virtualization.info

Oracle, Apple, and the VMwareCiscoEMC coalition

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:09:31 PST

So far we have dedicated a lot of space to Oracle, in terms of what virtualization offering it could provide and what mistakes may compromise its presence as a relevant player.

The Sun acquisition has not closed yet, so the company cannot disclose any specific plan. Without concrete information about that, what we have published so far, and what follows below, is pure speculation.
Nonetheless it’s worth spending some more time evaluating the strategy that Oracle may put in place and how it may impact the current players.

As already said many times, now the company is in the unique position to offer an entire computing stack, including servers, storage, the hypervisor, the operating system, the middleware, some of the most used business applications, thin clients, a VDI connection broker and an enterprise management software to coordinate all of the above.
Leveraged in the right way, and assuming Oracle may become a credible virtualization player, it represents a remarkable competitive advantage for some customers (while others can clearly see it as a painful way to lock themselves in).

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and now Red Hat, have to deal with multiple vendors and support thousands of different hardware and software components (VMware just launched a certification program for software. Why did they have to do that?). And a lot can go wrong when your hypervisor is the glue that keeps together servers, storage, network, guest operating systems, enterprise management agents, guest middleware and guest applications.
Oracle is the only one, in the virtualization market, that could say, “We know exactly what happens at every level of the stack, because we provide all the components; we can guarantee the behavior and the performance of our virtual infrastructure because there are no 3rd parties involved.”

There’s another company that is in a similar position, but in a completely different market: Apple.
Apple develops its software and its systems, and is fully in control. Steve Jobs considers this one of Apple’s biggest assets:

We're the only company that owns the whole widget -- the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can't do.

It is a lock-in, the growing number of issues around the iPhone App Store approval process confirms this, but it’s a huge success.

Of course the consumer market and the enterprise market are different worlds, but Oracle may well pitch its virtualization offering in the same identical way.
If so, Oracle is going to compete with the just born Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a nice acronym that also means VMware Cisco EMC, the three companies that founded it.

The value of VCE products, the self-contained virtual data centers called Vblocks, is not only in the hardware and software that make the units. It’s in the fact that VMware, Cisco and EMC design, produce, test and certify the units to serve a specific amount of virtual machines, for a specific amount of users, interacting with specific workloads, that perform in predictable ways.

In other words the VCE coalition saves the customer the huge investment of designing his own data center and the costs of designing it in the wrong way.
When the customer buys a Vblock, he is not just buying the hardware and the software. He is also buying the know-how that these three companies put in the machines. A know-how that he would have to produce by himself or buy somewhere else.

To validate this approach, VMware Cisco and EMC had to form a new entity and share investments, because none of them controls the full stack. Oracle does, and if the future of IT will be dominated by modular data centers, where a single vendor provides self-contained units that customers just stack up together, then Oracle now has the opportunity to become a leader in that future just as much as Cisco.

The difference between Cisco and Oracle is that the former has already clarified its interest in doing so and took several steps to change its current image of networking provider, while the latter… well, the latter still is the well known database giant. And no more than that.

HP acquires 3Com. What’s next?

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:08:05 PST

In the last two years Cisco made at least two long-term key investments in the server market: invested over $150 million in VMware and became a player with its own blade system Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco wants to sell and interconnect next generation data centers. To do so it needs servers, storage, networking, software abstraction and software management.
EMC is helping with storage and software management, VMware is helping with software abstraction.

The three worked together for some months and then announced a formal coalition, that will sell these integrated data centers through channels and direct relationship with customers (through a company called Acadia).

The joint effort of these three companies may be just an elaborate (yet remarkable) marketing exercise, but it certainly had an impact on the market.

It may have forced IBM to attempt the acquisition of Sun (which ultimately went to Oracle).
It may have forced HP to buy 3Com for $2.7 billion.

HP is the company that has the most to lose because of the VMware-Cisco-EMC coalition considering that it currently sells 36% of all physical servers that will run virtualized workloads, and that it’s the leader in this segment, ahead of Dell and IBM.

Cisco may use VMware to slip into the enterprises where HP reigns, like it attempted to do on the VMworld 2009 data center.
If Cisco becomes a real threat, HP will need servers, storage, networking, software management and software abstraction to counter it.
The question is not if HP wants or not to adopt a strategy that is similar to the Cisco one. The question is how long before the Cisco plans will allow HP to play nice with all three major virtualization vendors instead of buying the only one it can?

Xen Cloud Platform hits version 0.1

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:34:39 PST

At the end of August, Citrix announced a new major effort around Xen and cloud computing to counter the release of VMware vCloud Express.

The details of this project were scarce at that time and beyond the name, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), and the intent to integrate new and existing technologies, Citrix didn’t disclose much more.

