VMware’s VMworld 2010 is just two weeks away and, like always, virtualization.info will publish a live report from the keynote stage.  From his Twitter account, Steve Herrod , CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, hinted that this year there will be more announcements than ever , so there will be a lot to cover. But the keynotes are not the only must-see presentations to watch this year. The VMworld’s agenda offers a higher than ever number of interesting break out sessions, and, surprisingly, many of them are about the VMware’s products roadmaps.  In mid July virtualization.info published an early recommendation list but a number of key sessions were published only after the article. So here’s the updated, definitive list of 22 sessions (23 if you are a partner) that readers are encouraged to attend (roadmap sessions have an asterisk): Platform sessions: SS1001 Introducing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware Storage sessions: *TA8218 VMware Storage Vision *TA7805 Tech Preview: Storage DRS PC8051 Infrastructure Technologies to Long Distance VMotion – What Is “VM Teleportation”? Networking sessions: *TA8361 Future Direction of Networking Virtualization Management sessions: MA8030 Saving Time with vCenter Orchestrator MA8181 Optimizing Capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ  Business Continuity sessions: *BC8432 SRM Futures: Host Based Replication *BC8537 VMware Data Protection Roadmap Desktop Virtualization sessions: *DV7281  Virtual Desktop Cloud – The Future Vision of End-User Computing *DV6946 The Future of VMware Workstation and Cloud Development *DV7180 ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision Private cloud computing sessions: *PC7303 Bridging Application Management Between Public & Private Clouds: A Technology Preview of VMware’s Next Generation Solution MA8940 Self-Service and Workflow Automation for the Private Cloud MA7140 vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Pattern SP9721 How to Use Virtual I/O to Provision and Manage Networks and Storage Resources in a Private Cloud SE7813 vShield Edge & Application Protection – Architecture and Use Cases *SE9600 How to Attest Host Platform Security for Cloud Deployments: A Technology Preview from VMware, Intel, and RSA SE7835 Securing Your Cloud MA8649 VMware vCenter Configuration Manager: Our Foundation for Compliance in the Private Cloud SP8262 Cisco Nexus 1000V Update: Preparing the Virtual Machine Networking for the Cloud  MA8027 Provisioning Cloud Computing on Vblock using VMware vCloud Service Director (for partners only) PA9444 VMware Service Provider Cloud Licensing Programs  While we already know that session TA8361 (Future Direction of Networking Virtualization) will cover a new technology that will be announced on stage, a few additional sessions in the list above are especially interesting. The first one is SS1001 (Introducing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware): this is an extended session (aka Super Session) that will cover VMware plans to leverage SLES as its guest OS of choice for all virtual appliances .   It features a key speaker: Raghu Raghuram , General Manager and Vice President, Server Business Unit at VMware. Raghuram was in the 10-people team that launched VMware and his visibility into the company is really deep. He’s a top executive definitively worth to listen to. Another one is TA7805 (Tech Preview: Storage DRS) for obvious reasons: here VMware is expected to clarify the implementation of the Distributed Resource Scheduling technology to storage arrays. A third one is MA8940 (Self-Service and Workflow Automation for the Private Cloud). This session features an unexpected speaker:  John MacLean , Director of Products, VMware Service Manager. Service Manager is the configuration management database (CMDB) product that VMware acquired from EMC as part of Ionix management portfolio. It’s a key component of the strategy if VMware really plans to become a physical and virtual infrastructure management vendor (and in fact this is the only product that is not included in the “vCenter” porfolio). So it’s significant that the person in charge for this piece is also talking about provisioning and orchestration in the private cloud. Note: If any reader feels generous and wants to submit a  complete report about one or more sessions above for the community, it will be published online on virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info (where applicable), with proper credit. Submit them to  vmworld2010@virtualization.info , including the session code, title, and your full name in the email subject. Labels: Events , VMware

