As I mentioned
yesterday
, I'm at Microsoft's
Worldwide Partner Conference
in Houston. As I entered the pressroom a few minutes ago, I heard some information I wanted to quickly pass along. On a big-screen plasma display, Bob Kelly,
Corporate Vice President, Infrastructure Server Marketing, mentioned an upcoming milestone in Microsoft's virtualization program.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/09/20084 comments
Huge, huge news today with the
ouster
of the "Bill Gates" of virtualization, Diane Greene. The announcement came in a very brief, impersonal
notice
on the VMware Web site.
Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran who left that company in 2000, takes over Greene's role as captain of the ship, becoming the new president and CEO. Maritz founded another company, Pi Corporation, focused on cloud-based computing, that was bought by VMware's parent company, EMC, last February. Talk about a quick promotion.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/08/20086 comments
So, Diane Greene
is out
and former Microsoft executive Paul Martiz is in at VMware. It's a lot to digest in one morning. But one of the advantages of being at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference is that I'm sitting in the same press room as Mary Jo Foley, author of the best
Microsoft blog
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/08/20081 comments
Our July/August issue is going to be special. It's all about planning for your virtual environment. As an editor, I'm generally not a huge fan of "theme" issues, but in this case, it makes perfect sense. As the ubiquitous Gartner study points out, only around 10 percent of servers are currently virtualized (that number could be a little higher or lower, but it's likely fairly accurate).
That means most IT departments still aren't using virtualization; and among those that are, many have gone with a "consolidate a few servers and see what happens" method, without any real strategy behind it.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/03/20086 comments
The VMware acquisition of B-hive Networks is
complete
, and with it, VMware's managment capabilities are more complete as well. The announcement of the purchase was
first announced
in May of this year, making it a whirlwind courtship and marriage.
B-hive's primary product, Conductor, extends the ability of VMware's management console, VirtualCenter (VC), to see inside applications that reside in Virtual Machines (VMs). This is a weakness of VC, which can tell you what's happening with the VMs themselves, but has little ability to look inside them.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/03/20085 comments
Hi folks,
First, a few announcements: everyone (in the U.S., that is), have a greath 4th of July! Eat hamburgers and watermelon until you get sick, then work it off playing hours of volleyball.
Second, I'll be out for the balance of the next week. I'll be in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, doing some video work for my buddies over at sister publication Redmond Channel Partner magazine. While I'm there, however, I'm going to try my best to grab some Microsoft execs who work in the virtualization arena, and talk to them about Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Kidaro, App-V and more. I should get some good blog material out of that. The downside is that I won't be blogging here for most of next week, although I'll try to get some stuff in toward the end of the week.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/03/20087 comments
Simon Crosy, Citrix' CTO, doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's usually highly entertaining. Case in point is his
response
today to Brian Madden's
recent posting
about the future of Xen.
Brian, as I mentioned in a blog entry about his post, believes that Xen (note: not XenServer, which is a paid variant with Xen at its core, but the free, open source Xen hypervisor) could die off, and that the RTM of Microsoft's Hyper-V is the possible death knell.
Simon was the head of XenSource before it was bought by Citrix, and thus has a personal stake in this, as he's put his heart and soul into Xen for years. He thinks Brian is full of hot air in this case.
First, he says that XenServer (Citrix's Xen-based commercial hypervisor), while small, is on a growth curve:
"We have somewhere approaching 4,000 enterprise customers, and about 3000 trained channel partners ... The XenServer market share is small, and growing as rapidly as any such product can given the current VMware brand status, and the fact that we started well behind them."
He adds, correctly, that XenServer is still new in the market, so it makes sense that its share is small.
Simon then goes on to make a very interesting argument: that Microsoft and Citrix are ultimately partners, not competitors, even in the virtualization space. At least on the hypervisor side. Here's the core of his thesis:
"It is important to state yet again that we are not in a competition for server sockets with Microsoft. If that were the case, why would we have helped Microsoft to make Hyper-V a better hypervisor, by developing the shims and drivers that will allow Linux to run with optimal performance on Hyper-V? The founding thesis of XenSource, and the continued strategy at Citrix, is to promote fast, free, compatible and ubiquitous hypervisor based virtualization. If the hypervisor is free, why worry about who delivers it? Let the customer pick the implementation method that they want - the real money is in the up-sell with products that make virtualization valuable for customers."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/02/20085 comments
Brian Madden has a fascinating
post
on his site. The title pretty much tells you his central theses: "Prediction: Citrix will drop the open source Xen hypervisor for Hyper-V. The rest of the open source world drops Xen for KVM."
His main ideas are that XenServer, Citrix's hypervisor, will die off from lacket of market penetration. (Update: I misinterpreted Brian's remarks. He was referring to the open source Xen hypervisor, not Citrix' commercial XenServer implementation). Citrix will start using Hyper-V, from good virtualization buddy Microsoft. At the same time, Brian predicts that the open source community will rally around "KVM," which stands for "Kernel Virtual Machine." KVM has been integrated into the Linux kernel and provides virtualization services, so every Linux server now has a built-in hypervisor. This is further bad news for Xen, Brian argues, as the open source community will abandon Xen development and throw its muscle behind KVM development instead.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/30/20087 comments
If there is an award for "worst product by a major computer vendor", I nominate the Cisco VPN client. In fact, if I was making a list of the 10 worst products by a vendor, the Cisco VPN client would take all 10 spots.
Let me explain. My main work machine is a MacBook Pro, dual-core Intel with 2GB RAM. Last week I finally upgraded to the Leopard OS, from Tiger. The upgrade went smoothly (although I didn't appreciate the fact that Leopard needed more than 4GB of space to install; I thought it was Windows OSes that were supposed to be bloated?) Then I tried to log on to my company's VPN using the Cisco client.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/30/20089 comments
It's a very, very big day for Microsoft.
Hyper-V
is now out of beta and release candidacy, and available for your virtualizing pleasure.
Virtualization is becoming a core strategy for Microsoft. It sees an opportunity in a market that's still at less than 10 percent saturation, and is pouncing. If you need evidence, just look at how quickly it's been pushed through the pipeline: the first public beta was early, the first release candidate was early, and RTM is at least a month, and probably more, early (no definitive date was ever given for the final bits to be released, but spokesperson after spokesperson repeated the "180 days after release of Windows Server 2008" mantra).
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/26/20080 comments
The virtualization market is becoming quickly saturated with management products. That's a good thing: virtualization, far from simplifying management, normally increases management problems and needs. The ability to spin out a new VM means it takes you 20 minutes to get that new Web server into production, rather than days or weeks. It's hard for admins to resist the temptation.
The downside is that you have so many more servers to manage. Seeing this, traditional management vendors as well as a plethora of startups are jumping into the fray.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/24/20081 comments
As you may know, I've become a certified Macophile over the last year or so. My MacBook Pro is my main work machine, and I love it -- with a few very annoying exceptions (which I'll probably blog about before too much longer.)
You may have noticed that Parallels (formerly SWsoft) is similarly smitten with Apple. It is, by far, doing the most virtualization-related development for the platform. First there was Parallels, a virtual environment for Macs that allowed the running of Windows OSes. Parallels was a breakthrough product in the industry; suddenly, Mac lovers could use Windows-only products without buying a PC.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/24/20085 comments