Now the things are getting cleaver, with the Xen.org entity detailing the list of proposed components for XCP 1.0 and makes available the platform for download:

Latest Xen 3.4.1
Linux 2.6.27 Kernel
Windows PV Drivers, Microsoft Certified (Binary Only)
XAPI Enterprise-class Management Tool Stack (web based management interface)

VM Lifecycle: Live snapshots, checkpoint, migration
Resource Pools: Safe live relocation, auto configuration, DR
Host Configuration: Flexible storage management, networking, power management
Event Tracking: Progress, notification
Secure Communication using SSL
Upgrade and Patching Capabilities
Real-time Performance Monitoring and Alerting

Basic SR-IOV Support
CDROM and Network Host Installer
Full Featured “xe” CLI and web services API

Xen.org also published a tentative roadmap for version 1.0:

vSwitch Integration - first step to enabling multi-tenant network infrastructure, to enable firewall and routing rules to follow VMs as they migrate, and to enable flexible traffic monitoring of virtual ports
Netchannel 2 Integration - improve scalability of xen networking on larger systems and to accelerate inter-VM traffic
SR-IOV Networking - Although Xen support SR-IVO NICs today, configuration requires manual steps. By extending the control strack we can make SR-IOV simply a transparent optimization that is enabled automatically where possible
Booting guests from SR-IOV HBAs
Libvirt bindings
Native support for OVF in the tool stack
Drive DMTF standards for virtualization and cloud
Smart error recovery to minimize impact of hardware errors
Work closely with other projects and vendors to enable web-based mutli-tenant mgmt and provisioning; e.g. Eucalyptus, Enomaly, OpenNebula, etc.
Increased management scalability for dealing with 1,000s of Xen hosts - federation of resource pools
Aggregation of cheap local storage - integrated drdb/parallax
OCFS2 integration

No updates for Microsoft Virtual Machines Manager before 2011

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:19:17 PST

Last week, at its TechEd Conference in Berlin, Microsoft published updated roadmaps for most of its products.
The most interesting one from a virtualization perspective is the one about System Center family.

It seems that Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will not receive any major update before 2011:

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management hits Beta 2

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:12:27 PST

Five months after the first beta, Microsoft is ready to push out the beta 2 of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, a special version of the popular IDE that interacts with Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to provide a fully featured virtual lab automation platform.

There’s not really much to say about this new beta, expect reporting a few improvements in the setup and administrative GUI, along with support for network fencing with virtual machines that are acting as domain controllers (this last one is a very welcome addition).

The Visual Studio Lab Management team is publishing a number of in-depth walk-through about how to use the platform and how special features (like network fencing) workIt’s really worth a check.

Release: VMware View 4.0 (with software-only PCoIP)

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:47:21 PST

Last week VMware finally released the much awaited View 4.0, which supports vSphere 4.0 and introduces the software-only version of the Teradici remote desktop protocol PCoIP.

VMware is offering two versions of View 4: Enterprise (which includes vSphere and View Manager 4.0), priced at $150 per concurrent user, and Premier (which also includes View Composer and ThinApp), priced at $250 per concurrent user.

Of course the key aspect of this release is how well PCoIP performs on LAN and WAN scenarios.
Unfortunately the product will be available for download on November 19, so for now it’s impossible to make a performance analysis and comparison with Microsoft RDP 7, Citrix ICA/HDX and the other tens of alternatives that are flooding the VDI market.

The major problem with PCoIP is if its performance is so great to justify the adoption of a new proprietary remote desktop protocol at its 1.0 release (the protocol is more mature than that but so far relied on hardware components).
Many customers may want to be careful here, mostly considering that VMware and Teradici just have a co-development agreement, which is not even exclusive.
What happens if Teradici is acquired by a VMware competitor or if the company suffers major issues?
And most of all, what happens if one year from now VMware consider this protocol unpractical and too expensive to optimize and decides to replace it, for instance, with the just ratified Net2Display standard?

Anyway a lot has been already said.

Brian Madden already published a brief FAQ list, which includes a couple of interesting details:

The PCoIP client only supports Windows at the moment. Linux and Mac OS versions are expected next year
View 4.0 will fully support Microsoft Windows 7 as guest OS in early 2010

Chad Sakac already published a blueprint to design a View 4.0 architecture with the recently announced VMware/Cisco/EMC hardware called VBlock.
The solution (a VBlock 1) fits over 2,048 virtual desktops and costs $750 per seat all inclusive:

The paper includes some performance analysis. It doesn’t clarify if the numbers are obtained when using the RDP or the PCoIP protocol (assuming this will make any difference) but it’s really worth a check.

Release: Lanamark Suite 2009 R2

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:51:24 PST

Last week Lanamark, another startup that, like VKernel, could be impacted by the launch of VMware CapacityIQ, released Suite 2009 R2.

And like VKernel, Lanamark is looking around, introducing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, along with refreshed support for VMware (now up to vSphere 4.0) and Citrix (now up to XenServer 5.5).

Suite 2009 R2 also introduces enhancements to its online dashboard, but the most important thing is that the product can now collect data from up to 50,000 systems.

At the moment the company only offers a hosted version of its platform, but if VMware CapacityIQ will start to get some traction, Lanamark may be obliged to reconsider its go-to-market strategy and give the product on-premises.

