For the third quarter of 2009, VMware reported U.S. revenues of $246 million (down 1 percent), international revenues of $244 million (up 9 percent), and services revenues -- including software maintenance and professional services -- of $250 million (up 33 percent).
The suddenly volatile Citrix reported a global decline in Q3 license revenue of 18 percent (-15 percent in EMEA, -5 percent in APAC, and +5 percent in the Americas). Revenue generated from license updates increased 7 percent, while technical service revenue from consulting, training and technical support increased 20 percent. Lastly, online services revenue increased 21 percent.
IDC's numbers illustrate the ups and downs of the virtualization market as it rides out the economic storm. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, 16.5 percent of all new servers shipped during Q2 of 2009 were virtualized, an increase of 14.5 percent over the same period a year ago.
However, actual shipments decreased 21 percent to 246,000 physical servers because of what IDC cites as a continuation of the 2008 decrease in this area. Similarly, worldwide virtualization software revenue declined 18.7 percent to $344 million.
On the product front, IDC says the server virtualization market is continuing its shift toward the use of paid hypervisors, with paid-for virtualization software now running on 60.8 percent of all new server hardware shipments virtualized in 2Q09, a 57.2 percent increase over the second quarter of last year.
IDC's take on these numbers is that they represent growing stability, and the market is poised for the beginning of a "significant infrastructure refresh cycle in the months ahead."
When it comes to new, virtualized server shipments worldwide, HP remained numeral uno with 36 percent of the market. Although those shipments were down 18 percent from Q208, they grew 1 percent sequentially. These numbers were primarily driven by HP's x86 ProLiant server business.
Despite a year-over-year decline of 22 percent, VMware retains its 1-2 punch as the leader in virtualization platforms. That decline was just a tick more than its 21 percent drop in x86 virtualization licenses. For its part, Microsoft saw its virtualization license shipments go down 16 percent, as a result of the continued depreciation of Virtual Server 2005. Hyper-V is the better-news Microsoft story here, as it jumped 54 percent one year after its official launch, which landed it into fourth place "while it cannibalizes itself into the number three position, past Virtual Server 2005," IDC notes. Parallels Virtuozzo rounds out the top five with license shipments declining 36 percent.
Citrix XenServer showed the largest increase, growing 108 percent during the past year, a jolt IDC attributes to the company changing its business model (IDC obviously had no idea of the full open-sourcing XenServer announcement when it issued this Q2 press release), and offering XenServer free with certain management functionality.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/29/2009 at 12:48 PM1 comments
I've always been a big believer in talking to IT people about their pain points and the benefits they are realizing from their technology implementations. Simply stated, users like to learn about what other users are up to, so in my opinion, one of the best ways of explaining the value of a new technology such as VDI is describing how it is actually being used in the real world -- warts and all.
Which brings us to the VDI implementation of Kane Edupuganti, director of IT Operations and Communications at St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in New York City. Edupuganti came to my attention via a conversation I was having with zero client maker Pano Logic, which prides itself on offering end point products that are utterly free of any extraneous computing capabilities.
And they mean it. According to Pano Logic, the Pano Device (the product's official name) "simply serves to connect peripheral devices -- a keyboard, mouse, VGA display and audio output -- along with other USB peripherals, to a virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop operating system running on a server in the data center." No CPU, no OS, no memory, no moving parts.
Edupuganti has deployed 500 of these diminutive (3" x 3" by 2"), zero client devices across St. Vincent's 42 sites in the five boroughs of NYC, and he is very happy with the results, which include currently spending 30 minutes to deploy a new Pano Device compared to four hours for a fat client PC, and slashing St. Vincent's previously profligate energy consumption -- St. Vincent's was one of New York state's top five power consumers -- from 160 watts per PC to five watts per Pano Device. More good news: The eight St. Vincent's desktop engineers serving 7,000 users can now spend their time on more productive tasks than constantly dealing with hard drive failures and swapping out data from crashed machines.
