CommVault last week released the results of its Virtualization Survey, which polled Simpana software customers worldwide to determine the key factors driving adoption of server virtualization and the major challenges associated with managing these environments. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Quest Software today announced that vFoglight, its solution for virtualization monitoring and capacity planning, will support Microsoft Hyper-V and provide increased automation of virtual infrastructures with vFoglight 6.5, currently planned for release in Q4 2010. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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A little more than one year ago, Burton Group, an independent subsidiary of Gartner, reached unprecedented popularity with the launch of its Server Virtualization Evaluation Criteria. The evaluation criteria was used to compare Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtual infrastructures on over 60 features and Burton Group became the first analysis firm to declare that XenServer 5.5 plus Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition was as enterprise-ready as VMware Infrastructure 3.5 . In May, Burton Group also released a Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria. The company avoided to call it Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) despite it’s a de-facto terminology because it was originally launched by VMware. The new report  compares Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.01 against over 100 features , but none of them achieved the score to be considered enterprise-ready. Fast forward to last week: Citrix submitted XenDesktop 4.0 Platinum Edition with Service Pack 1 and Burton Group declared it the first enterprise-ready VDI solution available on the market. This is a major achievement for Citrix which is getting yet another recognition of its efforts in the virtualization space, three years after the acquisition of Xensource . It’s another negative note for VMware instead, which isn’t shining on the desktop virtualization space right now: its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) has been delayed several times and it’s unclear if it will ever hit the marke t; its Desktop Business Unit lost the Vice President and General Manager, Jocelyn Goldfein; and the company’s top executives suddenly are very skeptic about the future of VDI, to the point that they can’t forecast the adoption rate by the end of 2011. On top of that, both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs predicted that VMware will be behind Citrix in the VDI market within 2013/2014. VMware still has a secret weapon: View 4.5, which should be launched at VMworld 2010 or later in September. The product has been delayed multiple times too and it won’t feature the user profile management technology acquired from RTO Software in March . Despite that, some beta testers who tried it report that it’s a remarkable update. We’ll see if View 4.5 will achieve the Burton Group enterprise-ready certification and if it will be enough to improve the current perception about the company as a VDI leader. Labels: Citrix , VDI

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Yesterday VMware announced its financial results for Q2 2010. Interestingly, the company started the call reporting a record growth in the SMB segment. VMware expects to accelerate this trend even more with  the inclusion of vMotion in the vSphere 4.1 Essential Plus SKU . At the moment the vSphere Essentials business is growing 100% sequentially. VMware added 20,000 new customers in the last two quarters, reaching 190,000 customers total, but it doesn’t say how many are in the SMB segment. The company closes the Q2 quarter with $2.8B cash and $1.5B of deferred revenue, a year-over-year growth of 33%.  Total revenue for the Q2 was $674 million, up 48% from Q2 2009, while total license revenue was $324 million, an increase of 42% from the Q2 2009.  Software maintenance and support revenue was $290 million, an increase of 54% from last year, but the revenue decreased sequentially. Customers continue to buy on average more than 24 months of support and maintenance with each new license purchase. Professional Services revenue was $60 million, an increase of 54% from last year, and up 11% sequentially, but VMware doesn’t expect a strong growth in the PSO revenue because of the investments in the partners ecosystem ( VKernel seems to disagree here ). VMware reported a great performance in the Americas: US revenues increased 43% from a year ago to $334 million, representing half of total revenue, and Latin America scored a 85% year-over-year growth. Interestingly, in US the total order value of renewed Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) for the quarter exceeded the original contract value, even if the company didn’t share any specific number. International revenue grew 53% to $340 million. Enterprise license agreements were approximately 20% of total bookings, and transactions with order values less than $50,000 represented approximately 44% of total bookings. VMware reported a mixed performance in Europe: losing ground compared to Q1 2010 in those countries that heavily adopt virtualization, UK and Germany, and improving in more challenging markets like France, Ireland and Russia.   APAC performance has been much better, with a 80% year-over-year growth, especially in China, Japan, India and Australia.  Total operating expense, including costs of services and costs of licenses, increased 6% sequentially to $487 million. The acquisitions of Rabbit Technologies ( April 2010 ), of GemStone Systems ( May 2010 ), and of the EMC’s Ionix division ( March 2010 ) increased the VMware’s headcount of 400 new people. On top of them, VMware hired another 450 people, raising the total number of employees to approx. 8200. R&D expenses increased sequentially to $136 million, or 20.2% of revenues, as compared with 19.5% in the Q1 of 2010. Sales and marketing expenses were $215 million or 31.9% of revenues, compared with 31.6% in the prior quarter. Q3 revenues are expected to be within a range of $680 million and $705 million, or year-over-year growth of between 39% and 44%. VMware expects license revenue to be flat to slightly down from Q2. The company currently forecasts the 2010 revenue between $2.725 billion and $2.8 billion, equal to a growth of 35% to 38% compared to last year. Beyond numbers, as usual, it’s interesting how the VMware’s executives are changing their message in each call, to adjust to the new go-to-market strategy. Tod Nielsen , the company’s COO, is now calling the SpringSource Spring framework as “the programming model of the cloud”. Another interesting detail emerged during the Q&A session of the call is the forecast for the server growth in 2011:   Question from Merrill Lynch: …As you give consideration for the first half of the year, clearly the results are very impressive. There’s been a big rebound in several markets. And how does your business look as you start planning for 2011? Should we expect a continuation of these kinds of growth rates or should we expect some moderation given that you have proper comps for the server market ahead?… Answer from Mark Peek, VMware’s CFO: … You know, certainly the first half of 2010, we saw a rebound in the economy and we, like most of the IT industry, benefited from this rebound. Sever growth rates were in the 20% range; they’re forecasted to grow at somewhat similar rates although moderating a bit in the second half. The early indications for 2011 on server growth rates is that they’ll decline somewhat significantly in 2011. So that said, our business, although it’s influenced by server growth and also is impacted by installed bases which are moving to virtualization, and then on the other side of that is enterprise agreements that we’ve sold in which companies have inventoried some of their licenses… Last but not least VMware’s commented on the new per-VM licensing mode l that will be introduced for all management tools except vCenter Server starting September 1st: …The per-VM pricing is something that we introduced in reality as a response to how customers consume the products and to make it easier for them to consume and to build their own ROIs on the value proposition that it adds. At this point we don’t expect it to have a material impact on the near-term economics for us, but certainly we introduced per-VM pricing to help both us and our customers.   Thanks to  Seeking Alpha for the earnings call transcript as usual. Labels: VMware

