Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year.

The list includes:

• Transparent Memory Compression
  This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region. VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks. 
• IO-Resource Manager (IO-RM)
  This will allow the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to assign shares based on disk performance. The more shares a virtual machine will have, the higher priority it will get in accessing a shared VMFS volume.
• Eight concurrent live migrations
  Next version of VMotion will raise the default limit of concurrent live migrations from two to eight.

The imminent launch of Intel octal-core CPUs (codename Nehalem-EX) and servers with up to 48 cores (powered by AMD codename Magny-cours CPUs) will dramatically increase the virtualization hosts density but will highlight how the network layer is becoming one of the weakest point of high-capacity virtual infrastructures.

Anandtech just published a very interesting article on this topic, testing the performance of a couple of copper cable 10GBase-CX4 network interface cards against the popular quad-port gigabit NICs we use today in most virtualization hosts.

The benchmark measured dual-port Intel PRO/1000 PT Server adapter (82571EB) against a Supermicro AOC-STG-I2 dual-port 10Gbit/s Intel 82598EB and a Neterion Xframe-E 10Gbit/s.
Both NICs were tested with VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and CentOS 5.4 guest OSes with appropriate drivers.

While NICs tested by Anandtech are not the lastest available on the market, the research still is a valuable reading for most virtualization administrators.

The well-know virtualization professional (and blogger) Eric Sloof just released a tool called vmClient.

vmClient is a minimal management console that appears as an empty window frame.
It features a menu bar where the virtual machines hosted by any VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host are listed.
Each virtual machine in the list can be powered on/off, suspended and restarted. When the user tries to connect to them, the empty vmClient frame gets populated by the VMware MKS console (VNC) session with the guest operating system.

Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber).

Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them.

The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol.
This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example).

To do so, each virtual infrastructure entity, including hosts and virtual machines, appear as an IM contacts,  with its list of “friends”. 
Every management task can be executed through chat messages, and geographically distant virtual infrastructures can communicate through remote XMPP servers.

Microsoft just published the beta version of a new Infrastructure Planning and Design guide.
Titled Dynamic Data Center, this 43-pages blueprint on what Microsoft defines “a combination of automation, control, and resource management software with a well-defined topology of virtualization, servers, storage, and networking hardware”.

The guide is divided in five main parts:

• Determine the Dynamic Data Center Scope
  This part helps to define the scope and determine the workloads that will be included in the Dynamic Data Center project. It’s divided in three steps:
• Determine the proposed initial workloads for the Dynamic Data Center.
• Select the workload fault-tolerance approach (including Load Balancing, VM-Level and Host-Level Clustering, as well as Application-Level Fault Tolerance).
• Determine the initial size of the Dynamic Data Center.
  
• Design the Virtualization Hosts
  This part helps to design hosts that meet the capacity, performance, placement, and fault-tolerance requirements of the organization. It’s divided in three steps:
• Group the workloads
• Design the host’s Hardware configurations
• Determine host connectivity requirements
• Design the Software Infrastructure
  This part helps to design the software infrastructure in a way it can provide directory and authentication services, virtual machine management, configuration management, software distribution/inventory/patch management, event monitoring and collection, remote desktop services and hardware management.
• Design the Dynamic Data Center Storage
  This part helps to design the storage infrastructure in a way it meets requirements of capacity, performance delivery, fault tolerance and manageability. It’s divided in four steps:
• Design the storage system
• Design the host storage connections
• Design the storage switches
• Select the backup approach
• Design the Network Infrastructure
  This part helps to design the network infrastructure to accommodate the requirements accumulated throughout previous steps. It’s divided in three steps:
• Design network switches
• Design the hardware load balancers
• Design the firewalls

What the guide doesn’t cover instead is:

• Utility service providers or hosting companies offering cloud computing, cloud computing platforms, cloud platform services, or cloud infrastructure services.
• Windows Live™ network of Internet services or other consumer-oriented, cloud services.
• Microsoft Online Services or other third-party software-as-a-service organizations delivering Microsoft infrastructure technologies.
• VM guest planning is a complex topic, and although it informs the scoping in this guide, it is considered a related but separate exercise from planning the Dynamic Data Center infrastructure.

Now, while this document is a good starting point to plan and design what Microsoft calls a dynamic data center, it’s nowhere near the level of completeness that a customer need to design his infrastructure from scratch. And yet, it’s a great way to envision how massive is the investment that any company has to dedicate to data center design.

After reading this document, any customer would recognize some value in the emerging unified/fabric computing trend that companies like Egenera and Cisco are leading.

While Intel prepares to launch its first octal-core CPU (codename Nehalem-EX) , which will potentially trigger a price increase in vSphere licensing, VMware publishes a new benchmark on current Xeon 5500 servers.

