vmware

Microsoft Bashes VMware With A New Website; “Get The Facts” Revisited?

September 23, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 3 Comments

Thanks for reading us. We are bundling all our VMworld 2008 coverage in one handy page, go check it out now for more reports and videos!

Microsoft had people dressed up like medieval Venetian models at the hotel entrance of last week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They distributed dollar chips and flyers to anybody wearing a VMworld bag, with on it the website address VmwareCostsWayTooMuch.com, which led VMware customers and partners to a landing page, on which the headlines all redirect to the Microsoft Hyper-V portal.

The guerilla marketing tactics actually worked, with coverage from publications like NetworkWorld, ZDNet Blogs, Channel Marker, Virtualization Information, Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies blog, and others.

We ignore whether this smear marketing stunt was inspired by the US presidential campaign, but it was certainly not the first time Microsoft engages into heads-on advertising. Last time around it was targeted against Linux. However, we were never aware of Microsoft distributing any leaflets with GetTheFacts.com at the entrance of LinuxWorldExpo or LinuxTag. It is also quite funny to observe that Linux distributions (starting with SUSE) are now supported as Guest Operating Systems on Hyper-V and that Redmond advertises this feature extensively.

Microsoft even provides integration components and technical support for customers running select Linux distributions (limited to SUSE for the moment) as guest operating systems. IF history repeats itself, VMware can be reassured that in a few years this type of Microsoft campaign results in supporting a competing technology.

It took the VMware conference staff a little while to get notified about the leaflets and some more time before they got the hotel staff at The Venetion to stop the flyers from being handed out at the entrance of their annual user conference, attracting over 14.000 attendees to Las Vegas. It is estimated at least 4.000 flyers were distributed in the elapsed time.

The distributed 1 dollar chips were actually valid inside The Venetian Casino. This guerilla marketing initiative has cost at least 4.000 dollars in casino money, but the website and distribution must have cost a lot more.

It is hard to believe The Venetian did not make the connection between selling a few thousand ‘Dollar chips’ to Microsoft and concurrently renting their entire event facilities and rooms to VMware. Especially with those video cameras and security personell all over, it can be assumed Microsoft had obtained some sort of permission before handing out those free chips at the hotel entrance.

What do you think about this remarkable anti-VMware propaganda? Does it make MS look desperate as the new kid on the hypervisor block? Does it suit a multinational that runs entirely on ‘expensive‘ licenses to attack a ‘partner’ at its annual user conference over that very cost element? Do the facts that they present on their marketing website actually make sense? What boomerang effect can they expect? How would Microsoft react if Sun would hand out flyers at the gates of TechEd or DevDays with a catchy URL: GetOfficeForFreeAndStopPayingMicrosoft.Com. We look forward to seeing who will register that available domain. 🙂

As we all know, hypervisors are a commodity nowadays and just like Xen and Hyper-V, it must be said that ESX comes free of license cost too. At Virtualization.com, we like to think the value and related cost are no longer in that free naked hypervisor, but in the integrated management and extended tool sets that surround it.

If you were among those first 4.000 VMworld attendees, feel free to tell us how much you made with your Microsoft dollars on the gambling tables and if that was enough to cover/upgrade a VMware license?

Parallels Readying Attack on VMware Fusion With Desktop 4

September 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

AppleInsider has taken a close look at a few features of the upcoming Parallels Desktop 4, which will be Parallels’ answer to the latest release of VMware Fusion 2.0.

“Those aware of the changes say the new release will be Parallels’ first to make good on promise made in early January that it would enable virtualization of Mac OS X Server on Macs already running the operating system, making use of a change in licensing terms with Leopard’s release late last year that permits more than one copy to run at the same time.

Such features have been frequently requested by IT administrators, who on Linux and Windows have already been able to segregate individual apps away from the main operating system in the event of a crash or a security breach.”

Ars Technica adds:

“Desktop 4’s performance will also be beefed up by adding DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 support, an improved virtualization engine, and support for multiple cores and more RAM.

A makeover for the new version of Parallels Desktop is also in the cards, including a redesigned and simplified interface and more Terminal-based controls. In addition, the team is working on improving the ACPI interface (used for shutdowns and sleeping), and should be adding virtual machine resizing and 64-bit support. Based on those features, the software shouldn’t have a hard time catching up to Fusion, but I hope the team has something else waiting in the wings.”

Parallels

BakBone Software Introduces NetVault: Backup VMware Plugin

September 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

BakBone Software, a provider of heterogeneous integrated data protection solutions, announced that it is providing VMware data protection with a solution that protects both individual and entire groups of VMware ESX Servers, requires no scripting and is integrated with VMware technology and techniques.

BakBone’s NetVault: Backup VMware Plugin offers integration through the NetVault: Backup user interface, providing a way to provide VMware data protection. While other solutions on the market require complex scripting to work properly with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), BakBone incorporates these capabilities into a point-and-click user interface , the company said.

The NetVault: Backup VMware Plugin gives administrators integration with supported devices, including a VTL, SAN, NDMP or locally-attached drives. It offers granularity for Windows on VMware by allowing customers to backup and restore individual files within virtual machines and empowers storage administrators to create backup policies without the need to understand VCB internals or create complex scripts.

The Virtual Infrastructure Evolves Into The Virtual Datacenter OS

September 16, 2008 by Lode Vermeiren 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.

vMAN Over At DMTF Is Immune To Kryptonite And Now Powered by OVF Version 1.0

September 16, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

Like superheroes with a weak spot (remember Superman and green Kryptonite), large providers of green data center technologies and virtualization software had an Achilles’ heel with their vendor lock-in, which scared away quite a few prospects. Today the major players have all agreed to drop their distinct proprietary formats and aim to adopt the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 as soon as possible (most are already compliant upon release). We first learned about OVF during our interview with Ian Pratt and the release of this open standard is a great step forward. The short lead time of ‘only’ one year proves the industry has understood that open standards are the way to go.

Above is our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld in Las Vegas, where DMTF president Winston Bumpus revealed the release of OVF 1.0 and their larger Virtualization Management Initiative (vMAN). vMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments. Ultimately, the group’s goal is to eliminate the need for IT managers to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications, by enabling automated management of the virtual machine lifecycle.

This new specification created by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource is about to become an industry standard and aspires to help ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. We did not have the time to transcribe the interview yet, but already took a few of Winston Bumpus’ quotes from the DMTF press release.

“With the increasing demand for virtualization in enterprise management, the new spec developed through this industry-wide collaboration dove-tails nicely into existing virtualization management standardization activity within the DMTF…
OVF extends the work we have underway to offer IT managers automation of critical, error-prone activities in the deployment of a virtualized infrastructure.”

By collaborating on the development of the OVF specification, the DMTF group aims to make it easier for IT organizations to pre-package and certify software packaged as virtual machine templates for deployment in their virtualized infrastructure and to facilitate the secure distribution of pre-packaged virtual appliances by ISVs and virtual appliance vendors.