As every virtualization professional on the planet knows, Citrix develops a commercial version of the Xen open source hypervisor called XenServer. On top of that, the company also offers management and VDI solutions for Microsoft competing hypervisor: Hyper-V. While Citrix reiterated for years now that it’s fully committed to continue XenServer development, and its newest releases definitively confirm this trend, a number of people believes that at a point in the future the company will drop its own platform to support only Hyper-V. Maybe Citrix contemplated the idea in the past, but at this point it’s less likely than ever: Amazon EC2, currently powered by the Red Hat implementation of Xen, is leading the public cloud computing adoption effort, while the new OpenStack orchestration framework launched by Rackspace , which supports Xen out of the box, has good changes to become a key platform in the race for private cloud computing. Two years ago  Red Hat announced its intention to replace Xen with KVM and the plan is being executed as expected: the company released a new KVM-based virtual infrastructure (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or RHEV) and the upcoming Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 will be the first distribution to not include Xen . So Amazon has two choices for EC2: it either develops its own Xen distribution, or it embraces the one of another vendor. In the second scenario there is not much choice: Citrix, which leads the development of Xen since the early beginning, Oracle, or Novell, even if the company may be switching to KVM too . The adoption of XenServer represents a huge opportunity to cash in for Citrix. It may sell the Platinum edition of the hypervisor, which has been recognized as an enterprise grade virtualization platform , licensing hundreds of thousands of virtual machines to Amazon.   Additionally it’s worth to highlight that Amazon is recognized as a leading example in the hosting industry, so that hundreds of smaller hosting providers may mimic the company in the adoption of XenServer. And this translates into an exponential revenue increase for Citrix. On the private cloud computing side, Citrix secured a key partnership with Rackspace for Openstack, and the two already announced that the product will support XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) going forward.  It doesn’t really matter if OpenStack will support Xen, XenServer or XCP: in every case Citrix will have additional opportunites to win enterprise data centers. In such scenario, it wouldn’t make much sense for Citrix to abandon Xen and just work to build value on top of Hyper-V.  Despite that, the analysis firm Ovum reports something rather interesting about what Citrix believes about the future. The summary of a report released in November 2009 in fact says (emphasis added): …Xen’s prospects in the enterprise are limited by the squeeze it faces from VMware’s dominant ESX/ESXi hypervisor and Microsoft’s increasingly competitive Hyper-V hypervisor. Citrix has predicted that eventually its virtual server business will mostly be based on Hyper-V rather than Xen . Oracle is Xen’s best chance for a long-term enterprise future, but even Oracle faces a battle to build up its small virtualisation business. Novell also has only a small presence in server virtualisation, and, in any case, may split its attention between Xen and the KVM hypervisor… Unfortunately, there’s no way to review the report, unless you want to pay £924 of course, and verify if Ovum included a source for verification in its analysis. Labels: Citrix , Microsoft , Xen

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In February, CA hired Andi Mann , the former Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in February. In his new role as Vice President of Product Marketing for Virtualization Management, Mann helped to reorganize the go-to-virtualization-market strategy. virtualization.info also received a tip that CA hired Mike O’Malley , the former Director of Analyst Relations and Market Intelligence at VMware. O’Malley is the Vice President of Product Marketing since January. The two guys probably worked together at a plan to refresh the company’s image and credibility as a virtualization player. The process culminated with the relaunch of the CA’s virtualization portfolio, which now includes five products, officially released yesterday : Virtual Assurance Virtual Assurance is an event and performance monitoring solution. It tracks several components of the virtual infrastructure, like the application traffic response time (even for multi-tier applications), and performs root-cause analysis to help isolate and remediate faults. Virtual Assurance, shipping as a physical appliance, currently supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0. CA already announced upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers While Virtual Assurance is a stand-alone solution, Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers acts as a sort of gateway to the virtual world for the other CA’s management products, including eHealth Performance Manager, Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, NSM, and Spectrum Automation Manager. The product supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and 5.5, Oracle Solaris Containers 10 (for both SPARC and Intel architectures), and IBM LPAR P5 and P6 systems. Virtual Automation Virtual Automation is a VM lifecycle management solution, offering provisioning through a self-service portal, an approval workflow, library templates automated configuration, resource pool management, VM tracking, cost accounting, and scheduled de-provisioning. The product supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0, as well as Amazon EC2. CA already announced upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Virtual Configuration Virtual Configuration is a configuration management solution that provides configuration discovery, including discovery of server and application dependencies, configuration baselines and validation, detection and remediation of configuration drift, and virtualization dashboards to facilitate change tracking and review, compliance audits, and reporting on environmental status. The product supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0, and Citrix XenServer. CA already announced upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Virtual Assurance, Virtual Automation, and Virtual Configuration are also available as a bundle called Virtual Foundation Suite. The last product, Virtual Privilege Manager , doesn’t seem available yet as the CA’s website completely lacks of any literature about the product. The only details about this piece of the portfolio comes from the press announcement: CA Virtual Privilege Manager is designed to control privileged access to virtual environments by securing console access to the hypervisor and managing privileged access to all of the virtual images running on the virtualization server as well as the service console. Key capabilities of the solution include privileged user password management for the virtual machines and service console, fine-grained administrative access controls to the hypervisor service console, service console hardening, and original user activity monitoring in virtual environments. Solely judging from this description it seems that Virtual Privilege Manager is going to compete against HyTrust. The other products mentioned above instead compete with a wide range of well-established players, including Quest/Vizioncore, Veeam, VKernel, VMware and several others. CA is a big company with a solid position as infrastructure manager in the physical world, but a leadership in that space doesn’t automatically translates into a leadership in the virtualization market. The company will have to demonstrate a renewed commitment and a more effective capability to execute if it wants to stay competitive against the more agile virtualization startups that it’s attacking. Labels: CA , Configuration Management , Platform Management , Platform Orchestration , Security