This time the company focuses on high throughput web performance, running the SPECweb2005 benchmark against a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 machine equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 CPUs @ 2.933GHz and 96GB memory.

The system above, powered by vSphere 4.0, run four virtual machines with 4 vCPUs and 21GB vRAM each, hosting a copy of paravirtualized 64bit Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 plus Rock Webserver and Rock JSP server.

Such system, thanks to paravirtualization drivers, the VMware NetQueue technology, the Intel VMDirectPath technology (part of VT-d) and the Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit AF network interface cards, recorded a benchmark score of 62,296, equal to 85% of native performance.

The four VMs were able to serve  from 60,000 to 100,000 simultaneous users:

At the beginning of January virtualization.info published a long overview about the VMware’s approach to cloud computing, covering the vCloud APIs, the vCloud Express implementation and the five partners that are currently offering it.

One of them, BlueLock, just sent an email to its customers announcing that its vCloud Express offering will (tentatively) move from beta to general availability (GA) on March 25.

As far as we know none of the other providers is out of beta yet (this article will be updated if necessary).
So, while it’s entirely possible that BlueLock wants to be the first to announce vCloud Express GA, it’s much more likely that all the early adopters will make GA announcements in the same timeframe.
And this may mean that VMware is about to release some additional information or bits about its cloud computing platform. Like for example a version 1.0 of the APIs, or the public version of project Redwood, the software that will allow customers to migrate their virtual machines from their private virtual infrastructure to public clouds like the BlueLock one.

With an unexpected move, at the end of last week Parallels announced support for the upcoming Google operating system, Chrome OS, in its Desktop 5 for Mac.

While it’s entirely expected that consumers use desktop virtualization platforms to test new operating systems, it’s pretty uncommon to see a vendor that officially supports a beta product that is not widely deployed like Windows.

Considering the long beta cycles that Google products have (sometimes years), the effort to support multiple beta builds will be remarkable for Parallels.

The first stable release for Chrome OS is not expected to arrive before the second half of 2010.

Neocleus is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in May 2008 without much fanfare  (see virtualization.info coverage).
At that time, their Xen-based client hypervisor, Trusted Edge, was pitched as a secure endpoint platform that could be enriched by 3rd parties applications.

Two years after that, Neocleus still doesn’t get any significant traction despite many customers are well aware of (and very interested on) the client hypervisor concept because of its potential to deliver VDI in offline mode.
One reason for this lack of interest is that so far the startup made extremely complex to exactly understand the details of its product and to access it (the whole “drop us an email” argument doesn’t work well for a technology that is completely new and that faces severe skepticism about performance and hardware support).

So at the beginning of last week Neocleus announced a shift in its go-to-market strategy, with the release of NeoSphere, a version of Trusted Edge, that can be OEM’ed and extended by PC lifecycle management (PCLM), security and help desk vendors.
The first customer is the management vendor BigFix, according to Brian Madden.

Interestingly, every reference about Trusted Edge disappeared from the corporate website except a mention inside the original press announcement.

Last week Reuters and other news outlets reported that the VMware’s board approved a plan to buy back $400M in Class A shares.

The operation will happen over the months, through the end of 2011.

EMC said it has no intention to modify its ownership of the subsidiary, keeping it at around 80%.

In another note, the VMware’s CFO, Mark Peek, sold 15,000 shares at an average price of $46.72 a share in mid-February.

New month, new rebuttals in virtualization-land.
Evidently, virtualization players still consider the marketing skirmish very helpful to increase sales (virtualization.info has a slightly different opinion) so this March we have VMware leading three major campaigns against competitors.

Two of them are defensive, one is not:

• VMware View PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX
• Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales
• Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX

At the beginning of February Citrix sponsored a competitive analysis performed by Miercom.
The 7-pages report compares protocol performance of Citrix XenDesktop 4 (with ICA/HDX) and VMware View 4 (with PCoIP) and these are the conclusions:

In a comparison of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations, Citrix XenDesktop 4 provided better overall performance when compared to VMware View 4

XenDesktop 4 used 64% less bandwidth than View 4 with PCoIP for typical tasks

Flash video was delivered with an average of 65% less CPU usage, 89% less bandwidth, and excellent Quality of Experience by XenDesktop 4 compared to View 4

Overall, XenDesktop 4 uses system resources more efficiently and is capable of scaling more effectively

VMware answered last week, informing that they were not contacted by Miercom and that they have no insight about how test were conducted.
Of course VMware offered its point of view on each point,

At this point customers just have to decide which company has the nicest logo and which guy has the brightest smile to believe to one set of claims over the other. 
Luckily, Brian Madden jumps in and provide an impartial, long, detailed analysis that definitively is worth a read.

Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales

At the beginning of March, a blog independently run by VMware employees published interesting speculations about the sales volume of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V.

The article, written by Michael Hong, Senior Product Marketing Engineer, suggest that Citrix so far sold a very, very low number of Essentials for Hyper-V, because he apparently was the first one to recognize a major bug in the Workflow Studio setup.

Workflow Studio is part of the Essentials suite and the issue Hong encountered prevents its installation, but the Citrix support didn’t solve the issue and closed Hong’s support ticket without reasons.

Hong also notes that Citrix doesn’t have more than a bunch of posts on the its support forum about Essentials for Hyper-V.

For sure readers can’t wait to hear what Citrix has to answer on this…

Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

This is an old classic.
At the beginning of March VMware decided to cover a cost comparison table that Microsoft recently published.

The table compares several vSphere editions against a System Center bundle called System Center Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD), showing how the Microsoft way is significantly less expensive than VMware offering (at least half the price):

Of course there are a number of issues in the comparison that VMware pointed out.

In some cases VMware is completely right in highlighting how Microsoft doesn’t detail enough the difference between implementations of the same feature (vSMP support for example).
In other cases VMware wants Microsoft to drop comparison between some features because they are too different (VMware DRS vs Microsoft PRO for example) but here’s the a lot of room to debate.

While totally misleading, the sense of those marks is more like “We have this feature. The customer can use it in some way”.
Is it possible to pretend that a simple comparison table like this one (or the ones that VMware produces) offers an insightful qualitative analysis of implementation cost for each listed feature?
The customers that are looking for such in-depth side-by-side analysis aren’t going to research more on their own? Are they supposed to make their purchase decision just looking at this chart?

This is way the whole “my product is better than yours” marketing effort is a complete waste of time.

VMware just launched a new online facility called Labs.

It seems a sort of R&D website that exposes company’s engineers pet projects before they turn into real products, similarly to what other companies like Microsoft and Google do.

At the moment Labs hosts ten projects, all released as Technology Previews, under open source licenses, without any support and without any indication about future inclusion in the VMware product portfolio.

Some of them, like the previously covered VMware Guest Console, are extremely interesting:

• Apache Pivot
  Like most modern development platforms, Pivot provides a comprehensive set of foundation classes that together comprise a "framework". These classes form the building blocks upon which more complex and sophisticated applications can be built.
• Dynamo RIO
  DynamoRIO exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc. Unlike many dynamic tool systems, DynamoRIO is not limited to insertion of callouts/trampolines and allows arbitrary modifications to application instructions via a powerful IA-32/AMD64 instruction manipulation library. DynamoRIO provides efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of unmodified applications running on stock operating systems (Windows or Linux) and commodity IA-32 and AMD64…
• esxplot
  Esxplot is a GUI based tool that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program loads files of this data and presents it as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel of the tool, graphs of the selected metrics are plotted in the right panel.
  Esxplot allows you to "browse" the contents of these somewhat unwieldy files. You can plot up to 16 metrics on the same canvas and export the graphs to a gif, jpg, png or bmp file format. Subsets of the data can be worked with by using the regex query box which will produce a subtree that can be browsed or exported as a csv file which can, in turn, be loaded into esxplot, PERFMON or Excel…
• Onyx
  Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.
• SVGA Sonar
  VGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen. Sonar was designed to use the devtap API to visualize application drawing patterns by rendering a scaled-down view of the desktop replacing pixel data with color-coded rectangles. As applications update the screen, Sonar presents it's scaled version of the screen using colors to denote different types of rendering commands and whether this rendering caused a visible change to the screen…
• vApprun
  …vApprun, these features becomes available to both Workstation and Fusion users. The vApprun tool implements the same vApp/OVF feature set as the vSphere 4 release. Thus, Workstation/Fusion can be used as a development environment for advanced OVF packages, and it can be used to evaluate and test OVF packages on your desktops and laptops…
• vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA)
  VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) - vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.
• VMware Guest Console (VGC)
  A new management console able to independently monitor and manipulate files and processes inside any guest operating system. See virtualization.info coverage.
• VI Java
  vSphere Java API is a set of Java libraries that sits on top of existing vSphere SDK Web Services interfaces. It provides full managed object model and run-time type checking, resulting dramatic productivity boost.
• Virtual USB Analyzer
  The Virtual USB Analyzer is a free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools. As far as we know, it's the world's first tool to provide a graphical visualization along with raw hex dumps and high-level protocol analysis.

Thanks to NTPRO.NL for the news.

Exactly one year ago, PHD Virtual Technologies (formerly PHD Technologies) lost its CEO Sridhar Murthy.