Release: Parallels Desktop for Mac 5.0

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:38:11 PST

Just a few weeks after the release of VMware Fusion 3.0, Parallels answers with Desktop for Mac 5.0.

The company released the previous edition of this hosted virtualization platform exactly one year ago.

The new version 5.0 focuses on performance, claiming a 300% improvement on virtual machines operations (like start/stop a virtual machine) and up to 22% faster performance compared to Fusion (the study was conducted by Crimson Consulting Group but there’s no documentation for that).

Beyond that, the product ships features that seem on par with the ones provided by Fusion 3.0, with some advantages here and there:

Support for 64bit
Support for 8-way vCPUs
Support for Aero (Windows 7/Vista), OpenGL 2.1 (Windows XP and Linux) and DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3
Support for Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit and 64bit, host and guest OS)
Support for multi-touch gesture in Windows guest applications
Virtual Machine Lock Down

At this point there’s not much differentiation between the Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. It’s primarily a matter of personal taste and capability to promptly solve the issues that demanding Mac customers will point out.
It will be very hard for Parallels to keep its market share unless they releases some major exclusive features.

VKernel defends against VMware attack, offers flagship product for free

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:43:29 PST

At the end of October VMware released its first capacity planning tool: CapacityIQ.

As always happens when a market leader expands into a new segment, its previous partners suddenly turn into competitors.
Some of them are able to keep the pace and deliver value on top of the new product, but this requires a number of resources that not every startup has, and a cooperation between the two companies that the newcomer may be uninterested in.

VMware is in the capacity planning space since ever with its hosted and free service Capacity Planner. But so far the product has been accessible only to the Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), which granted enough room to the partners to sell their on-premises products.

Now, with CapacityIQ around, VMware partners may lose market share.
They still can try compete on price, number of features and frequency of updates, but will always be customers that want everything from a single vendor, and there will always be vendors that gives away their newest product to establish a presence in a new segment.

VKernel is one of those partners: the company criticized the value of CapacityIQ at launch, but now its running to give away its flagship product for free (for a limited timeframe anyway).
If you download their Capacity Analyzer before the end of the year, you’ll receive a free license for unlimited sockets. Perpetual.

And of course VKnernel now is also in hurry to clarify that support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer is coming.

Update: It seems that VKernel is not really giving away its flagship product, but a limited version called Capacity Modeler. Possibly the same tool that the company launched as beta in October 2008.
This post will be further updated with details as soon as possible.

Red Hat releases Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Virtualization Manager for Servers

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:24:53 PST

Yesterday, finally, Red Hat announced the availability of its new virtualization offering, which includes a platform based on KVM and an enterprise virtualization manager.

The company already released Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 in mid September, which features KVM in the same way (despite technical differences in the architecture) Microsoft Windows Server 2008 features Hyper-V.
The problem is that RHEL 5.4 plus KVM may be not enough to compete against lightweight, dedicated platforms like VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer. Additionally, RHEL 5.4 lacks of enterprise management tools that customers can use to control large scale virtual data centers.

This gap is filled today with the release of Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) and Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers (REVMS).

REVH is a stripped down version of RHEL 5.4, with the following characteristics (partial list):

Support for Intel VT / EPT and AMD-V / RVI
Support for up to 64 physical CPUs (up to 256 core)
Support for up to 1TB physical RAM
Support for up to 16 vCPUs
Support for up to 64GB vRAM
Support for memory overcommit (page sharing only, depending on Linux Kernel Same-page Merging)
Support for physical NICs bonding and multipath I/O
Support for NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel
Support for RHEL (from 3 to 5) and Windows (2003, 2008 and XP) guest operating systems.
For Windows guests Red Hat offers paravirtualized (network and block) drivers based on the VirtIO standard, which are certified by Microsoft thanks to the SVVP certification.

Red Hat reports that KVM can handle up to 600 virtual machines within a single host.
Its platform, based on KVM, is reportedly able to handle more than 400 virtual machines within a single host (with 32 cores and 1TB physical RAM).
The company also claims that it can reach up to 95% of real hardware performance for mission critical workloads like SAP or Oracle Database.

REVMS instead supports the following capabilities:

Virtual machines live migration (across NFS, iSCSI and FC shared storage)
Virtual machines high availability (if a host dies all its virtual machines are restarted on another one within the same cluster. It requires an out-of-band management interface such as IPMI, Dell
DRAC, HP iLO, IBM RSA or BladeCenter for host power management.)
Virtual machines dynamic resource management (storage, networks and computing capability can be aggregated in resource pools. The System Scheduler relocates the VMs across the hosts that are part of the pool following the system policies and using live migration)
Hosts maintenance mode (when the host is put in maintenance REVMS uses live migration to move virtual machines elsewhere)
Hosts power management (the System Scheduler can use live migration to relocate the VMs on low activity hosts and power down the unnecessary servers)
Virtual machines thin provisioning (the REVMS component called Image Manager allows to overcommit storage
Virtual machines snapshots (snapshots can be scheduled and used as recovery points)
Virtual machines templates
Role based access control and support for Microsoft Active Directory for the management console
APIs

Funny enough, it seems that the REVMS console is only available for Windows clients (we’ll double-check with Red Hat on this and update this article accordingly).

