So far application virtualization vendors had a hard time to win the market. Even the biggest players like Microsoft, VMware and Symantec have been extremely slow in developing their platforms and the marketing effort to push them to the mainstream audience has been practically non-existent. There’s even a doubt that the market really needs application virtualization . Despite that, there are new players brave enough to enter the market. The last one is a German firm called Dögel IT-Management . Dögel IT-Management is a solution provider focused on desktop management and application virtualization, currently offering the solutions of most of its future competitors: VMware, XenoCode ( now renamed in Spoon ), InstallFree and Endeavors Technologies ( recently resurrected with a new Chairman ). There is not much more about the company, founded in 2005, except that its founder and CEO is Mathias Dögel . He released an interview explaining the desire to enter the application virtualization market to fix the many shortcomings of the solutions above. Two weeks ago, the company launched a public tech preview of its new application virtualization engine called Evalaze . Like some competitors, Evalaze 0.8 creates a sandbox in the Windows operating system and performs file system and Registry redirection. Quite interestingly, the company claims the capability to virtualized multiple version of Internet Explorer, including 6, 7, 8 and the technical preview of 9, which is not a trivial goal to accomplish. The virtualized applications run in user-mode and work on all Windows client OSes, from 2000 to 7. Evalaze is even able to execute 16bit apps on 32bit OSes and 32bit apps on 64bit OSes. Additionally, the splash screen that appears when you launch a virtualized application can be customized. The virtualized applications are packaged after taking a snapshot of a clean environment: Similarly to Spoon, the company released a bunch of free and open source applications virtualized with the new engine that customers can download for free. Dögel IT-Management has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar .

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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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Starting today Parallels has begun selling a special version of its desktop virtualization platform for Windows, Desktop for Windows, that addresses Windows XP/Vista users migrating to Windows 7. Simply, the guest operating system has to be Windows XP or Vista while the host operating system has to be Windows 7. The presence of seamless window technology dubbed Coherence helps the application of the two platforms to coexist in a nice way. CNet is highlighting how this offers may be not compliant with legal terms of Windows 7 EULA. Actually, it’s a no news. Since ever, a customer that wants to run one or more guest operating systems on top of a certain host operating system has to own the license of all OSes. This applies to any hardware virtualization platform (both type-2 and type-1) which includes Parallels Workstation and its competitors, like VMware Workstation or Oracle VM VirtualBox. There’s no reason why it should be different in this specific case. On server-side things are slightly different, as Microsoft allows to have one, four or unlimited virtual instances of a certain Windows Server edition when it’s binded to a bare-metal hypervisor. But even in that case the allowed virtual machines can’t run different versions of the OS.

Earlier this week, Citrix unveiled the public Release Candidate of its client hypervisor XenClient , beating on time VMware and its upcoming Client virtualisation Platform (CVP) . The VMware’s reaction has been instantaneous: the day after the announcement, the company released an article about the Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) IT governance model, claiming that its current approach is way better and the real one. Like Citrix in fact, VMware delayed multiple times the release of its client hypervisor, at the point that the upcoming release 4.5 of View, will not include it, as many have hoped. VMware rather preferred to remove the experimental label from an existing feature of View Client for the so-called offline VDI scenarios that is simply called Local Mode. Local Mode leverages VMware Workstation as the virtualisation platform on the end-user laptop where the virtual desktop will run once disconnected from the corporate network. VMware announced this feature in September 2008, implemented it in View 3.0 and kept it experimental so far. Meanwhile announced the additional effort on CVP as a step beyond. Local Mode is still experimental. It won’t be a fully supported feature before the release of View 4.5, which apparently has been postponed . In his post VMware lists a number of reasons why a hosted virtualisation platform is better than a bare-metal one for offline VDI. A couple of them are valid: the installation is non-destructive (non need to format the laptop hard drive and install from scratch) larger compatibility list (every laptop supported by the host operating system will work, so pretty much all the ones that exist on the market, both for Windows and Linux) Despite that, the VMware’s behavior here seems identical to the much criticized one that Microsoft had with memory over-commitment. For years at Redmond, the virtualisation team publicly downplayed the importance of memory overcommitment techniques that only VMware could offer in its server-side hypervisor. But recently the company announced the upcoming arrival of Dynamic Memory ( a form of memory ballooning ) as part of the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. Of course VMware has been quick in pointing out how Microsoft is radically changing its position about dynamic memory management. The case here may be identical: VMware is now suggesting that bare-metal client hypervisors won’t be good for offline VDI until CVP will be ready. At that point it’s easy to expect that the company will sell it as the next frontier of the BYOC technology.