This VDI system was born of necessity. The hospital's shared-bandwidth MPLS network was slowing down to the point where medical personnel using fat client PCs in the emergency room on 12th Street in NYC were unable to maintain current patient care and billing information because the bedside system used to perform those functions -- which is located at the data center on 33rd Street -- couldn't keep up with the daily onslaught of processing demands at the ER.
Unwilling to jerk the MPLS system out of 42 locations and start over with something else, Edupuganti researched the market and came up with a VMware VDI solution that included the Pano Devices. As he puts it, "We started browsing the web and we ran across this little silver box called Pano Logic and we started digging into it and we found it fit perfectly into the model we were thinking about."
In that VDI model, rather than being bogged down on the MPLS network, applications and the desktop run in the data center, and screen scrapes are done to an endpoint device.
It didn't take long for things to improve. "The minute we deployed the Pano Logic solution based on VMware's VDI solution, the lags went away, and within a week, medical personnel were able to catch up on almost 300 backlogs being closed in the emergency department," Edupuganti declares. "They love the performance, and they kind of actually became our marketing tool within the hospital. The word spread from the emergency department to the radiology department to the cardiology department and so on."
The Pano Devices are good, but they can't fix a balky network, and a balky network can cause problems for Pano Devices. As he puts it, if you have blips in your network, you will see a blank screen on the user workstation. He goes on to note that Pano Logic introduced its own network access protocol, which he says is better than RDP, the company's previous protocol of choice. Still, the new protocol is not perfect, and Edupuganti says that for use with YouTube, when he renders video, a lack of bandwidth can lead to lags or non-synched video/audio feeds.
"They're working on it," he says of the protocol problems. "It is one of our pain points, and it is on our wish list to be corrected."
That's a small problem compared to the big benefits St. Vincent's is enjoying.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/27/2009 at 12:48 PM9 comments
In fact, they have just revealed "accelerated momentum" for VMware vSphere 4, saying it has been downloaded 500,000 times by customers since becoming available May 21 of this year. The pace of these downloads has briskly increased to an average rate of more than 3,600 downloads per day.
Warning: Do not attempt to read the press release describing this good news while driving or operating heavy equipment because it is filled with so many hyperbolic, unvarnished, and extravagantly self-serving statements that your mind may briefly boggle, causing you to lose control of your vehicle.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/22/2009 at 12:48 PM6 comments
Citrix got a nice little boost recently in its battle to retain mindshare against VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V when it unveiled XenDesktop 4, a new VDI product that Citrix claims is unsurpassed in its functionality and ROI potential. That claim is why I lined up a VDI Point-Counterpoint feature between Citrix and VMware that will appear in the upcoming December-January issue of our magazine.
Anyway, things were going along nicely following the announcement until the pleasant buzz of success came to an abrupt halt when three different segments of Citrix customers registered complaints related to XenDesktop 4 licensing and packaging requirements.
In his personal blog of October 20, Sumit Dhawan vice president for Citrix XenDesktop, decided to man-up on the issue, and after briefly noting that XenDesktop 4 was still boffo, he laid out the bad news: the results of survey data and one-on-one conversations had made it evident that "we missed a few important things" on the licensing and packaging front during the initial product announcement.
According to Dhawan's blog, some customers required additional flexibility to license virtual desktops based on devices, rather than users. Other customers new to desktop automation said they needed a simple "VDI-only" solution with more flexible licensing to make the transition easier as they ramp up. The third group to complain were K-12 and university customers who wanted a simpler, more cost-effective program customized for the unique needs of the educational market.
So what did Citrix think about these criticisms? "The short answer is 'We agree,'" Dhawan declares. "Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us make sure XenDesktop 4 enables the broadest set of virtual desktop scenarios possible. As a result, we've decided to make three important enhancements to XenDesktop 4."
Those enhancements include a new device-based licensing option, a new VDI edition available in both user/device and CCU licensing, and a new campus-wide licensing program for customers in the education industry.
