virtualisation

Breaking: Diane Greene Leaves VMware, Paul Maritz To Become CEO and President

July 8, 2008 by Robin Wauters 13 Comments

VMware co-founder Diane Greene (see BusinessWeek profile) has been ousted as president and chief executive of the company and will be replaced by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz (we reported on him joining EMC’s cloud computing division earlier this year), effective immediately. The company also said that while it “is not updating guidance for the second quarter, we expect revenues for the full year of 2008 will be modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007.” The mean estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial was for 51% growth to $2 billion.

Shares of the virtualization software maker went tumbling in recent trading. The stock was recently down 24.3% to $40.26 a share. Shares have fallen by two-thirds the past eight months. The stock went public at $29 and rocketed in its first two months of trading to as high as $125 a share.

On Fortune.com’s Go West blog, Adam Lashinsky writes that VMware “was so loved by investors that it singlehandedly drove the valuation of EMC, whose best move this decade may have been buying VMware before it had the opportunity to go public the first time.”

Things change. VMware stock is falling big time since the news got out.

It’s highly likely that EMC has replaced Diane Greene because of the poor revenue outlook. Also worth noting is that we reported a rumor earlier today about VMware possibly being fully spun out of EMC (which now becomes highly unlikely, considering Paul Maritz’ track record).

We’ll post more details as soon as they’re available. We’re wondering how the VMware troops will react on the news, and what will happen with Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist at VMware and Greene’s husband.

This is the official take from the company’s chairman, Joe Tucci:

“As one of the founders and the leader of VMware, Diane guided the creation and development of a company that is changing the way that people think about computing,” Tucci said in the statement. “The Board thanks her for her considerable contributions to VMware and wishes her every success in the future.”

Reuters has a comment from Jefferies and Co analyst Katherine Egbert, who was disappointed the company did not hold a conference call to explain why it was cutting its revenue forecast.

“She said she suspects VMware is concerned that sales of its server virtualization software will get squeezed by new competition from Microsoft, which late last month started selling a rival product. Microsoft introduced that product, which costs far less than VMware’s offering, six weeks ahead of its previously announced launch date.”

Update: VMwareVideos reminded us of this video of Diane Greene talking about VMworld.

They also found this one featuring the new CEO and President, Paul Maritz, an ex-Microsoft Corp executive, reflecting on what it’s like to have Bill Gates review your stuff.

[Source: MarketWatch]

Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 1/2)

July 8, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 4 Comments

A month ago we reported on how you can build your own open source cloud on clusters to make your personal cloud dreams come true! Simply put your datacenter to use by ordering Xen virtualization on the Rocks and then carefully roll it in fresh Eucalyptus leaves.

In order to learn what makes these clouds tick, we have sent our enthusiastic cloud computing koala Toon Vanagt to San Francisco to interview Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski at the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Below, you can find the first part of this exclusive video interview (we’ll post the second part tomorrow).

Rich’s students came up with EUCALYPTUS, which stands for ‘Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems’ as an open-source tool for doing “cloud computing”. Their tool is designed to stimulate the development, interest, experiments and research into the nascent concept and industry of cloud computing.

Eucalyptus was build in a modular fashion, so it can “mimic” the interface of popular commercial clouds, like the one they started off with, Amazon EC2. The team plans support for several cloud interfaces as long as they are public and well documented.

Rich underlined that Eucalyptus is designed to experiment and not to compete with industrial strength clouds as Amazon EC2. Although with some engineering, one could take parts of Eucalyptus, mature those and scale to specific needs.

When asked about the underlying virtualization experience, Xen is seen as a very useful technology in ‘cloud’ regards. Rich complements Xen on being well documented and conceptually easy to understand and he looks back at the Xen selection as a good first hypervisor choice. Due to the nature of their specific use, parts of Xen would ‘break’ under load and were modified to meet certain stability needs.

As LibVert is used, Eucalyptus should in theory be relatively easy be able to support other hypervisors such as VMware and KVM. If no major wrinkles appear on the development surface, Eucalyptus therefore expects to support VMware and KVM with its 2.0 release, scheduled for early September 2008.

Rich supportively points to the Enomalism elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure. as an alternative open source virtualization system.

Security remains an issue but in some respects, accountability and authentication are an even bigger problem to the open source community than within commercial projects. “In an academic space, where you are not paying for usage, it is not a credit card that you are accounting to, but a user”. So Eucalyptus had to devise a user accounting system that is based on certificates. On top of that components should not be ‘spoofable’, as there is no message encryption in Eucalyptus (yet). Because these messages can be spoofed, Rich’s team had to take care of an open source implementation of Web Services Security to make sure the cloud controllers cannot be ‘fooled’ by malicious messages of doubtful origin.