The two products, bundled together with the name of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, are sold through a subscription model. Price starts at $499 for 1 socket with 12x5 support.
Of course REVMS can manage the KVM platform included inside RHEL 5.4, but the operating system must be purchased separately.

To justify the value of its new offering, Red Hat even prepared a feature comparison matrix which includes VMware vSphere 4 and VI 3.5, as well as Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, and a price comparison matrix that will generate endless discussions (we already know it):

The last piece of the new offering, Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (REVMD), which is the SolidICE product acquired from Qumranet in September 2008, will be released in early 2010.

That piece represents the real opportunity for Red Hat to attract new customers and compete with more mature competitors. Convincing customers to change their hypervisor of choice for server consolidation isn’t easy at all, but there’s still a huge, untapped opportunity around client consolidation (aka VDI) and enough confusion to give KVM plus SPICE a chance to gain some market share.

Another critical point is how the ecosystem will welcome this new offering. The Red Hat offering isn’t able to cover every need a customer may have around managing a virtual data center, so partners are critical.
The first one to jump on the Red Hat bandwagon is VMLogix, which announced its commitment to support REVH in its lab management solution Lab Manager.
Many others have to follow to make this offering a valuable alternative to VMware, Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms.

VMware, Cisco and EMC form Virtual Computing Environment coalition. Why?

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:11:10 PST

As expected, today VMware, Cisco and EMC announced a special alliance, a coalition as they call it, dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE).

This entity will share investments to sell the components, training and consulting for a number of bundle packages called Vblocks.

The VCE will also count on a partners ecosystem, which already counts on six system integrators: Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.

The Vbocks can be deployed at customers data centers or hosted online.
To design them, operate them on behalf of the customers, or just transfer them from the hosting facility to the customers data centers, Cisco and EMC created a special joint venture called Acadia
VMware and Intel invested in Acadia too, and the company will start operating in 2010.
It’s not clear why the system integrators above cannot do that instead of Acadia.

At its launch VCE will offer three Vblocks:

Vblock 0
entry-level configuration available in 2010
supporting 300 up to 800 virtual machines
leveraging Cisco's UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC's Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
Vblock 1
mid-sized configuration (undisclosed launch date)
supporting 800 up to 3,000 virtual machines
leveraging Cisco's UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC's CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
Vblock 2
high-end configuration (undisclosed launch date)
supporting up to 3,000-6,000 virtual machines
leveraging Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC's Symmetrix V-Max storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform

VCE will develop and offer additional bundles over time for shared services, applications and vertical industry solutions.
“Shared Services” and “Applications” is where the interest should focus the most. There, it’s possible to see popping up the hosting provider Terremark, where VMware invested $5 million, and SpringSource that VMware acquired in August for $420 million.

All Vblocks will be ISO 27001 compliant.

To manage these data-centers-in-a-box as a whole, EMC is offering a new management product called Ionix Data Center Insight.

Ionix will not replace the vSphere and UCS management consoles, but will coordinate them, gluing them with an application management stack that controls what happens inside the virtual machines:

The most important question around this partnership is: why these VMware, Cisco and EMC have to form a coalition to validate and sell their products as a commercial bundle?
Their architects already produce jointly validated infrastructure blueprints that customers can use to design new data centers.
Part of their channels already sell their solutions together where it makes sense, and more will do if the products works better together.
Their customers don’t need a new brand and marketing brochures to buy the idea of cloud computing and private cloud. Cisco alone (in terms of selling servers) is new enough to generate interest and concerns.

VMware is taking a lot of risks with this move.
HP alone sells 36% of all virtualized servers. And it has EDS.
Dell just acquired Perot Systems, which is one of the biggest consulting arms in the world to sell the VMware-centric Dell virtualization portfolio.
IBM just has to think about Red Hat and its new KVM-centric offering, and it could be a dangerous competitor on a global scale.

Months ago virtualization.info published an article suggesting that VMware may be slowly morphing into an infrastructure management company that will compete with BMC, CA, HP and IBM.
Maybe it’s not VMware, it’s EMC that has this ambition. Ionix seems to imply so.
And because Cisco may have a similar ambition too, and both can’t afford to become an infrastructure management company in 2010 without controlling the virtual layer, VMware is the mandatory addition.

Maybe the VCE coalition is just an attempt to generate significant results that can validate a future merger.
VMware, Cisco and EMC all have a neutral position in the market today.
All have a solid relationship with the entire ecosystem (except their direct competitors), including Microsoft (except of course for VMware).
While this coalition doesn’t change much, apparently, an actual merger would drastically change the way these companies behave. And the shareholders may not consider the move worth losing the current market alliances.
But, if a coalition could produce amazing results in 12-18 months of work, then it would much easier to justify the new Ciscoware.