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In November 2008 Microsoft unveiled that the upcoming version of its worldwide popular IDE, Visual Studio 2010, was designed to orchestrate Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to provide a fully integrated virtual lab automation (VLA) environment. Marketed at that time as a stand-alone edition, and called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management, the first beta of this product appeared in June 2009 , while  the second beta went public in November 2009 . Now it finally seems that Microsoft is ready to release the product: earlier this week in fact, during its Visual Studio Live! event, Microsoft announced that its VLA platform will be available for web download at the end of August. There’s a last minute change anyway: the product is no more a stand-alone edition of Visual Studio 2010 but it’s included in Ultimate and Test Professional editions. Labels: Microsoft , Virtual Lab Automation

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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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As virtualization.info reported earlier today, VMware is about to significantly change the architecture of its virtual infrastructure . Before that transformation, which customers won’t see before 2011 probably, the company will change another key aspect of its offering: the pricing model. Along with the release of vSphere 4.1 in fact VMware announced today a new per-VM licensing that will take effect starting September 1, 2010: VMware vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager will be sold in VM packs on a per VM basis starting on September 1, 2010. VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager are already licensed on both a per VM and physical server model. Per VM licensing for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ will take effect in the fourth quarter of 2010. The minimum number of virtual machine licenses in a licensing pack is 25, reports IT News . vCenter will continue to be priced per-Server, but for how long? It’s easy to guess that the per-VM licensing will be extended to the key tier of the virtual infrastructure as soon as the next version of vSphere will be out.

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Some of our readers may have noted that the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been expanded recently, with the addition of several new companies in multiple areas, like Kaviza in the Hardware Virtualization | Connection Broker category, Unidesk in the Application Virtualization | Platforms category , C12G Labs and Eucalyptus Systems in the Hardware Virtualization | Platform Management category. Today we add another market player: the Canadian startup VM6 Software . The company was co-founded in 2004 by Claude Goudreault , CEO, and Eric Courville , COO. Goudreault has a past as Senior IT Architect for large companies like General Electrics and Rogers, while Courville has been the Vice President of Sales & Business Development for PlateSpin first (from 2004 to 2007) and for Embotics then (from 2007 to 2009). With them there’s at least another former member of the original PlateSpin team: Kirsten Foon , Director of Marketing. Foon was the Online Marketing Program Manager before Novell acquired PlateSpin. On top of that, VM6 Software appointed Stephen Pollack , the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin, as a board advisor in November 2009. The company secured its first round funding in April: a $4M investment led by RBC Venture Partners and Ignition Partners. The VM6 Software flagship product, called VMex, is a rather unique proposition in the virtualization market: evidently targeting the SMB segment, this is an all-in-one virtual infrastructure for server consolidation and VDI that leverages Microsoft Hyper-V. VMex builds four modules on top of Hyper-V: the virtual shared storage (simulating a real SAN with quota management and thin provisioning), the high-availability component (through an active/active cluster that uses the virtual SAN and guarantees a 99.99% uptime), the VDI connection broker and of course the virtual infrastructure management. VMex also leverages the Windows Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and Active Directory, to provide a self-contained virtual infrastructure in a box. Again: this builds on top of the Hyper-V version included in Windows Server 2008 R2 and doesn’t require any Microsoft additional piece, like System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), or 3rd party products. Ten days ago the company released VMex 2.1 , which introduces a VDI session manager that allows users to view session state or reset sessions, a new dashboard to administer the virtual storage component, a new high availability technology and support for event monitoring by email. VM6 Software has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar .

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The server version of App-V (formerly SoftGrid), now officially dubbed Server App-V, was previewed for the first time ever in May 2009 at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) but Microsoft actually announced plan to deliver this product in January 2008. In the last year Microsoft barely mentioned it again, showing an additional demo at MMS 2010. Unfortunately, the just ended TechEd 2010 conference didn’t bring better news (see virtualization.info coverage). Quite the opposite, the event sanctioned a far distant release, probably scheduled for Q2 2011, in sync with the launch of the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). To be fair Microsoft didn’t explicitly said that Server App-V will arrive by that timeframe, but at this point there’s no hint about an earlier release.

