After the benchmark about Office SharePoint Server 2007 ( 171,000 concurrent users on a single server ), VMware published a new performance report related to its new vSphere 4.1 virtual infrastructure. This time it’s about SAP. Once again the company measured the performance of the system using a single physical host: a Dell PowerEdge R905 4U rackmount server with 4 AMD Quad-Core Opteron 8384 CPUs and 128GB RAM. vSphere 4.1 started serving a single virtual machine with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, loaded with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2, SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 4 and IBM DB2 9.7. The test was repeated with multiple VMs, with 2 and 4 vCPUs each. VMware reports that this configuration can serve up to 1,200 concurrent users with 2 or 4 VMs running a grand total of 8 vCPUs. If the amount of VMs and the amount of vCPUs is doubled than this system can serve up to 2,500 concurrent users: Labels: Benchmarks , SAP , VMware

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virtualization.info is a publication about technology. On these pages you’ll find information just about vendors and products. Today I’ll make an exception for a person that has made a piece of the virtualization history. Today I’d like to honor Alex Vasilevsky , who died yesterday of cancer. Alex Vasilevsky co-founded Katana Technology in 2003, with Scott Davis, who now is the CTO of the Desktop Virtualization business unit at VMware. Alex Vasilevsky was the Chief Scientist of Katana Technology, which was rebranded as Virtual Iron in January 2005, and officially launched one month later.  Virtual Iron has been acquired by Oracle in May 2009. After Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky founded another virtualization company in December 2007: Old Road Computing. The stealth startup was rebranded as Virtual Computer in September 2008 and officially launched three months later. Virtual Computer launched one of the first client hypervisors in the market. As a very promising company, it attracted the interest of many investors, including Citrix. With both his companies, Alex Vasilevsky greatly contributed to the development of the open source hypervisor Xen, which now is a leading virtualization engine, powering virtual infrastructures and public cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon EC2. I wrote about Katana for the first time in December 2004 , quoting an article from ARNnet. I’ve met Alex for the first time in June 2007: we were both speaking at the same virtualization conference in NYC. In the early days of virtualization, the biggest competitor of Virtual Iron was XenSource. Simon Crosby, founder and former CTO at XenSource and now CTO at Citrix, just published some words about Alex Vasilevsky. Labels: Leadership , Virtual Computer , Virtual Iron

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At the beginning of the week Citrix released the Service Pack 1 for its VDI platform XenDesktop. Burton Group, a Gartner subsidiary, named it the first enterprise-ready solution for VDI on the market . So what’s new in the update that is worth such recognition? The SP1 (build 5010) contains upgrades to the Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) that improve the reliability of virtual desktops with almost 50 fixes , but the two key new features are related to the connection broker component, the Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC): Role-based access control (RBAC) model for administration delegation Change logging for administrative tasks On top of that, now Citrix provides enterprise support agreements (minimum 3 years) for all XenDesktop 4 Platinum Edition components. Labels: Citrix , Releases , VDI

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At the end of July VMware published an interesting benchmark about its new vSphere 4.1 platform: over 171,000 concurrent users for a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment hosted by a single physical server. The virtualization host was a Dell PowerEdge R710 2U rack server, powered by two Intel Quad-Core Xeon X5570 CPUs and 96GB RAM. The SAN was an EMC CX3-40 SAN with two storage processors and 60 146GB hard drives (15K RPM). vSphere 4.1 hosted five virtual machines: three Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition R2 IIS web servers, a SQL Server 2008 SP1 and SharePoint Server 2007 SP2. The SQL Server VM was configured with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, the other VMs with 2 vCPUs and 4GB vRAM. The workload, a mix of 80% read, 10% search, and 10% modify transactions, was generated by Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Agent. Labels: Benchmarks , Microsoft , VMware

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MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of Wintergreen Research’s new report “Cloud Based Office Productivity Software Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2010 to 2016″ to their collection of Internet Applications market reports. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Virtual Bridges just announced the release of VERDE 4.2. The features provided in this new minor update are significant. First of all Virtual Bridges developed a VDI client for the Apple iOS: called iVERDE, the application should appear shortly on the AppStore for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. The company built iVERDE on the open source iDesktop project. iVERDE, which has been released under the GPL open source license too, supports remote connection to Windows XP, 7 and Linux virtual desktops. VERDE 4.2 also includes a new way to provision virtual machines from a so-called gold master image by leveraging Microsoft Active Directory. VERDE 4.2 also includes support for two-factor authentication products, including RSA SecureID, Safeword and other solutions based on RADIUS. Last but not least, the new build allows customers to customize the client desktop virtualization platform based on KVM that Virtual Bridges offers for offline VDI: Live Environment Access Format (LEAF). With VERDE 4.2 now LEAF can be personalized at the login phase to include branding logos and scripts. Labels: Releases , VDI , Virtual Bridges

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Citrix Systems today reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2010, sending its shares soaring. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Duncan Epping at Yellow Bricks yesterday posted a brief but very interesting article about the best approach to pursue when a company is about to replace its SAN arrays: Storage vMotion or SAN Replication. Epping breaks down the pros and cons of both approaches: SAN Replication Can utilize Array based copy mechanisms for fast replication (+) Per LUN migration, high level of concurrency (+) Old volumes still available (+) Need to resignature or mount the volume again (-) A resignature also means you will need to reregister the VM! (-) Downtime for the VM during the cut over (-) Storage vMotion No downtime for your VMs (+) Fast Storage vMotion when your Array supports  vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) (+) If your Array doesn’t support VAAI migrations can be slow (-) Induced cost if VAAI isn’t supported (-) Only intra Array not across arrays (-) No resignaturing or re-registering needed (+) Per VM migration (-) Limited concurrency (2 per host, 8 per VMFS volume) (-) Labels: VMware

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The US startup Virtual Computer earlier this week announced its new Senior Vice President of Marketing: Andrew McKay . McKay is the co-founder and former Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing of Attivio, a software company focused on enterprise search solutions. From 2002 to 2006 McKay has been the Vice President of Sales, Technical Sales and Product Marketing at Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), acquired by Microsoft in early 2008. Labels: Leadership , Virtual Computer

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Despite the great Q2 performance reported two days ago by VMware, not everybody believes that the virtualization vendor will continue to keep its leadership position in every market segment the near future. Dow Jones in fact reports about a research note released last month by Goldman Sachs about VDI suggesting that Citrix will surpass VMware and lead the market in the next three years. The financial firm wrote in the Americas Morning Summary of June 9 : We believe Citrix and VMware will dominate the VDI market for the foreseeable future, with close to 90% of the market between the two. However, momentum is diverging currently in favor of Citrix. Hence, we have updated our model to reflect increasing market share for Citrix increasing from 42% in CY2009 to 50% in CY2013. VMware’s share moves from 51% to 39% over the same timeframe. Previously we had both vendors with equal share in CY2013. The skepticism expressed by the VMware’s executives during the Q2 2010 earnings call certainly didn’t help to counter the Goldman Sachs forecast. Labels: Citrix , VMware

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