While waiting to see if the merger will take place or not, it’s worth to consider once again how this coalition will impact the other OEMs that so far preferred VMware over Microsoft and Citrix.
A number of smart people suggested that this partnership will not change anything, but it’s worth to remind that Cisco has a significant stake in VMware, that Intel and VMware just invested in the new Acadia joint venture, and that VMware just sent out a message to its sales channel that says:

…The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses. As a result, organizations will no longer have to choose between best-of-breed technologies and end-to-end vendor accountability…

Who knows if HP, Dell and IBM consider this a non-problem.

VMware, Cisco and EMC to announce a joint venture

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:43:04 PST

At the end of the last week Reuters broke the news about an upcoming joint venture between EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco.

The three should announce a new product portfolio this week, called vBlock, probably gluing together Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus, EMC V-Max and VMware vSphere, which the joint venture will sell as a hosted service.
And if the customer wants it, the vBlock gear can be moved inside the company’s boundaries.

At the end of September virtualization.info published an article about the strong alliance that these three companies are building and how it’s going to impact the VMware partnership with the other OEMs and how it’s going to influence the perception that customers have of the VMware position in the market.

We expect the official announcement before publishing further comments, but it’s clear that this joint venture is going to modify the landscape in some serious way.

Update: In an interesting interview with John McCool, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Switching and Services Group at Cisco, that Network World published today, the joint venture (codename Alpine) is mentioned but the executive refuses to comment about it.

Microsoft to virtualize and stream Office 2010 with App-V

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:58:56 PST

Just last week virtualization.info questioned the Microsoft effort on desktop virtualization (including application virtualization and the so called enterprise desktop virtualization, what we call here platform wrappers).
Our article mentioned the MED-V lethargic development lifecycle and the fact that Microsoft stays under the radar for App-V too because at this time it may be the best thing to do.

What Microsoft is waiting for to massively push App-V and everything else beyond Hyper-V?
For App-V, the answer may be Office 2010 (codename Office 14).

During the summer in fact ZDNet reported that the new version of Office, expected somewhere in 2010, will feature a special edition called Click-To-Run.

Office 2010 CTR will be available on Microsoft servers, and streamed on the customers desktops on demand, as the Microsoft invitation letter to its beta testers describes:

…

Q: Can I use any of the Office 2010 applications before the install is complete?
A: Yes, you can use them while they are being streamed to your computer. You might notice some slight delays when using the product if they are not fully installed on your machine.
Does the Office 2010 products get installed on my machine every time I use an application or when I reboot my machine?
No. The Office 2010 products are streamed to your computer and installed once. After they are streamed to your computer the product stays installed on your machine.
Do I need to be connected to the Internet when I use any of the Office 2010 applications?
You only need an internet connection to download the complete product. Once it has been fully downloaded you no longer need an Internet connection.
What happens if I lose my internet connection before the complete Office 2010 product is fully downloaded?
You can still use the Office 2010 applications. But since not all of the entire product features have been streamed to your computer, your applications may have limited capabilities, depending on what has been downloaded so far. When you connection is restored, the product will continue streaming from the point that it left off…

ZDNet can’t confirm that App-V is involved but virtualization.info just received independent confirmations.

Microsoft is not really trying to keep the secret. Here’s a video introducing the CTR edition that Microsoft published just one month ago. It doesn’t mention App-V but application virtualization is clearly mentioned:

Office CTR is in private beta at the moment. Microsoft may decide to unveil it along with the Office 2010 public beta (aka beta 2), hopefully to be unveiled at TechEd Europe 2009, November 6.

If customers will embrace Office CTR it will be a major validation for application virtualization, and Microsoft will be able to leverage the awareness and interest around it by pushing its platform in the enterprise space in a completely different way.

This may also trigger the ISVs reaction: without 3rd parties applications supported on this new platform, customers could use App-V only with Microsoft products, which is a good start but not enough to reach the level of adoption that hardware virtualization has today.

VMware wants to compete with Google, not Microsoft

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:13:31 PDT

No, VMware doesn’t really want to compete with Google, but with what Google represents today: a major vendor that believes in a web-centric IT.

At this point of its history, the VMware ambition goes well beyond leading the virtualization space.
VMware wants to be the mandatory platform that customers need to offer and consume business services. Something that is not just what the industry calls today cloud computing.

VMware wants to be inside the data center, inside the home and business workstations and thin clients, and even inside portable devices like smartphones, tablets and netbooks.
When the industry will be ready, VMware will probably want to be inside home appliances too.

Maybe this was the original plan since the beginning. Maybe it became the new mission once VMware recognized that, because of Microsoft and others, its hypervisor would become a commodity in a few years.
For sure such plan (partially) explains the acquisition of SpringSource.

The problem is that the IT world already has a platform that it’s used to deliver business services and that is available in every computing device the users have access to. It’s the Web.