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Veeam released today version 5.5 of its nworks Smart Plug-In (SPI) for HP Operations Manager. The add-on integrates VMware monitoring capabilities in the HP management platform, and supports vSphere since version 5.0. The new SPI 5.5 introduces three new features: Capability to define at which frequency the VMware data has to be published on Operations Manager Failover Groups A deployment toolkit that includes an online calculator for pre-deployment planning that recommends the number of collectors required, as well as a built-in wizard for ongoing analysis as enterprises grow

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Like pretty much every other big vendor in the IT space, VMware has many ways to hit competition. A very efficient one is to criticize other vendors though non-corporate blogs. This allows the company to be way less polite than what customers expect, while not keeping full responsibility for the critics if something wrong is said. This approach has additional benefits: it allows customers to read a brutal (brutal, not necessarily brutally honest) review of products that may be hard to evaluate, it obliges competitors to defend their approach clarifying technical details that wouldn’t be revealed otherwise, and eventually it leads to counter-attacks, which expose additional weaknesses on both sides. Over the long term this turns into a futile marketing skirmish (see the multi-year VMware-Citrix one), but at the beginning the information exposed could be really valuable. This is what is going to (hopefully) happen between VMware and Red Hat now that the former completely smashed the new Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation (RHEV) platform, launched in November 2009 . A VMware Senior Engineer, Eric Gray , in fact recently published on his popular, personal blog, a series of articles analyzing multiple aspects of the new RHEV offering. On RHEV Manager availability: RHEV-M is one seriously mission critical component of the RHEV infrastructure, so it is surprising to see that there are no high-availability options for RHEV-M — no clustering or other redundancy support. Even the approach of protecting RHEV-M by deploying it in an HA VM is also impossible — something that works just fine for vCenter Server and even System Center VMM .

Xsigo Systems, a data center I/O virtualisation company, today announced the technology integration of the Xsigo VP780 I/O Director with the Microsoft System Center suite of IT management solutions. The integrated solution works with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to help IT managers better monitor and control their server connectivity… This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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Yesterday Pano Logic announced the release of its VDI platform Pano System 3.0. The new product introduces the support for Windows 7 and the integration of VMware View 4 Manager into the Pano System console. This last feature is specifically targeting large enterprises as Pano marketing literature is pretty clear about when View Manager makes sense in their VDI architecture: For most Pano System deployments, the only VMware products needed are vSphere’s ESX or ESXi and vCenter Server. Suggested uses for View Manager with the Pano System: 1. You need to manage a mixed or hybrid VDI client device population that includes both Pano Devices and thin clients or PCs running View Client. 2. Your initial deployment has over a 1,000 virtual desktops and is expected to grow. 3. You have 1,000 or more DVMs, storage space is a critical cost factor, and your IT group has the VMware expertise to implement View Composer’s linked clones. Another interesting point in the company’s documentation is how it positions the proprietary Pano Direct Protocol against the new VMware/Teradici PCoIP: PCoIP is an optional protocol for View 4 Clients and isn’t required for VDI. PCoIP was designed for edge cases rather than VDI – e.g. remote computing where a single user performing graphically intensive work, such as video editing or CAD/CAM design, is connected one-to-one to a dedicated workstation or blade server, often over low bandwidth wide area networks – and requires either proprietary chips or excessive processing power at both the server and the endpoint, driving up hardware and technology costs. … The Pano Direct Protocol, built into all Pano Devices and Pano Manager, was purpose-built just for VDI and zero clients. It acts as a low-level highly efficient bus extension protocol that assumes there is no processing being done (or even possible) on the zero client device and delivers a VDI session over a local area network that typical users find equivalent to using a desktop PC. It doesn’t require any extensions or specialized compression processing on either the server or the endpoint, keeping costs and complexity down.

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