So what are we to make of this embarrassing scenario? Here's my take: Citrix erred by not fully understanding the needs of its customers, realized that the best business decision was to admit the mistake, and went about fixing it. They came out of the situation looking better than worse, and they probably locked in some new customers who would have otherwise gone elsewhere.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/22/2009 at 12:48 PM4 comments
Through the wonder of virtualization, Windows 7 now goes with Windows XP hand-in-glove, which is a claim the much-maligned Windows Vista could never make. In other words, the Windows XP Mode capability of Windows makes Windows 7 completely backwards compatible with XP, enabling users to run all their old software on Windows 7. This is possible because Windows XP Mode is a virtual machine powered by a new version of the Windows Virtual PC virtualization engine.
This new version of Windows Virtual PC is designed specifically for small and mid-market business users. It is integrated with the Windows 7 Shell as well as Windows XP Mode setup, and also provides support to many USB devices.
Just as it is the runtime engine for Windows XP Mode, Windows Virtual PC performs that same function for MED-V, which is a product of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance. MED-V is designed to provide IT pros with the capability to centrally manage and deploy Virtual Windows environments toward the laudable goals of reducing complexity, maintaining control and keeping costs low.
Now, onto the caveat: Windows XP Mode will only work on CPUs featuring AMD-V and Intel VT CPU-specific hardware virtualization features. In order to find out if your PC includes the AMD-V or Intel VT features, check with your PC maker.
Looks like Mac has one less arrow to shoot at the hapless PC.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/20/2009 at 12:48 PM4 comments
And now for few words on storage virtualization: Having been editor of a webzine on storage networking in my not-so-distant past, I thought I would weigh in on this technology, which is dramatically improving the lives of storage admins and enhancing productivity at the growing number of organizations that are implementing it.
One of the long-standing problems facing IT organizations has been more fully implementing available capacity in storage devices, such as disk arrays -- whoa, wait a second. Let me back up and state this correctly, I should say that the problem has been more fully implementing capacity when it is possible to locate and assess all the underused storage devices across far-flung legacy IT infrastructures, which is like searching for a needle in a haystack at some companies.
In virtualized storage environments, multiple physical resources are pooled into a smaller number of physical resources -- which may be as small as one -- which reduces complexity and enhances access. Virtualized storage can also be dynamically adjusted to meet rapidly changing storage demands. Another benefit area that has drawn particular attention is the green story that is created in the data center by consolidating storage resources, reducing overall energy bills and slashing the amount of required data center floor space. Throw in less time spent managing tasks that can be automated centrally, and you end up with a pretty attractive technology package with "ROI" stamped all over it.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/20/2009 at 12:48 PM3 comments
Some people believe that by forsaking Xen and embracing the open source KVM hypervisor via its recent announcement of version 5.4 Red Hat Enterprise Enterprise Linux (RHEL), that Red Hat is simply playing a "me too" virtualization game that is too little, too late. After all, how can Red Hat gain a solid foothold in a market where VMware rules, Microsoft is coming on strong and XenServer from Citrix is bidding for market share.
In her Sept. 9 blog, ServerWatch managing editor Amy Newman suggests a twist on this scenario that will not put a happy face on the Xen world.
"It is Xen, which has been part of RHEL since version 5 was released in 2007 that stands to lose the most," Amy writes. "RHEL said it will continue to support Xen for the 10-year release cycle of version 5, but it made its aim to migrate customers to KVM quite clear."
Navin Thadani, a senior director of Red Hat's virtualization business, attempted to calm the fears of Xen users in an article that recently appeared in Campus Technology. According to Thadani, "The KVM hypervisor will sit right beside the Xen hypervisor," adding that RHEL customers who have deployed the Xen hypervisor will continue to be supported throughout the full lifecycle of RHEL 5.
Still, it's gotta be enough to make a Xen user nervous.
In her blog, Amy briefly digresses from her Xen tack by referring to her colleague Paul Rubens, who also recently interviewed Thadani. In response to a question about a possible industry shakeout, Rubens quoted Thadani as saying, "We see consolidation as being inevitable, and in the medium term, in this market, we believe that will leave VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat."
Other than being so much unleavened pabulum, that comment seems highly believable.