In the last twelve months the company was led by its Executive Chairman Joe Julian, former Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Global Accounts at Veritas Software.

PHD Virtual Technologies yesterday announced that the former CEO of Shunra Software, Thomas Charlton, joined the company as new Chairman and CEO, thus replacing both Murthy and Julian.

This is the third CEO the company has since its launch in March 2006.

The most interesting thing is that the press release explicitly says that Charlton was chosen by Insight Venture, the VC firm that invests in both Shunra and PHD Virtual.

A few minutes ago a couple of videos of a new VMware product called Guest Console (VGC) surfaced.

Guest Console, currently in Technology Preview phase, is a new management console able to independently monitor and manipulate files and processes inside any guest operating system.

It can connect to any guest OS, it doesn’t matter if the VM is hosted on ESX, Server and Workstation.
Once connected to the host, VGC provides a task manager, a file system explorer, a snapshot manager and a virtual machine manager that work with Windows and Linux guests.

With these tools an administrator can perform simple tasks like ending a running process or start a new program, as well as more complex things like copying the same file to multiple guest OSes at the same time.
In similar fashion, it can manipulate snapshots of multiple virtual machines at the same time or store the information coming from multiple guest OSes for inventory purposes.

Here’s the videos:

Thanks to Eric Sloof for the news.

Exactly one year ago the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore made clear its decision to extend the focus to hypervisors from Microsoft and Citrix.
At that time the company announced the upcoming support for Hyper-V and XenServer in the new vControl enterprise management console.

Twelve months later, according to ComputerWorld, Vizioncore is getting ready to further support VMware competitors and unveils that its performance monitoring product, vFoglight, will support Hyper-V by mid-year and XenServer within the end of 2010.

One of the biggest assets VMware has, excluding of course its product portfolio, is its VMTN Forum facility, which hosts a large and incredibly active community of professionals that quite often are more knowledgeable, faster and way more efficient than the company’s paid support.

Any new customer that wants to learn VMware technologies inside out, well beyond what the official training class can provide, should consider investing at least 6-9 months just to follow the threads on the VMTN board in passive mode.

There’s a large number of VMware employees that contributed the success of VMTN. The first one that comes to mind for sure is John Troyer, Senior Social Media Strategist, who definitively is the VMware front man for everything related to the community.

Behind the scenes there’s at least another one: Robert Dell’Immagine, Director of Community Program, who just left VMware after almost six years.

Dell’Immagine joined the security vendor Qualys, where he’s covering the same role since February.

The security virtualization startup Altor Networks announced this week a new round funding, $10M, led by DAG Ventures, Juniper Networks, Accel Partners and Foundation Capital.

Accel and Foundation already led the previous one, equal to $6M, in April 2008.

It’s not clear if this is the second or third round: the company claims it is the second one, but the $6M announcement says:

…today announced it has secured a $6 million second round of financing led by Accel Partners and Foundation Capital

Last week Pano Logic announced its third round funding, equal to $20M and led by Mayfield Fund.

As result, Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha will join the company’s Board of Directors.

With this investment, the startup raised more than $40M. The previous round, $18M, was led by Foundation Capital and Goldman Sachs.

Pano Logic revealed that its sales tripled in 2009 and while its revenue may just get better this year, the startup is seeing increasing pressure from bigger firms that embrace the idea of a zero client for thin computing and VDI environments.
Dell, for example, just announced its own zero client: the FX100.

The good news is that Pano Logic just closed an OEM agreement with Fujitsu.
Simply dubbed Fujitsu Zero Client, the OEM’ed product is available starting this month in every country where Fujitsu operates, as far as we understand.

Last week VMware updated its disaster recovery solution Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to version 4.0.1.1 (build 236215).

The new version is primarily for bug fixing and features enhancements. There are no new capabilities. Yellow Bricks published the complete list.

This version of SRM supports storage replication adapters from:

• 3PAR
• Compellent
• Dell | EqualLogic
• EMC (for CLARiiON, Symmetrix, Celerra and RecoverPoint)
• FalconStor
• Fujitsu
• Hitachi
• HP (for EVA, LeftHand and XP)
• IBM (for DS, SVC ad XIV)
• LSI
• NEC
• NetApp (both NAS and SAN products)
• Sun (acquired by Oracle)

Last week the virtualization security startup HyTrust announced its second round funding: $10.5M, led by Granite Ventures and Cisco.

The first round was equal to $5.5M, provided by Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.

Only Len Rand, Managing Director at Granite Ventures and former General Manager of Strategic Marketing and Global Alliances in Intel, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Director. Nobody from Cisco.

On top of this, HyTrust also announced that Jim Gannon, the former Director of Global Accounts at VMware, joined the company as its new Vice President of Sales.