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Cloud.com (formerly VMOps) is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing startup that was founded in August 2008 by Shen Liang , the former Vice President of Engineering at SEVEN Networks. Earlier in his career, Liang was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun. The company, which counts 40 employees according to its Linkedin corporate profile, raised $6.6M in Round A led by Index Ventures, and another $11M in Round B , led by Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Nexus Ventures. The Cloud.com management team also includes Kevin Kluge (Vice President of Engineering), who come from Yahoo! where he was the Senior Director of Engineering, Shannon Williams (Vice President of Business Development), who was the Vice President of EMEA operations at Solidcore Systems, and Peder Ulander (Vice President of Marketing), who was the Senior Vice President of Marketing in Sun. Quite interestingly, the board of director, includes just one outsider: Rosen Sharma, CTO of the Systems and virtualisation Business at McAfee. The company comes out of stealth mode with an open source management console for IaaS cloud architectures, that supports VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer,

The adoption of cloud computing implies facing and solving a number of remarkable challenges. The security aspect is probably the most discussed ever but another key point that ISVs, cloud providers and customers have to agree on is licensing. Licensing of guest operating systems and their applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms is a critical aspect to consider when evaluating the economics of this technology. And really a few players are actively discussing it. So it’s with a lot of interest that virtualisation.info reports about the activity around Amazon and its Xen-based EC2 IaaS cloud. Last month Microsoft and Amazon announced a new pilot program that allows their customers to extend their existing Windows Server Enterprise Agreement (EA) licenses, plus technology Assurance (SA), to the instances they have inside EC2. Last week Red Hat announced something similar with its Cloud Access initiative . Basically, those customers that have a minimum of 25 active subscriptions and a direct support agreement with Red Hat, can apply unused Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform Premium and/or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server to their EC2 instances. Those licenses must remain attached to EC2 instances for at least six months.

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The popular security firm Core Security yesterday disclosed a serious security vulnerability found in all Microsoft hosted virtualisation products, including Virtual Server 2005, Virtual PC 2007 (with and without SP1) and Windows 7 Virtual PC. While Core Security is using the “hypervisor” terminology, this bug doesn’t affect any bare-metal virtualisation platform Microsoft has, including Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2. The vulnerability affects the virtual machine monitor (VMM) memory management. It makes memory pages mapped above the 2GB available with read or read/write access to user-space programs running in a Guest operating system.

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Stealthy start-up Nicira got some backing from VMware founder Diane Greene and is developing a network operating system designed to virtualize networks and create networks ideal for cloud deployments. Nicira’s founding team comes out of Stanford University, where Greene’s husband and VMware co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, is a professor in computer science. he start-up’s CEO is Steve Mullaney, who… [[ This is a content summary only.

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At the end of January Microsoft silently updated its Linux Integrated Components package to version 2.0, introducing the long awaited support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems in Hyper-V. Microsoft announced future support for Red Hat operating systems in July 2009, since the open source vendor joined the Server virtualisation Validation Program (SVVP). Customers had to wait no less than seven months to finally have a version of Hyper-V Linux Integrated Components that supports RHEL 5 (including 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 versions, both 32 and 64bit). Like for Novell SUSE Linux, Microsoft doesn’t include in the package the optimized drivers for mouse.

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Wyse software and Pippard have come together to create a POS system that is designed and optimized for these environments. The Pippard MRT-WCR includes the traditional POS system display, cash drawer, receipt printer and scanner, but its heart is based on a new Wyse virtual client processor combined with a Microsoft Windows Embedded Standard 2009 operating system. This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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