The shortage of public IP addresses in university environments was solved by using the open source technology VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). [VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network that can be spawned over a set of physical computer over the Internet. You can see VDE as the software incarnation of a hardware network switch plus attached cables. Using the vde_switch and vde_plug programs you are able to create quite complex virtual analogies of a network that can span several hosts, even across the Internet.

By creating a virtual Ethernet for every cluster allocation and make that a set of user space processes can tunnel through NATs (Network Address Translation). As a downside to this VDE implementation comes a performance penalty. So Eucaluptus is offered with 2 flavors, linked to the SLA-nature in cloud computing. The first option uses the described very flexible ‘Virtual VLAN’ independent of IP-addresses. The second option bypasses VDE and is faster but less scalable as limits user requests to the confines of a single cluster.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish the second part of this exclusive interview. Stay tuned!

VMware Online Store Now Has Academic Discounts on Workstation and Fusion

July 8, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

For current students, prospective university students, or academic faculty and staff, VMware has just made it easier to purchase VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion at an academic discount. Through the all new academic portal, students can get a discount to up to 50% off the commercial list pricing if they purchase VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion for personal use.

Previously, the only way to get access to VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation at their academic prices was to purchase at an outlet like a campus book store that happened to stock the software.

EMC Shares Up On VMware Spin-out Rumors

July 8, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Update: you might want to read this article about VMware co-founder Diane Greene leaving VMware before you read this post. Come back, though 😉

Financial analyst Thomas Curlin of RBC Capital Markets upped his rating on the EMC stock to “Outperform” from “Sector Perform”, even as it trimmed the stock’s price target from $21 to a more modest $19. The focus of his call: the prospects for a spin-out of the company’s stake in VMware.

Curlin notes that the company can spin out VMware to shareholders with minimal tax implications starting in early 2009. In his research note, Curlin writes:

“Management recently has suggested it does not plan to spin out VMware, but if the stock remains at current levels, we believe it could be forced to do so by activist shareholders. This possible scenario is a key aspect of our recommendation upgrade as it provides downside protection in a challenging macro context.”

Curlin figures that EMC is trading at a value of about $6.25 ex its stake in VMW; but he thinks the non-VMW business is worth $10-$14 a share. Shares of EMC closed at $15.05.

[Source: Tech Trader Daily]

IDC Research Shows Strong Server Virtualization Adoption in Europe

July 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

According to ONStor, Europe’s lagging in storage virtualization adoption. Recent research from IDC, however, shows the pace of adoption of virtualized servers is incredibly rapid among organizations that are using virtualization, with 35% of servers purchased in 2007 being virtualized and 52% of those bought in 2008 expected to be so. 54% of those not using virtualization expect to do so in the next 18 months.

“Virtualization use has exploded since our last survey of the European market,” said Chris Ingle, consulting and research director, IDC’s Systems Group. “Both large organizations and smaller businesses are using the technology for a wider range of applications and for business critical projects. As use of virtualization grows the challenges around managing complexity, finding skills and software licensing become more apparent”

Further Findings Include:

Organizations are increasing their virtualization of x86 systems for core business applications, although the majority of virtualization is still for test and development and for network server applications. Expertise and skills are the biggest barrier to virtualization adoption.
Growth of virtualization as a strategy remains strong, rising from 46% of the base to 54%. What is interesting is that virtualization is growing as a datacenter strategy in itself rather than as part of other projects. This supports the view that virtualization is increasingly seen as a standard for a wide range of workloads.
VMware is the clear market leader in providing virtualization technology with 82% of the sample using VMware. Despite high levels of Linux use, only 3% of the sample were using Xen as their virtualization platform. Microsoft was used by 13% of the sample base with various Unix technologies and mainframe accounting for 14%.
59% of implementations have fewer than four VMs or partitions per physical box. The largest growth area for virtualization use over the past year, particularly in small and medium businesses, is improving disaster recovery, backup, and enhancing availability.
Availability of skills and application vendor licensing are the factors causing most problems for virtualization users. 23% of virtualization users report that their application vendors’ licensing is still not meeting their needs and 33% of large businesses report that it limits use of virtualization.
Despite seeing virtualization as a vital tool for their business, the majority of organizations do not measure benefits and use virtual infrastructure in the same way they do physical infrastructure.

The IDC study was first carried out in 2007 and has been repeated in Q1 2008 with a larger sample of organizations and a wider range of questions.