HA and VMotion.

VDC-OS is a natural evolution from the “virtual infrastructure” approach, which no longer only includes the virtualization servers and their shared storage and networking, but also the “next layer” in the virtualization stack, both upwards and downwards: VDC-OS no longer stops at the guest OS level, but provides application services as well, and in the other direction goes beyond the local network and is aware of the bigger picture.

The building blocks that make up VDC-OS will sound very familiar to beta testers of ESX 4.0 and technology partners. They include some new features, recent acquisitions and better integrated versions of the current product line-up, as well as third-party add-ons bearing the VMware Ready logo. All of these are called “vServices”.

The three big areas of vServices VMware identifies are:

  • Application vServices – Availability, Security, Scalability
  • Infrastructure vServices – vCompute, vStorage, vNetwork and vCloud
  • Management vServices – vCenter (the new name for VirtualCenter)

The new and current features in depth:

Application Services
Availability:

  • HA, VMotion, Storage VMotion, NIC/HBA teaming
  • VMware Fault tolerance, formerly known as “Continuous availability” – which allows a VM to run on two hosts simultaneously, using lock-stepping of CPU instructions. (new)
  • vCenter Data Recovery – built-in disk-based backup and recovery of VMs and the files within them, including data deduplication. (new)

Security

  • ESXi, a stripped-down hypervisor in only 32 MB of code, to reduce the attack surface
  • VMware vSafe (first announced at VMworld Europe), with third party support add-ons from IBM, Checkpoint, Radware and McAfee, who will announce their first products today (new)

Scalability

  • DRS
  • Hot add of virtual CPU, memory and PCIe devices like network adapters (new)
  • Very large VMs with 8 virtual CPUs and 256 GB of RAM (new)

Infrastructure Services

vCompute

  • CPU/Memory optimization with hardware assists, page sharing and memory ballooning
  • DRS
  • VMDirectPath – enabling wirespeed network access to VMs (new)
  • Paravirtualized SCSI – providing more iops per second at lower latency (new)

vStorage

  • VMFS
  • Linked clones (first demonstrated at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco) – allows multiple VMs to run from the same base disk (new)
  • Storage VMotion
  • Thin Provisioning (new)
  • APIs to closer work together with storage arrays (new)

vNetwork

  • more offload technologies to reduce virtualization overhead
  • Distributed vNetwork virtual switches (new)
  • Third-party virtual switches – the first one to be announced today by Cisco (new)

Cloud Services (vCloud)

  • VMotion and Storage VMotion (within the “internal cloud”)
  • VMware vCloud (new)
  • Network vMotion – preserving network and security policies when a virtual machine is being migrated (new)
  • vApp – an encapsulation of a VM and its policies and service levels, based on OVF (new)

Management

vCenter replaces VirtualCenter, and integrates the add-on products today known as Stage Manger, Lab Manager and the likes. It integrates withing other management frameworks from the likes of IBM and CA.

  • vCenter AppSpeed – performance monitoring and remediation to guarantee service levels. (new)
  • vCenter Orchestrator – to automate repetitive workflows
  • vCenter CapacityIQ – proactive capacity planning for entire VI environments
  • vCenter Chargeback – to allow IT departments or cloud service providers to charge based on VM usage
  • vCenter ConfigControl – called “update manager on steroids” by VMware, a central way to configure and update the virtual data center
  • Host Profiles – to standardize the setup of ESX hosts using templates

Watch out for more announcements by VMware and its partners in the coming hours and days.

vCloud: VMware To Be Cloud Computing Provider Too, But Inside Your Private DC (And Not Tomorrow)

by 3 Comments

Many of the 14.000 attendants to VMworld will be happy to learn they are not going to be out of their jobs soon. Especially with cloud providers threatening to reduce corporate IT departments, completely virtualized datacenters are believed to be the future. VMware intends to keep those datacenters under their corporate client’s control on standardized X86 hardware.

(Update: link to the ‘Virtual Datacenter OS for VMware‘ product page and its Cloud vServices)

(Update 2: the link to the official press release, more comments below and a mention on Between The Lines)

Will vCloud be introduced as a cure against outsourcing to third party data centers? It is VMware’s aspiration to offer every business the flexible infrastructure associated with Amazon, Google and Salesforce. However without the need to offer excess computing power to external clients. VMware is not alone with this vision as this is very close to the network grail George Kurian at Cisco envisions:

What is most important in the virtualization world is to not to think about your data center as traditional silos of storage, server, network, firewall, application… We need to bring virtualization into the network… If you think about networking speeds and latency getting faster and lower respectively, you can, in essence, really extend virtualization to all aspects of IT systems. Down the road we see the opportunity to drive things like processor virtualization, memory virtualization, as interconnect speeds go up dramatically and latencies reduce over the next two to three years.

VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz (who was an early believer in cloud computing) will use this vCloud announcement (not a product release) to warm up the 14,000 people expected at its annual conference in Las Vegas this week. According to a well researched article by Patrick Thibodeau over at Computer World:

… the planned cornerstone product is VMware’s Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) for managing the underlying systems, or “internal cloud.” Desktops and laptops are part of this virtualization umbrella, with their operating systems running in a virtual machine on the client computer that is managed back from the data center. VMware also wants to make it possible for IT managers to seamlessly tap into the resources of third-party hosting providers in the same way they can now move server resources inside their data center. It calls this new technology vCloud. VMware’s product set, including its VDC-OS, is limited to x86 architectures. That’s why Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s senior director of product marketing cited Google as the example of IT’s Parthenon, and not the data center of some other Fortune 100 company. Google has standardized on x86. Most other large companies and many mid-sized firms also have environments that include RISC-based servers, Unix operating systems and midrange systems running Cobol-based applications that have been developed over decades — not on the new systems that Google has bought and built in its 10 short years….
Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., believes VMware’s approach will raise interesting questions for hardware vendors, in particular, about its long-term impact on their products. If all x86 systems are treated as virtual pools, the underlying hardware may be of less consequence, he said.

The initiative has broad support from partners across the industry, including BT, Rackspace, SAVVIS, Sungard, T-Systems, and Verizon Business.

Intel will not be shocked by that conclusion as it will gladly ship those six core processors. Neither will HP be panicking as it has been succesfully integrating its own virtualization suites across multiple platforms (X86, Integrity) and continues to extend its Opsware capabilities. And Sun went open source with its xVM Server as outgrowth of the Xen project that even supports SPARC and Solaris.

We are very curious if “vCloud” as a product name is going to survive the release cycles and the vetting by their marketing department. It also has to be noted that vCloud is specifically intentend to be an Operating System for all aspects of the virtual datacenter. We suggest to rather name it the VDC-framework, as it seems to contain sets of services to be extended in very standardized ways (APIs & SDKs) and no direct interaction with the underlying hardware. The Xen model has proven to be very successful with such ‘extensions’ by third party ISVs.

We could not help to notice that the domain name vCloud.com redirects to VoiceCloud.com, which is powered by that omni-present cloud provider: Amazon Web Services.

VMware’s partners do learn there is some good news to with plenty of room to hook on those new API sets and offer their tools for managing heterogeneous hypervisor environments or as Balkansky boldly puts it:

“Our strategy for now is to provide richer capabilities for our operating systems rather than provide some shallow capabilities for other platforms”.

Update: More interesting links on this VMworld keynote surprise spoiler:

Update On ESX 3.5 Issue: A Letter from Paul Maritz

by Leave a Comment

—

New VMware CEO Paul Maritz has issued an official statement about the major bug plaguing customers who had updated to ESX / ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and experienced a serious problem yesterday due to a mistake in the licensing code.

The letter in full:

“Last night, we became aware of a code issue with the recently released update to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2).

When the time clock in a server running ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 hits 12:00AM on August 12th, 2008, the released code causes the product license to expire.  The problem has also occurred with a recent patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  When an ESX or ESXi 3.5 server thinks its license has expired, the following can happen:

  • Virtual machines that are powered off cannot be turned on;
  • Virtual machines that have been suspended fail to leave suspend mode; and,
  • Virtual machines cannot be migrated using VMotion.

The issue was caused by a piece of code that was mistakenly left enabled for the final release of Update 2.  This piece of code was left over from the pre-release versions of Update 2 and was designed to ensure that customers are running on the supported generally available version of Update 2.

In remedying the situation, we’ve already released an express patch for those customers that have installed/upgraded to ESX or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  Within the next 24 hours, we also expect to issue a full replacement for Update 2, which should be used by customers who want to perform fresh installs of ESX or ESXi.

I am sure you’re wondering how this could happen.  We failed in two areas:

  • Not disabling the code in the final release of Update 2; and
  • Not catching it in our quality assurance process.

We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers.  We have kicked off a comprehensive, in-depth review of our QA and release processes, and will quickly make the needed changes.

I want to apologize for the disruption and difficulty this issue may have caused to our customers and our partners.  Your confidence in VMware is extremely important to us, and we are committed to restoring that confidence fully and quickly.

Thank You,

Paul Maritz
President and CEO
VMware”