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Oracle released yesterday version 5.0 of its Sun Ray Software, the solution introduced by Sun in 1999 to centrally control and power its Sun Ray thin clients. This release introduces a couple of major new capabilities. First of all, the client part, called Oracle Virtual Desktop Client (formerly Sun Desktop Access Client) can be installed on Mac OS X. On top of that the product now ships with a connector for VMware View 4, allowing the Sun Ray Clients to be used as View thin clients. The server component is available for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 Update 3, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2 and Sun Solaris 10 5/09 for both SPARC and x86/x64 architectures. The software update is available now for download and ships with Sun Ray 270, Sun Ray 2 and the new Sun Ray 3 Plus clients.

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The 2010 edition of the VMware’s conference VMworld is approaching fast. The company already published the session catalog which, easy to guess, has a strong focus on private cloud computing and the upcoming vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly codename Project Redwood). virtualization.info recommends a few sessions: DV7180 – ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision This session will detail new features and enhancements to the ThinApp product since VMWorld 2009, including the 4.0.3, 4.0.4, and 4.5 releases as well upcomming releases that occur between now and VMWorld 2010. The second half of the session will present part of our vision for the future of application virtualization and demonstrate some demos of possible future technology. MA7140 – vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Patterns This session focuses on the building blocks for a vCloud architecture. Using Design Patterns is fundamental for a successful design and deployment. We will provide a Conceptual Model including the requirements and constraints and conceptually represents what we are trying to produce. The Logical Design shows the relationship of the components. This session uses the experience of the VMware TS Cloud Team for deployments with Enterprise Private Cloud and with Cloud Providers. MA8027 – Provisioning Cloud Computing on Vblock using VMware vCloud Service Director This session focuses on provisioning vApps in cloud environment. Starting with at the hardware layer, provisioning of UCS servers in Vblock architecture, applying server profiles and related policies. Moving up the stack with installing and configuring vSphere, applying host profiles, creating and deploying network/storage policies. Carving out resource, network and storage pools for Cloud computing using VMware vCloud Service Director. Create Service catalogs, apply cost models using Chargeback, deploy vApps in multi-tenant environment. MA8030 – Saving Time with vCenter Orchestrator Starting with a demo of how to use the bulk operations workflow to maximize your investment in vCenter Orchestrator, we will walk through how to modify a few workflows that saves a few minutes of your day. We will also show some of the best practices of writing workflows. MA8092 – Cloud Futures: The Infrastructure Authority To realize the potential of private cloud, infrastructure must be capable of not just dynamically provisioning and optimizing systems, but also not violating any security, regulatory, or organizational policy constraints in the process. In many enterprise environments, dynamic IT consists of several disjointed solutions and oftentimes blind faith that policy, security, or regulatory constraints will not be broken. The bottom line – someone has to be in charge. The infrastructure authority (IA) is the future nerve center of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) operations. Among the many roles the IA possesses are: • Provides a central metadata store • Leverages common data models to request or offer services • Maintains physical, virtual, and policy dependency maps • Ensures security and regulatory compliance • Ensures that service level requirements are met • Stores and enforces organizational policy • Ensures accurate capacity forecasts • Integrates with third party management and orchestration tools to authorize IT operations such as provisioning or relocation before they proceed Typical questions answered by the IA include: • Are security zoning rules checked before live migrating a VM? • Do any policy restrictions prevent VMs from migrating to different data centers or to public cloud infrastructure? This session takes a practical look at the emerging role of the IA, and details how existing management frameworks such as VMware vCenter and industry standards such as OVF can be used in this capacity moving forward. MA8181 – Optimizing Capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ This session will provide recommendations and best practices to optimizing your VMware virtual infrastructure capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ. The session will provide a deep dive into how CapacityIQ analyzes and forecasts capacity utilization, how it identifies unused capacity and how it predicts your future capacity needs. It will explain the key CapacityIQ concepts and methodology as well as help you understand and interpret all the