Anyway, getting back to Amy again, she concludes her analysis of Xen's questionable future by saying, "This leaves Xen out in the cold, or the cloud, which is where the majority of activity has been of late. But with the virtualization vendors scrambling for the cloud, the competition is stiffening there as well."
Who would have thought the cloud would become a second-chance killing floor for technologies that have been ousted from the virtualization penthouse?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/2009 at 12:48 PM0 comments
I'm Bruce Hoard, the new editor of Virtualization Review. Let me immediately deliver my first unvarnished opinion about virtualization: I think it is an awesome technology. Not super-duper awesome, but awe-inspiring awesome.
Before I expound further, let me give you a brief tour of my IT journalism career. I started out as a staff writer at ComputerWorld back in the early 80's, when emerging LAN technologies were the subject of a holy war between the baseband and broadband crowds, and the IBM PC was just starting to turn the IT industry on its ear.
My beat back then was networking, which was predominantly composed of data and voice technologies (these guys were also not far from going at each other with pitchforks). After a few years of moving up the editorial ranks, I was chosen to be founding editor of Network World, which of course, still graces the ranks of IT publications today.
After leaving Network World, I started a 20-year freelance career, during which I wrote about a wide range of technologies, ran a webzine about Microsoft software running on Compaq computers, edited another webzine that covered storage networking, and generally speaking kept busy producing whatever editorial products were called for at the time.
During the past year or so, I was commissioned to do some freelance white papers on this new technology known as virtualization, and right away, I thought it was a cool, compelling topic. As a result, when I had a conversation with 1105 Media VP and Editorial Director Doug Barney about some job openings, and he mentioned that the estimable Keith Ward was vacating the editor-in-chief job at Virtualization Review to run another magazine there, I immediately threw my hat into the ring.
Happily, I got the job, and now I am presenting myself to you, gentle readers, as your new editor. I'm asking you to continue your interactive relationship with us by bending my ear with your rants, raves and plain old comments relating to our editorial product.
My goal is to build on Keith's fine work by getting you even more involved than you were before. I promise to read all your constructive e-mails, and to publish the ones I think will be the most interesting and instructive to our audience of over 40,000 readers. I'm making it as easy as possible for you to opine by including comment boxes. Please give them a workout!
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/2009 at 12:48 PM10 comments
I've been wondering if people are rolling their own VDI, as it were, and now I have run across at least one company that has done just that. The story of this implementation comes from David Davis, who is Director of Infrastructure at TrainSignal.com, a global company offering video training for IT Pros. He has a number of certifications including CCIE #9369, MCSE, CISSP, VCP and vExpert. The prolific Davis also writes for a cool site called VirtualizationAdmin.com.
His roll-your-own description was part of a larger piece he wrote on the benefits and pitfalls of VMware's VDI package (which has since been supplanted by VMware View).
So as Davis tells it, TrainSignal.com is a frugal company that didn't want to pay the big ones for a full-blown VMware VDI solution. The company has a large Citrix farm with over 400 concurrent Wyse thin clients connecting to 16 servers, with users sharing applications that are installed on each server.
The problem, Davis discovered, was that a number of older applications were not multi-user enabled, and when a second user ran one of them, it would lock or crash.
"What we did," Davis wrote, "is create a VMware virtual desktop (on Server 1.x or ESX), and enable RDP to run it. We installed the old application, and we made it so the workstation would automatically login using Windows credentials, and the application would start -- maximized in the virtual desktop -- when the user connected and logged in.
"Back on that user's Citrix desktop, we put an icon with a name of the application. The application actually ran an RDP connection, full-screen, and connected to the virtual desktop system. When the connection was made, the user immediately saw their application, but it was running on the other server. However, because that user was the only person using the application, it worked fine with just a single server."
Davis calls this his "sort-of-ad-hoc VDI system," saying it enabled his company to hold down costs (no PCs required), keep its network secure, and easily roll out more of these virtual desktops.
Question: Is this kind of roll-your-own virtualization a good idea? E-mail me your thoughts or post below.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/2009 at 12:48 PM6 comments