So if VMware wants to become the definitive platform for service delivery, then it has to fight the ongoing, global effort of the IT industry to turn any piece of software into a web application. And has to compete, in the long run, against those vendors that lead this effort, like Google.

Of course it’s not cheap and not desirable to turn all the existing applications into web apps. And this is where the VMware mantra is focusing right now and will focus more and more over time.
But what will happen ten years from now if the whole industry will follow the Google example and embrace the web development 100%?

Will VMware be confined to the role of a platform provider that allows to run legacy software in a way that it seems a brand new web application? This is exactly how server virtualization was sold at the beginning of the VMware history, well before everybody started to recognize its value for server consolidation.
And what will happen to VMware when next generation web applications will be about to replace everything?

It VMware really envisions its virtualization platform as the best way to deliver business services, then Google is the one to fight, not Microsoft.
And maybe this explains why the company CEO didn’t waste time to criticize the Google approach to cloud computing.

Is Microsoft really committed to enterprise desktop virtualization?

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:46:33 PDT

Ten days ago Microsoft announced the availability of its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009 R2.
As most readers know, this is a special bundle that the company offers to its enterprise customers (Volume License only), and only if they subscribe the Software Assurance (SA) service.

MDOP contains key components of the Microsoft virtualization offering, like the application virtualization platform App-V, acquired from Softricity in May 2006, and the security wrapper for Virtual PC MED-V, acquired from Kidaro in March 2008.

While none of the two technologies is as popular as the hypervisors, both are critical for the Microsoft long-term virtualization strategy.
App-V is specially important and Microsoft is silently working behind the scene to offer it inside servers, not just on desktops like today.

This new MDOP 2009 R2 only updates App-V 4.5 with the Service Pack 1, and the SP1 only introduces support for Windows 7 (which includes support for AppLocker, BranchCache and BitLocker ToGo features).
MED-V 1.0 won’t support Windows 7 before Q1 2010, and it seems that there will not be much more.

Microsoft seems far behind with MED-V. After the Kidaro acquisition, it took 13 months to release a rebranded version 1.0, and now it’s taking another 9-12 months just to release the first service pack.
And it’s worth to remember that the product still supports a hosted virtualization platform, Virtual PC, where Microsoft is not investing at all.

It’s acceptable that Microsoft doesn’t push too hard on App-V until the market is ready to adopt it on a large scale.
This way it has the time to focus on Hyper-V, the time to develop a stronger engine and to port it to the server side, the time to shape a meaningful marketing strategy, while Citrix is containing the VMware early attempts to invade the application virtualization market with ThinApp.

It’s less acceptable that Microsoft is not doing anything concrete with MED-V, which leverages hardware virtualization to secure the enterprise in an innovative way.
Microsoft doesn’t have a lead in the security space. And the perception that the security industry has about Microsoft didn’t improve too much over the years.
Securing the enterprise customers with virtualization is a unique opportunity that Microsoft is wasting, mostly considering that VMware couldn’t win this market with ACE.

Microsoft may be doing this because it doesn’t want to waste any time in developing something on top of an almost death platform like Virtual PC. But so far the company didn’t disclose any plan for the desktop virtualization space.
It may replace Virtual PC with a version of Hyper-V for desktops (which would become a really ubiquitous client hypervisor for VDI) or it may decide to seriously restart the investment on Virtual PC.

Customers have no idea and whatever will happen to this second class virtualization platform it will also impact MED-V.
How an enterprise can trust a non-leading vendor (like Microsoft in the security space) without a clear roadmap and a lethargic development lifecycle? Where’s the value for SA customers in having MED-V inside MDOP?

Release: VMware Workstation 7.0 / Player 3.0 / ACE 2.6

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:41:03 PDT

Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and Fusion 3.0

Beyond the support for Windows 7 and its Aero interface inside the virtual machine, Workstation 7.0 (build 203739) includes a number of remarkable features. For example:

Autoprotect
The product automatically takes snapshots of any virtual machine every half hour, every hour or every day
Encryption
The product encrypts any virtual machine with the AES 256-bit algorithm
CPU release
The product frees CPU resources instantaneously without powering off or suspending if the virtual machine is paused.
Virtual disks manipulation
The product can expand and compact a virtual disk (Windows 7/Vista only) without the use of any 3rd party product
Virtual Hardware version 7
Support for up to 4 vCPUs, up to 32GB vRAM, up to 10 vNICs
Support for ESX 4.0
customers can run VMware ESX 4 inside Workstation 7 as long as their physical hardware features an Intel EM64T CPU with VT-x or an AMD64 10H CPU (and later) with AMD-V, and as long as the virtual machine has assigned two or more CPU cores
Support for IPv6

Player 3.0 (build 203739) shares with Workstation 7.0 the same engine, so many of the features above are also available here.
On top of that VMware introduce a fully featured virtual machine editor, which turns Player into a Workstation Light:

The last product of this wave is ACE 2.6 (build 203739).
There’s no much to say. Pretty much every feature is about the virtualization engine and not the policy engine, which fully integrated inside Workstation.
It’s not really clear what VMware is waiting for to kill the brand.

