A couple of weeks ago Xen.org released Xen maintenance release 4.0.1. It’s primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces a few new capabilities. First of all the default pvops kernel is now 2.6.32 (Xen 4.0 used kernel 2.6.31). Secondarily, they pygrub boot loader now support loading para-virtualized guests using GRUB2 configuration files. But more importantly, Xen 4.0.1 introduces Remus support, the Xen fault-tolerance package, for pvops dom0 kernels. Xen 4.0.1 is expected to be included in the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) as the project further matures. It still uses Xen 3.4.2 Labels: Platform , Xen

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For years Google has been pretty adamant that it doesn’t need hardware virtualization. Everything started in 2007 when a Google engineer, Luiz André Barroso,  said at the Usenix conference: I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today. In April 2009 Google even (indirectly) responded to VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz about the idea that virtualization is the only viable way to do cloud computing . But now, apparently, something changed at the search giant. The KVM Forum 2010 just ended and the speakers slide decks are now available online . They are full of extremely interesting details about the KVM project and its roadmap. And one of them is especially interesting:  Ganeti as a KVM cluster management interface . Ganeti is a cluster management solution for Xen and KVM that supports live migration, para-virtualized and fully virtualized guest operating systems. The solution is released under the GPL (v2) open source license and maintained by a number of Google employees. This doesn’t imply that Google itself is using it, but one of the last slides in the slide deck above seem to confirm so: The presenter, Guido Trotter , is a Systems Administrator at Google, responsible for the corporate infrastructure, and the maintenance of the corporate services. Now, maybe Google only runs on the “Corporate Computing Infrastructure” internal facilities like CRM, Accounting or other technologies, while keeping its core services on bare-metal. But at least now there’s a confirmation that Google is not totally against hardware virtualization and instead is using KVM internally. Labels: Google , KVM , Platform

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At the end of the last week Oracle released another maintenance build for its desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox. VirtualBox 3.2.8 primarily introduces a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements. The only new feature  seems the support for remote installations in the Solaris Installer. Labels: Oracle , Platform , Releases

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Just five days after the release of VirtualBox 3.2.2 , Oracle publishes another minor update. Like the previous one, VirtualBox 3.2.4 is a maintenance release introducing just bug fixes .

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Earlier this week VMware announced its earnings for the first quarter of the year. It is extremely positive, and came with interesting comments that are worth reporting. Total revenue for Q1 2010 was $634M, up 35% from a year ago. $312M come from licenses, $267 from technology maintenance and support, and $54M from professional services. The best performance comes from technology maintenance and support, grew 52% compared to Q1 2009. In terms of geography, half of VMware revenue comes outside US, with Europe, China and Japan growing strong and beyond expectations. VMware closed a 8-figure Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) which netted over $8 million of license bookings

rPath, provider of automating system provisioning and maintenance solutions, today announced it is adding support for configuration management to its system automation solution. Effective immediately, rPath will support interoperation with key open source configuration management tools, including Reductive Labs’ Puppet, Cfengine, and Opscode’s Chef. This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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During the Q4 2009 earnings call, beside the numbers we report below, the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton provided a couple of interesting details about the company’s past performance and future plans. Citrix grew 9% during 2009, for a total of $451 million in revenue. Revenue from new license sales was $168 million, up 4% from 2008, and up 30% from Q3, while license update revenue increased 6% from 2008. Technical services increased 20%, led by support, maintenance agreements, and online SaaS revenue was $82 million, up 18%. Citrix closed 5 deals with over 10,000 seats for XenDesktop in Q4 2009, reaching around 3,000 total XenDesktop customers.

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