A new US startup entered the virtualisation market in mid-February: Virsto . Founded in 2007 and sustained by a $8.5M investment led by August Capital and Canaan Partners, the company is managed by Mark Davis , former CEO of Creekpath Systems (acquired by Opsware, which was then acquired by HP ). Davis also served as Vice President of Marketing at Monosphere, acquired by Quest . Davis is leading an interesting team of managers and advisors, which includes the co-founder and CTO Alex Miroshnichenko (former CTO at Acronis), the co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Serge Pashenkov (former Senior Director of technology Development at PowerFile and Veritas – acquired by Symantec), the Vice President of Sales Rafael Santini (former VP of Worldwide OEM Sales at XenSource – acquired by Citrix ), and the advisors Frank Artale (current Vice President of Business Development at Citrix), James Phillips (co-founder and former CEO of Akimbi – acquired by VMware ) and Shaw Chuang (former R&D Executive at VMware).

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Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year. The list includes: Transparent Memory Compression This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region . VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks.

Microsoft just published the beta version of a new Infrastructure Planning and Design guide. Titled Dynamic Data Center , this 43-pages blueprint on what Microsoft defines “a combination of automation, control, and resource management technology with a well-defined topology of virtualisation, servers, storage, and networking hardware”. The guide is divided in five main parts: Determine the Dynamic Data Center Scope This part helps to define the scope and determine the workloads that will be included in the Dynamic Data Center project. It’s divided in three steps: Determine the proposed initial workloads for the Dynamic Data Center.

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With an unexpected move, at the end of last week Parallels announced support for the upcoming Google operating system, Chrome OS , in its Desktop 5 for Mac. While it’s entirely expected that consumers use desktop virtualisation platforms to test new operating systems, it’s pretty uncommon to see a vendor that officially supports a beta product that is not widely deployed like Windows. Considering the long beta cycles that Google products have (sometimes years), the effort to support multiple beta builds will be remarkable for Parallels. The first stable release for Chrome OS is not expected to arrive before the second half of 2010.

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Neocleus is a US startup that entered the virtualisation market in May 2008 without much fanfare

Last week Reuters and other news outlets reported that the VMware’s board approved a plan to buy back $400M in Class A shares. The operation will happen over the months, through the end of 2011. EMC said it has no intention to modify its ownership of the subsidiary, keeping it at around 80%. In another note , the VMware’s CFO, Mark Peek , sold 15,000 shares at an average price of $46.72 a share in mid-February.

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New month, new rebuttals in virtualisation-land. Evidently, virtualisation players still consider the marketing skirmish very helpful to increase sales ( virtualisation.info has a slightly different opinion ) so this March we have VMware leading three major campaigns against competitors. Two of them are defensive, one is not: VMware View PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop ICA Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs vSphere PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop ICA At the beginning of February Citrix sponsored a competitive analysis performed by Miercom. The 7-pages report compares protocol performance of Citrix XenDesktop 4 (with ICA/HDX) and VMware View 4 (with PCoIP) and these are the conclusions: In a comparison of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations, Citrix XenDesktop 4 provided better overall performance when compared to VMware View 4 XenDesktop 4 used 64% less bandwidth than View 4 with PCoIP for typical tasks Flash video was delivered with an average of 65% less CPU usage, 89% less bandwidth, and excellent Quality of Experience by XenDesktop 4 compared to View 4 Overall, XenDesktop 4 uses system resources more efficiently and is capable of scaling more effectively VMware answered last week , informing that they were not contacted by Miercom and that they have no insight about how test were conducted. Of course VMware offered its point of view on each point, At this point customers just have to decide which company has the nicest logo and which guy has the brightest smile to believe to one set of claims over the other.

The virtualisation startup Reflex Systems may have changed its go-to-market strategy , focusing more on virtual infrastructure management than on security, but it didn’t forget its roots. Exactly one year ago the company hired a former ISS executive , Preston Futrell, as new Vice President of Sales, in September 2009 launched a new version of its new flagship product that features a VMware VMsafe-certified policy compliance enforcement engine , and now it closes a deal with TippingPoint , a well-known player security market. TippingPoint, a subsidiary of 3Com, which was recently acquired by HP , offers a popular line of intrusion prevention systems (IPS). The partnership allows TippingPoint to include Reflex VMC in its Security virtualisation Framework , a bundle of products (Digital Vaccine Labs, vController, Security Management System and of course the IPS appliances) that enforces segmentation between virtual machines and supports separation of duties between the different teams that manage the virtual infrastructure.

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ConVirt ( formerly XenMan ) is an open source management console that supports multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM. Originally started in 2006, the product was relaunched in March 2009 , demonstrating a significant potential. One year later, the company behind ConVirt, Convirture, releases version 2.0, which once again features notable capabilities: new architecture made of an AJAX web front-end which supports multiple administrators and a back-end data repository for the entire virtual infrastructure performance trends reporting capability to produce interactive charts about historical information in the data repository template compliance tracking capability to track how much a virtual machine changed from its original template and to flag discrepancies datacenter-wide monitoring both storage and network resources can be monitored from a single console rather than checking each host configuration The company is still offering the product as open source, but it’s also trying to monetize it with the introduction of an Enterprise Edition (currenty in beta). This product will add to the open source edition the following capabilities: dynamic resources allocation (through the use of resource pools) high availability (through hosts and virtual machines fail-over) virtual machines backup (both scheduled and on-demand) network and storage automated configuration (VLAN and SAN setup across multiple hosts) role-based access control alerting and email notification CLI and APIs

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Last week VMware updated its disaster recovery solution Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to version 4.0.1.1 (build 236215). The new version is primarily for bug fixing and features enhancements. There are no new capabilities. Yellow Bricks published the complete list. This version of SRM supports storage replication adapters from: 3PAR (just acquired by CA) Compellent Dell | EqualLogic EMC (for CLARiiON, Symmetrix, Celerra and RecoverPoint) FalconStor Fujitsu Hitachi HP (for EVA, LeftHand and XP) IBM (for DS, SVC ad XIV) LSI NEC NetApp (both NAS and SAN products) Sun (acquired by Oracle)

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