Release: Liquidware Labs Stratusphere 4.5

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:16:17 PDT

In June the new startup Liquidware Labs released the first rebranded version of the VMsight technology acquired in May: Stratusphere 4.2.
They are back this week with the first consistent update and easy to guess the new 4.5 version integrates the technology acquired from Entrigue Systems in September: ProfileUnity.

In details Stratusphere 4.5 introduces support for Citrix XenDesktop 4 and Microsoft Window 7, as well as the preliminary support for VMware View 4 (which still is in private beta).
On top of that the product sports several enhancements in the GUI, in the reports and in the correlation engine.

Anyway the most interesting thing of this release is that now Liquidware Labs allows users to download a trial version of the product.
The company always said that it’s specifically targeting Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), and most of the time this means that you don’t need to have (and promote) a freely downloadable trial.
If Liquidware Labs has just changed this it may mean that it’s also changing its marketing strategy.

Release: VMware Fusion 3.0

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:40:56 PDT

Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and of course Fusion 3.0.

The new version of Fusion (build 204229) introduces a notable number of features, including:

64bit engine
Virtual EFI (to replace the legacy virtual BIOS and grant full compatibility with Mac OS X)
Embedded P2V migration tool (Migration Assistant for Windows)
V2V migration from Microsoft VHD format
Support for 4-way CPUs
Support for Aero (Windows 7/Vista), OpenGL 2.1 (Windows XP) and DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3
Support for Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit and 64bit, host and guest OS)

Release: VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.0.1

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:08:04 PDT

Three months after the launch of one of its newest products, vCenter Chargeback, VMware is ready for the first minor update.

The new version 1.0.1 (build 204097) fixes a number of bugs and introduces a few welcome features:

Support for Windows Authentication
Additional computing and billing policies
APIs (technical preview)

VMW and CTXS Q3 2009 earning reports

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:37:42 PDT

Last week both VMware and Citrix announced their Q3 2009 earnings.

VMware reported its US revenue in decline for 1% (to $246 million) from Q3 2008. International revenues instead grew 9% (to $244 million) from the same period of 2008.
Services revenues (software maintenance and professional services) increased 33% (to $250 million) from Q3 2008.

Citrix instead reported a global decline of its license revenue for 18% (-15% in EMEA, -5% in APAC and +5% in Americas) from Q3 2009, while the revenue generated from license updates increased 7% for the same period.
Technical service revenue (consulting, training and technical support) increased 20%, while online services revenue (most likely the GoTo product portfolio) increased 21% from Q3 2008.

The two competitors are performing pretty well in the stock market if we look at the year performance:

The virtualization market continues to shift towards the use of paid hypervisors says IDC

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:28:53 PDT

After last week report and predictions from Gartner, this one is the IDC turn, which reports a very interesting details about the market trends:

…worldwide virtualization software revenue declined 18.7% year over year in 2Q09 to $344 million. Virtualization licenses did grow quarter over quarter in 2Q09. The server virtualization market continues to shift towards the use of paid hypervisors, with paid virtualization software now running on 60.8% of all new server hardware shipments virtualized in 2Q09, an increase over 57.2% in 2Q08…

IDC also adds that 16.5% of all new servers shipped in the second quarter of 2009 were virtualized, an increase from 14.5% in second quarter of 2008. However, actual shipments decreased 21% year over year to 246,000 physical servers in 2Q09.

Even more interestingly, IDC reports the OEMs market share in the virtualization industry:

HP - 36% (shipments declined 18% year over year in 2Q09 but grew 1% sequentially)
Dell - Not Disclosed (market share growth equal to 9% over first quarter 2009)
IBM - 15%

Last but not least IDC reports about the VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Parallels market shares (our emphasis):

VMware continues to hold the number 1 (VMware ESX) and number 2 (VMware Server) virtualization platforms despite revenues declining 22% year over year. This was slightly more than the decline of 21% in total x86 virtualization licenses.

Microsoft saw its virtualization license shipments decline 16% year over year, due to the continued depreciation of Virtual Server 2005. However, Hyper-V showed a sharp increase of 54%, one year after its official launch and entrenching itself into 4th place while it cannibalizes itself into the number 3 position, past Virtual Server 2005.

Parallels Virtuozzo rounds out the top 5 with license shipments declining 36% year over year.

Citrix XenServer showed the largest increase, growing 108% year over year due to the company changing its business model and offering the product for free with certain management functionality. It`s a bold seeding strategy that will see market share gains, but will take some time, if ever, to monetize.

50% of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012 says Gartner

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:01:04 PDT

Last week Gartner released a press announcement disclosing that only 16% of workloads run inside virtual machines.

The analysis firm predicted that this amount is going to reach around 50% by 2012, which is equal to 58 million deployed virtual machines.

