In January 2008 the hardware vendor ClearCube decided to spin off its software division and started offering a VDI solution that could work with 3rd party hypervisors and physical servers. Called VDIworks, the startup largely remained under the radar, while trying to differentiate itself with a proprietary remote desktop protocol called VideoOverIP (VOIP) that launched in June 2009 . It’s unclear how much VDI market share the company gained in a world ruled by Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Quest, but at least VDIworks is trying to win some niches. It just released in fact a VDI client for the Apple iPad that supports its VOIP protocol: Fast Remote Desktop. VDIworks released a video of the app: Click here to view the embedded video. Labels: Releases , VDI , VDIworks

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In March the startup VKernel launched a simple and extremely effective free tool called CapacityVIEW : a single-window dashboard to immediately recognize the virtual infrastructure elements (data centers, clusters, hosts, virtual machines, resource pools, data stores), the resources allocation (both physical and virtual) and the amount of alerts that VMware vCenter is raising at any given moment. In May the company repeated the experiment launching AppVIEW , another minimal dashboard that evaluates and presents potential CPU, memory, disk and storage I/O bottlenecks by collecting 30 days of performance stats. Last week VKernel added a third free piece to its arsenal. This one is called StorageVIEW: it identifies the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest storage I/O latency in a VMware environment: It supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS SAN protocols and, of course, if a customer wants to have a more extensive analysis he’s welcome to upgrade to the Capacity Analyzer.

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In April the startup Hyper9 lost his Senior R&D Scientist Schley Andrew Kutz , popular on the virtualization scene thanks to his reverse engineering work of the VMware vCenter plug-in architecture, and father of many tools that the company released in the last year. Hyper9 hired Kutz just one year ago , bringing in his intellectual property about the Virtualization Manager Mobile and the SVMotion GUI plug-in . Kutz moved to EMC where he’s working as Principal Software Engineer. On top of that, Hyper9 loses today its founder and CTO Dave McCrory , virtualization.info has just learned. McCrory just left to pursue new opportunities and he’s rumored to be working on a new startup already. So far Hyper9 had a very complex story. Founded by McCrory and other former Surgient employees, it entered the market in November 2006 with the name of InovaWave. It used to develop a product to optimize the VMware ESX performance (initially called DXTreme for ESX and then renamed in VirtualOctane ). In February 2008, for undisclosed reasons, the company decided to completely change its brand identity, renaming itself in Hyper9 , and to completely shift its technology focus.

This is not exactly a bright moment for Red Hat, which received severe critics from VMware about several aspects of its Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform . While it’s true that this a 1.0 version and it’s then acceptable that it has a number of limitations, it’s still true that Red Hat is supposedly developing this product since at least one year and a half (as soon as it acquired the startup Qumranet ) and that it has to immediately deliver a very competitive product if it wants to play against VMware. And probably to accelerate the process of maturation of RHEV, this week the company announced that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) will become an open source project . Unfortunately this won’t help still for a long time. In a recent online presentation in fact, Red Hat revealed a number of details about its roadmap for RHEV that are all but promising: the upcoming RHEV-M 2.2 will still require Windows Server 2008 to offer RHEV-M high-availability then, customers will have to use Windows clustering services while the product is being ported now in Java so to be used on every platform including Linux, the new Java-Based RHEV-M won’t be ready before another year or so (probably in the form of version 3.0) RHEV-M 2.2 probably won’t support any form of storage live migration On top of that, apparently, Red Hat has no current plans to offer a limited free edition of its KVM-based hypervisor as VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V are. Despite that, and the many limitations above, Red Hat is claiming a significant saving when its virtualization platform is compared to VMware and Microsoft ones: (quite interestingly, Citrix is not part of the comparison) At the same time Red Hat claims better performance than competitors with several mission critical workloads: Easy to guess, VMware will have something to say about this.   Update: Apparently , the RHEV-M porting to Java will imply the adoption of JBoss. Support for third party databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL) is also planned.