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Demand Technology Software is a US firm that develops a number of products for performance data collection and monitoring on Windows operating systems. The company’s flagship product is called Performance Sentry. Its multi-tier architecture is designed to scale up to thousands of monitored servers, storing their performance data on its SQL Server database. To collect data, it uses an agent that runs as a Windows service. The company just released a version of this product that supports VMware vSphere (both ESX and ESXi hosts, with or without vCenter Server). The new version, called Performance Sentry VM, does more than just run inside a virtual machine. Leveraging the VMware APIs in fact, Demand Technology Software managed to translate the VMware’s performance metrics into objects and counters that Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon) can use. The translated data, coming from the hypervisor and the guest operating systems, is presented by the Performance Sentry virtual machine that basically runs as a proxy provider. At this point any management solution can use it, including Perfmon or System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) thanks to a Management Pack that the company develops.  The product collects over 170 counters from 17 different objects . The company published a video of the product in action. Labels: Demand Technology Software , Perfomance Monitoring , Releases , VMware

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Vyatta, provider of open networking and network virtualization solutions, is partnering with value-added distributor Zycko to provide a scalable, flexible and affordable network and routing software alternative to the existing proprietary routing and security solutions in the EMEA market. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Last week VMware released vSphere 4.1 , an impressive minor release for its virtual infrastructure which introduced a number of remarkable new features. One of them is called Memory Compression: Compressed memory is a new level of the memory hierarchy, between RAM and disk. Slower than memory, but much faster than disk, compressed memory improves the performance of virtual machines when memory is under contention, because less virtual memory is swapped to disk. See Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX 4.1 for more details. While virtualization.info can’t say when the IT industry started researching the memory compression technique, we certainly can report about Nitin Gupta , a former member of the VMware’s Technical Staff part of the ESX Resource Management team from India, who mentioned memory compression on his personal blog in March 2009. Gupta is working on this technology since 2007, turning it into a GPLv2 open source project available for free on Google Code under the name of compcache (aka Compressed Caching for Linux). More than that, Gupta left VMware in April 2010 and submitted compcache to the Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2010 program. SoC is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Google accepted compcache based on the Gupta’s paper Memory Compression for Virtualized Environments , where he describes how to apply his generic memory compression software to hypervisors. Gupta already contributed code to the Linux kernel and Xen, so while his paper doesn’t specifically mention any hypervisor, it’s clear where compcache will end up. Assuming this whole thing is perfectly legal, it will be interesting to see how long will take for Citrix, Oracle or even Red Hat to hire the guy.

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Believe or not, the first blade system in the history of Cisco, the Unified Computing System (UCS), was launched more than one year ago . Since March 2009, Cisco managed to enter a number of data centers, also thanks to the tight relationship with VMware and EMC . In May The Register reported a sequential revenue growth last

VMware Studio is an integrated development tool that takes existing software applications and packages them into virtual machines and vApps that are ready to run and optimized for VMware platform products. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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After years of silence, the startup RingCube relaunched its flagship product in March , replacing the MojoPac brand (and its focus on the consumer market) with vDesk and a new effort to win the enterprise segment. vDesk acts like a wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms, which can enforce corporate security policies and that can be centrally managed. It competes against products like Microsoft MED-V ( formerly Kidaro Workspaces ), Sentillion vThere ( acquired by Microsoft too ) and VMware ACE. The company just achieved the OPSWAT OESIS OK interoperability certification for vDesk 3.0. OPSWAT is a very small US company founded in 2002 which develops and sells OESIS, a software framework that developers can adopt to manage third party security applications. OPSWAT also maintains a certification program, the OESIS OK, that verifies the compatibility between these security applications, including antivirus, antispyware, personal firewalls, hard disk encryption, VPN clients and much more . OPSWAT just added a new category to its program, Virtual Machines, and vDesk is the first product to appear there. The Gold Certification level achieved means that vDesk is able to interoperate with other certified products on the following tasks: Detection of product Get hypervisor type Is machine virtual Enumerate virtual machines Get virtual machine info Get VM network config Start virtual machine Pause virtual machine Stop virtual machine