Gartner also adds:

…by year-end 2010, enterprises with 100-999 employees will have a higher penetration of virtual machines deployed than the Global 500…

In May 2007 for example Gartner predicted that virtualization will be part of nearly every aspect of IT by 2015.
In April 2008 Gartner also said that 4 million virtual machines were expected by 2009, while we would have 611 million virtualized PCs by 2011.
It’s not clear how to read the new 58 million number considering the previous predictions above.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions page has been updated accordingly.

VMware saves the vSphere Enterprise Edition

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:55:59 PDT

Citrix is not the only company listening to customers feedbacks. After much debate around the decision to kill the vSphere Enterprise Edition by December 15, VMware decided to keep it, as confirmed by Computerworld.

Those customers coming from VI3.5 were entitled to keep their existing Enterprise license while moving to the new vSphere 4.0 platform. But VMware originally planned to kill this upgrade option by the end of the year.
This way the company probably hoped to accelerate the adoption of vSphere or drive slow customers towards the more expensive (and future rich) Enteprise Plus Edition.

VMware reconsidered its strategy after receiving negative feedbacks (here’s an example).
For sure the decision was made well before the Citrix attempt to lure away VMware customers with the Open Door program as virtualization.info has learned.

Unidesk hires Ron Oglesby away from Dell

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:33:54 PDT

virtualization.info has learned that Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services at Dell, left the company last week.

Oglesby is one of the most popular names in the virtualization industry, author of the bestsellers VMware ESX Server 2.5 Advanced Technical Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide.
He was one of the premiere speakers at our Virtualization Congress 2009 and he appears on virtualization.info from time to time as guest columnist (see his last article here: Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?).

Rumors report Oglesby as the new Chief Solution Architect at Unidesk (still unconfirmed).

Unidesk is a US startup founded in December 2007, funded by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture with a $8.1M Round A, and focused on VDI.
The company tried to launch a couple of times in the past two years (one in August 2008), and now their product, based on a patent-pending Composite Virtualization technology, is in private beta.

Citrix to fully open source XenServer - UPDATED

alessandro.perilli@virtualization.info (Alessandro Perilli) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:26:23 PDT

The article virtualization.info published just last week about Citrix joining the The Linux Foundation generated a lot of interest and comments.
Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, personally answered a few readers about the reasons behind the value of a free XenServer and the strategy behind it.

In doing so Crosby disclosed very interesting information. First he claimed that XenServer costs to VMware $300MM per year in lost revenue, probably a Citrix internal projection considering its current market share.

Much more important than that, today Crosby candidly unveiled that Citrix is about to fully open source XenServer.
You read right: the company CTO is not talking about Xen, which is already developed and maintained by the open source community. He’s talking about its commercial implementation, XenServer, where Citrix invested so far, that is offered as a free product since February and that the Burton Group considered as enterprise-ready as VMware ESX.

Here’s his full answer that contains the breaking news:

XenServer is 100% free, and also shortly fully open sourced. There is no revenue from it at all. That is strategically aligned with our goal to increase market share, get directly to customers and also provide Citrix customers with virtualization built into our core products as a core capabiliy, so every XenApp customer has free support for XS built into their XenApp entitlement, ditto for XenDesktop. Our positive revenue comes form Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, which adds all of the automation functions for management of virtualized environments and self-service virtual lab and stage management. This is a substantial business, growing rapidly, but also offers customers value through inclusion in the value-added stacks (Enterprise/Platinum editions) of XenDesktop and XenApp. It is therefore not possible to make a direct head to head comparison with VMware, which doesn't have a competitor to XenApp, and whose competitor to XenDesktop doesn't scale at present.

Crosby further confirmed his words after the comment above.

This move may or may not increase the Citrix market share, and may or may not oblige VMware to drop the price of ESX earlier than expected.
virtualization.info will publish additional details as soon as they are available.

Meanwhile it’s worth considering what Oracle and Novell will do after this will be formalized.
Both companies have their own implementations of Xen, and both are working to release more sophisticated platforms that offer the same features that XenServer offer today.
If Citrix gives away the code, does it make any sense for Oracle and Novell to continue their own development of the hypervisor?

It will also be interesting to see if this move will generate more virtualization players, as it makes so much cheaper and easier to enter the virtualization market by focusing just on the management layer.

Update: Citrix reached out virtualization.info to add an official statement to this move:

XenServer is offered to the community as the basis for the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). There will be substantial additional contributions coming from other community partners, but we aim to make all of our technology in XenServer (other than XenCenter, which is a stateless Microsoft .NET client GUI and therefore not appropriate for the XCP community and its intention to make a great cloud platform for large scale clouds to consume and automate using their automation and management systems) available to the community in OSS.

Other features will come in too, like the Open vSwitch, and we will drive from there to develop additional storage repositories and so on. But the key emphasis is the use of XCP as a platform for the entire community, with a starting point, for which we have offered the code base of XenServer.

Key partners such as VA Linux, Oracle, Novell, Fujitsu and Intel and AMD are all committed to the ongoing delivery of additional value to the platform, which will therefore have multiple routes to market, a strong ISV community and hopefully deliver revenue to a broad sector of the market.