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When Red Hat announced its plan to focus on KVM , and subsequently acquired Qumranet , the startup that maintained the virtualisation platform, it was clear that its implementation of Xen couldn’t survive much longer. In Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 and 5.5 Xen and KVM coexisted, but the former is going to disappear in RHEL 6.0. The first public beta of the new operating system in fact doesn’t have it anymore, according to ComputerWorld . Quite interestingly, ComputerWorld also quotes Simon Crosby, the Citrix CTO of Datacenter and Cloud division, who said “Red Hat has not contributed to the Xen code base for several years”, also suggesting that Red Hat is now five years behind the market because of its decision to support KVM. But even more interesting is what Crosby has to say on his own corporate blog about the Red Hat decision. Not only he recommends to Red Hat customers to consider a switch to Oracle Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux rather than prepare themselves to convert RHEL 5.x Xen virtual machines into RHEL 6.x KVM ones, but he suggests these options even before suggesting to migrate the RHEL 5.x Xen VMs on Citrix XenServer: …If you approach your virtualized world with a Linux/RHEL based mindset, then I recommend you consider switching to Oracle Enterprise Linux. It is a superior, enterprise class version of RHEL, and typically more up to date than it, and OEL is guaranteed to be compatible with RHEL. It’s straightforward to point an existing RHEL update network to the Oracle update servers. Oracle supports OEL on other virtualisation platforms such as VMware or XenServer, and in terms of pricing, running OEL in a virtual environment requires that the customer pay for only a single subscription for the physical server. Alternatively, if you’re wary of giving Larry more control than he already has over your environment, Novell SUSE Linux offers a superb enterprise Linux platform boasting more than 3,000 certified applications, fully supported on Xen and XenServer, with complete support for SAP and (via Mono) many Microsoft .Net apps. … Crucially, OEL and XenServer (and for that matter, Oracle VM, Hyper-V and even ESXi) are freely downloadable products . There is no freely downloadable Red Hat product. Moreover, for RHEV, the “virtualisation platform” incarnation of RHEL, even the source is no longer available online. You need to send Red Hat a check for $10, and they will mail you a CD with source. Yep, you can get the source if you ask for it, but then you’ve got to build it yourself. Uhhh. While both Oracle and Citrix are delivering their own implementation of Xen and could be considered competitors in the server virtualisation market,

Today VMware sent out a number of invitations to promote an upcoming announcement planned for April 27. The online webcast will be jointly presented with Salesforce, one of the leading companies in the technology-as-a-Service (SaaS) market since years, and it’s dubbed VMforce . Because it’s highly unlikely that VMware and Salesforce would disclose a merge in such a way, the expectations to have a groundbreaking announcement are set rather low. Nonetheless, a new evidence discovered just a few hours ago, may suggest something really big between the two. Dave McCrory , founder and CTO at the startup Hyper9, just discovered in the Google Cache a Salesforce job announcement that doesn’t exist anymore and that contains the following key sentence: Build new VMware technology-based grid with thousands of virtual machines to host… This single line is enough to speculate on a scenario where Salesforce starts offering to end users hosted virtual servers (or even virtual desktops), targeting both Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure ( when it will finally evolve from just a PaaS cloud architecture ), and where of course the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud is provided by VMware. That would be a remarkable announcement.

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Dave Convery , VMware vExpert and virtualisation Architect at Anexinet, published a short but very interesting report on current limitations of vShield Zones, the firewall that VMware acquired from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008 and that offers for free as part of vSphere 4.0 Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions . He specifically mentions three shortcomings related to: Networking …there is an unprotected Port Group (ORIGINAL Network). This needs to be added to the vSwitch AFTER the vShield Agent is installed. If the ORIGINAL Network is already a part of the vSwitch, it will need to be removed BEFORE installing the vShield Agent. In order to avoid an outage, you will need to disable DRS and manually vMotion all VMs off of the ESX/ESXi host before installing the vShield Agent and modifying the port groups

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Just one week after the release of Stratosphere 4.5.3 , the US startup Liquidware Labs announces version 4.5.4. In this build the company included an Application virtualisation Assessment feature clarifying that its interest goes beyond hardware virtualisation and VDI. With the new capability, Stratusphere 4.5.4 can build an application inventory by assessing physical desktops and laptops. The inventory includes the following information: Executable size System services installed and used per application Device drivers installed per application Total number of application users Average launch delay (application load time) Application usage (total and average time) Application resource requirements (total and average CPU, memory, IO) Basically Liquidware Labs is betting on the advent of application virtualisation as a mainstream technology, something that doesn’t seem to happen anytime soon . It’s not the only one

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In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors voted to remove the founder Diane Greene as CEO of the company. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPO in the IT history . Two months after her departure, his husband Mendel Rosenblum, left too . Rosenblum co-founded VMware and was the Chief Scientist declining the company vision. The board immediately replaced her with Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive that joined the EMC ecosystem after his startup Pi was acquired in February 2008.

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Last week the startup Liquidware Labs updated its flagship product Stratosphere to version 4.5.3. This minor update (version 4.5 came out in October 2009) just introduces a much welcome one-click assessment that produces a useful PowerPoint slidedeck. To be honest the slides could be prettier but they are customizable, so users may want to apply their own themes before presenting to a wide audience. The information inside the slide deck anyway is valuable, especially a graph showing how many physical machines and how many users are good candidates for client consolidation (aka VDI).

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