data presented. MA8649 – VMware Server Configuration Manager: Our Foundation for Compliance in the Private Cloud Compliance to regulatory requirements and IT standards is an important issue that drives many IT initiatives including security and threatens to limit cloud adoption. Learn how Server Configuration Manager (SCM) enables customers to ensure compliance and provide visibility and control of their IT infrastructure. SCM helps automate mundane tasks, reduce manual errors and increase application availability. Learn how SCM can help your customers dramatically reduce their operating costs, and experience firsthand this new solution which provides a foundation for compliance in the cloud. (for partners only) PA9444 – VMware Service Provider Cloud Licensing Programs This course will give you an overview of VMware’s licensing and pricing strategies for VMware Service Provider Partners. It will also cover program elements including requirements and key benefits of the VMware Service Provider Program. As cloud computing continues to evolve, VMware is enhancing and clarifying our licensing and pricing models to ensure our Service Provider Partners have the best in class pricing and licensing models along with world class product and programs. PC8051 – Infrastructure Technologies to Long Distance VMotion – What Is “VM Teleportation”? Join this session and learn about infrastructure technologies purpose built for long distance VMotion and Cloud federation. Using existing technologies such as vSphere and active-active virtual storage models, you will discover new innovations to move active VM’s and workloads over distance without disruption. New techniques and best practices such as the conception of “VM teleportation” will be illustrated and discussed. Discussion of VM HA and DRS behavior and best practices with stretched vSphere clusters, including new changes in vSphere. Learn also about upcoming technologies that can help overcome limitations with current technologies including VMotion over geographies, and the support of cloud computing and federation. PC8422 – Introduction to vCloud API We envision the vCloud REST API to become a key technology for managing, provisioning and automation in the vCloud infrastructure. The API is a major part of the vCloud offering and there will be a significant interest from both Service providers, Enterprises and ISV to implement custom solutions on top of the API or to consume/manage cloud services from the vCloud ecosystem. In this presentation we will describe the design and the architecture of the vCloud API, will present the key concepts and idioms of the API, and will deep dive into the user (which is focused on provisioning) and the admin API (which is focused on automating and managing the cloud infrastructure). In addition few major usage scenarios of the vCloud API will be explored. SE7835 – Securing Your Cloud This session will provide an overview of the core security Features in VMware’s new VCloud Services Director Product. We will provide an overview of the architecture, key security features, how a Service Provider or Enterprise can offer a secure IaaS platform to their customers using VMware’s VCloud Services Director features and outline a roadmap for planned new security features in upcoming releases. SP9721 – How to Use Virtual I/O to Provision and Manage Networks and Storage Resources in a Private Cloud Join this session to learn best practices for using virtual I/O to provision network and storage resources within a private cloud. With live demonstrations and practical examples, we will show how virtual I/O lets you assign, provision, and manage network and storage resources based on application and user requirements. You will learn the key elements of virtual I/O and how this technology changes the connectivity landscape to deliver far more connectivity and more bandwidth to servers than is possible with traditional I/O. We will discuss practical tips on how to run more virtual machines per server while delivering a superior, more predictable user experience. Virtual I/O fundamentally re-defines and streamlines resource provisioning. Join Camden Ford — a seasoned storage and networking architect — to learn how to make the most of these capabilities. Create, manage, and even chargeback for new value added services, and get the most from your virtualization deployment. TA8218 – VMware Storage Vision A VMware engineering executive will describe VMware’s multi-year vision for storage. The discussion will cover strategic directions such as: • How VMware sees storage architectures changing to meet the needs of virtualized deployments for SMB, enterprise datacenter, VDI deployments, and service provider clouds • How VMware sees changes in application architectures impacting its products’ interaction with storage over time • VMware’s directions in its own storage product line as well as its strategy for partner engagement and growing the capabilities of the storage hardware and software ecosystem TA8361 – Future Direction of Networking Virtualization Virtual Switch becomes an integral part of today’s data center. What is the next big wave of new technology coming in the cloud era? The speaker will discuss how upcoming new virtual networking technology that can significantly improve data center efficiency, elasticity, QoS, and SLA.

