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Former Citrix GM Joins VMTurbo As President And CEO

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VMTurbo, a provider of intelligent workload management software to assure application performance, today announced that N. Louis Shipley, formerly General Manager of Citrix Xen Products Group, has joined VMTurbo as President and CEO. Shipley replaces VMTurbo founder Shmuel Kliger, who will focus on product and technology strategy as well as strategic partnerships.

Shipley was President and CEO of Reflectent Software, an end user application performance monitoring company acquired by Citrix in 2006. He was General Manager of the Citrix Management Systems group, then took on the role of General Manager of Citrix XenServer when Citrix acquired XenSource in 2007.

Lou joined Reflectent in December 2002 after working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Highland Capital Partners. Prior to Highland, Lou served as Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for WebLine Communications, a customer contact center software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $325 million.

He also will join the VMTurbo board of directors. Shipley replaces VMTurbo founder Shmuel Kliger as President and CEO. Kliger will focus on product and technology strategy as well as strategic partnerships.

Update: Xen 4.1.1 Maintenance Release

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The Xen.org community has announced that there is a new maintenance release of Xen available, version 4.1.1. It includes the following changes:

– Security fixes including CVE-2011-1583 CVE-2011-1898

– Enhancements to guest introspection (VM single stepping support for very fine-grained access control)

– Many stability improvements, such as: PV-on-HVM stability fixes (fixing some IRQ issues), XSAVE cpu feature support for PV guests (allows safe use of latest multimedia instructions), RAS fixes for high availability, fixes for offlining bad pages and changes to libxc, mainly of benefit to libvirt

– Compatibility fixes for newer Linux guests, newer compilers, some old guest savefiles, newer Python, grub2, some hardware/BIOS bugs.

Citrix Commercializes OpenStack With ‘Project Olympus’

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Citrix will soon be rolling out a new OpenStack product that would let customers build private or public clouds. The company has added Project Olympus, a new cloud product, to its open cloud computing portfolio to complement its Citrix NetScaler Cloud Gateway and NetScaler Cloud Bridge.

Citrix Systems announced Project Olympus, a new cloud infrastructure product based on the open-source cloud operating system OpenStack, at Citrix Synergy a few weeks ago. It will be the first commercialized version of OpenStack and will begin shipping later this year, Citrix said.

Based on OpenStack, Project Olympus will help customers build real infrastructure-as-a-service clouds that are scalable, efficient and open by design because they use the same architecture, approach and technology behind “some of today’s largest and most successful clouds in the world,” Citrix added.

Project Olympus will be composed of two components, a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer. It will support a wide range of infrastructure, management and development technologies to make it easy for customers to expand and build on the platform, Citrix said.

Project Olympus will also support Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere in addition to Citrix XenDesktop.

OpenStack began as a joint effort between Rackspace and NASA back in July 2010. The effort has since expanded to include more than 70 industry partners, including Citrix. OpenStack supports multiple virtualization hypervisor platforms, including Hyper-V, KVM and Xen.

Xen Releases Cloud Platform (XCP) 1.0

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Xen.org, home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced the availability of Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) 1.0.

Developed as part of the Xen Cloud Project introduced in 2009, XCP 1.0 provides a solution for small and medium size enterprises looking to build private clouds, as well as open source enthusiasts, universities and researchers wanting to experiment with cloud computing.

It represents a shift in enterprise usability for Xen.org, which has traditionally released software as source code only. X

XCP is an open source server virtualization platform in a single, tested installable image that features the Xen hypervisor, network and storage support, a management stack and tools, as well as support for a range of guest operating systems including Windows and Linux.

XCP 1.0 includes a fully featured, enterprise-class Xen API Management tool stack with features such as disaster recovery support, security, real-time performance monitoring, support for multi-host resource pools, and upgrade and patching capabilities.

XCP 1.0 provides support for virtual networking capabilities via Open vSwitch and a range of open source GUI management tools.

The Xen community will also be enabled to test features with XCP 1.0 that could offer future value to enterprise products such as Citrix XenServer and Citrix OpenCloud.

Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.

Does Shift happen ?

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Last week’s announcement of RHEL 6 Beta not including Xen anymore probably is the start of a new era in open source virtualization. While the signs were on the wall since RedHat acquired Qumranet it has never been more visible.

The tone has been set …in the same week RedHat announces RHEL6 Beta with only KVM support, Canonical announces 12000 UEC Deployments. UEC is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud , it’s their Eucalyptus implementation, or should we say integration ?
12000 deployments of UEC sounds like a lot, maybe a bit too much to believe today … ,

It’s probably too early to say that there are more KVM than Xen deployments today (certainly taking into account Amazon’s giant Xen deployments ) , but when talking to different ISP’s and Cloud Vendors you feel that there is a trend towards preferring KVM over Xen.

The biggest argument for KVM today is the fact that you can turn any recent Linux box into a Virtual Machine container with a couple of comands. The fact that KVM is part of the Linux Kernel and doesn’t require you to add extra components to your distibution makes it a lot easier to deploy and validate as opposed to a Xen setup that still needs extra changes and isn’t in the main kernel.

Today main reason why people are still considering Xen in some projects is legacy hardware not having a VT chipset yet … lots of older hardware can be put to good use with the performance that Xen’s paravirtualization brings .

When given choice of KVM / Xen or VirtualBox for their future Open Source virtualization deploymetns, Almost 50% of the people questioned plan on using KVM for their next deployment, as opposed to only about 30% planning to use Xen.

So at first KVM was being ignored, then being laughed at for not being a dedicated hypervisor but being part fo the Operating System .. and now apparently it’s time for the fight … and what a fight .

With much sadness we read Simon Crosby’s FUDitorial about RedHat’s KVM adoption.

When people start calling OEL a “superior enterprise version of RHEL” a red light starts flashing for me , so is Oracle planning to acquire Citrix any time soon ? As the only way to explain Simon talking about RHEL not being available for download and no sources being availble at all, I can think off is that he is already thinking about how to please his next employer.. Simon’s reaction tries to make the RedHat move look insignificant for some, for others it might be the drop that makes them really switch to KVM as it clearly is full of FUD regarding to RedHat

Oracle was betting heavily on Xen, Sun was also putting a lot of effort into xVM, however the Sun xVM effort seems to wander off towards more VirtualBox efforts. Obviously Citrix won’t head towards KVM anyh time soon .. but the big question is .. what will the masses do ?