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In February Computer Associates (CA) appointed Andi Mann as its new Vice President of Product Marketing for Virtualization Management. Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) for more than four years, Mann is a well-know and respected industry analyst, extremely focused on the virtualization and cloud computing markets. His insight and privileged position in the industry will hopefully increase the confidence in the CA virtualization strategy and capability to execute. So far the company in fact didn’t play a too active role, and while its messaging seem to imply a renewed

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Hyper9, the enterprise-class virtualization management company, today announced its IT Director/Manager Lens, the second in a series of management-specific filters developed to help organizations optimize the business value of their virtualization initiatives. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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DreamFace Interactive, an enterprise application development software company, announced today at GigaOM Structure 2010 that it has entered into a strategic partnership with OpSource to provide an integrated one stop solution for development of custom applications in the cloud. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Could the week end without a new marketing skirmish between Microsoft and VMware? Of course not, or at least not when a long time Microsoft partner is involved. Just last week VMware announced a new, rather surprising OEM deal with Novell , which allows the virtualization vendor to distribute SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1 . Additionally, VMware announced a plan to adopt SLES as the guest operating system of choice for all its virtual appliances. Microsoft didn’t react too well (you can say it by the way they misspelled the name of the competitor, something that didn’t happen in a long time), and published its own interpretation of the deal, suggesting that customers may be locked into an inflexible offering: …looks like VMWare finally determined that virtualization is a server OS feature. I’m sure we’ve said that once or twice over the years . The vFolks now plan to ship a full version of a server OS with vSphere, and support it, to fulfill their application development and application deployment plans. Fourth, this is a bad deal for customers as they’re getting locked into an inflexible offer. Check out the terms and conditions . VMware replies back today . Nothing unexpected in the replay, with VMware arguing that Azure is an even bigger attempt to lock customers in Windows: Ultimately Microsoft’s strategy with Azure it to have customers run applications on Microsoft operating systems using Microsoft databases in Microsoft datacenters…. looks like the mother of all lock-ins. But the reply contains a couple of interesting statements. The first is: …The OEM agreement with Novell doesn’t change our commitment to guest operating system neutrality… Hopefully it will stay this way, while the maintainer of the other major Linux guest operating system, Red Hat, continues to build a competing virtual infrastructure based on KVM and a cloud infrastructure that support multiple hypervisors . The second is: Microsoft clearly “forgets” about VMware’s 1,000+ vCloud partners and public infrastructure as-a-service solutions based on VMware technology like vCloud Express . VMware just has four hosting partners that offer vCloud Express. And all of them, as far as we know, still offer the product in beta. A fifth one, Logica, has been removed (or has retired) from the program without any explanation , leaving the entire EMEA without a single vCloud provider. The other over 1000 partners that are working on this program still have to deliver a single piece of cloud infrastructure, simply because the foundation software of the vCloud architecture, called vCloud Service Director (vCSD), is not here yet .

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At virtualization.info we usually don’t pay much attention to the various sales promotion that vendors launch to win the hyper-competitive virtualization market. Sometimes we make exceptions . And today is one of those days. Stratus Technologies is a well-known company for its 99.999% fault-tolerant hardware, ftServer, which is made by a couple of identical machines that act as one, providing out-of-the-box HA capability. ftServer is certified by Citrix and VMware virtual infrastructures but Stratus doesn’t seem happy enough to tell its customers that its platform is guaranteed to work. The company has just launched a new promotion called Zero Downtime Guarantee : Stratus Technologies is betting $50,000 that Tier 1 enterprise applications are virtualization-ready — provided they are running VMware vSphere™ 4 on the Stratus ftServer platform. The Zero Downtime $50K Guarantee announced today promises new and existing Stratus customers 100 percent uptime for newly purchased ftServer 6300 systems running VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions. Any unplanned downtime caused by the failure of the server or virtualization platform during the first six months after being placed into production will put $50,000 cash or product credit in the customer’s hand . The program is open to end-user customers worldwide and runs through December 31, 2010. Conditions and exclusions apply. (our emphasis) Of course that little “Conditions and exclusions apply.” sentence in the middle of the press announcement is the key, but the details of these conditions and exclusions (for example: what are the applications that Stratus considers Tier 1?) don’t seem available online. Customers may want to further investigate.

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