Today Milan hosted the VMware Forum 2012, during the opening keynote Brian Gammage, VMware’s Chief Market Technologist, tried to collect all the news and declarations we heard in the last few days, like the acquisition of Wanova and Stephen Herrod’s speech at another italian event, and give an univocal reading to the entire plan.

The starting point of the keynote was “we just came out from Mainframe to Client-Server transition, which started with an economical advantage and endend with an incredible overhead just to control the new power given to the users we must be careful with the transition to Cloud-era“.

“Its easy to get confused with VMware’s products line because we are the only company with such a large offering” continued Gammage, probably referring to the supposed gaffe of Stephen Herrods, then presented a slide that resumed VMware’s offering in a SIMPLIFY-MANAGE-CONNECT schema.

The key strategy for Gammage is policy-based automation, CIOs needs systems able to learn whats is normal in their environments and adapt the resources on the realtime needs, VMware’s answer, summarizing, is the vCenter Operations Management Suite.

Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.

Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the cloud, uses a layering technology to segment OS, applications and user personalizations into isolated containers allowing administrators to manage separately hardware and each layer of software.

Wanova’s technology will be integrated into VMware View finally offering layering functionalities and a deeper user customization, maybe will also introduce a little bit of physical desktop culture into VMware’s offering.

Centralized Image Management of Both Physical and Virtual Desktops
The combination of VMware View™ and Wanova Mirage™ will enable IT organizations to offer a better user experience for employees and increased operational savings across all device types, by:

• Deploying Centralized, Single Image Management for Both Physical and Virtual Desktops –IT organizations will be able to automatically synchronize PC image updates/upgrades to all types of endpoints – physical virtual, tethered desktops, or roaming laptops (Mac and PC).
• Supporting Departmental and User Installed Applications – Advanced layering technology will enable the deployment of persistent departmental and/or user installed applications in centrally managed desktop images, providing every end user with a low cost personalized physical or virtual desktop.
• Gaining High Availability and Rapid Disaster Recovery  –Image-syncing technology efficiently stores all elements of a user’s desktop image in a company’s private cloud for complete management and backup, while desktop streaming and layering technology enables quick recovery and repair services for all types of endpoints, even over WAN.
• Delivering Universal Access – Image-syncing and layering technology can enable universal access that facilitates seamless transitions between all types of endpoints – physical, virtual, tethered desktops, or roaming laptops (Mac or PC).

Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a key requirement.

vMSC infrastructures are implemented with the goal of bringing the same benefits of high-availability clusters in local sites, but in a geographically distributed model with two data centers in different locations.

The document, written for a technical audience, describes how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios in environments where the distance between datacenters is limited, often metropolitan or campus environments.

The presented failure scenarios can be summarized as follows:

• Single-Host Failure in Frimley Datacenter
• Single-Host Isolation in Frimley Datacenter
• Storage Partition
• Datacenter Partition
• Disk Shelf Failure in Frimley Datacenter
• Full Storage Failure in Frimley Datacenter
• Permanent Device Loss
• Full Compute Failure in Frimley Datacenter
• Loss of Frimley Datacenter

Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.

Terms of the transaction were not released.

The move suggest the intentions of EMC to compete with consumer-focused storage offering like DropBox and applications more enterprise-like as VMware’s Project Octopus, neo-released in beta.

The addition of Syncplicity also extends EMC’s strategy of enabling the ‘New User’ in the Post PC era, those who want to access, share, collaborate and participate in business processes on their preferred device.

This quote reminds us the growing trend of BYOD (bring your own device) workplaces where employees of large corporate struggle for shared storage services and the enterprise IT tries to control the security implications of the phenomenon.

In this panorama Syncplicity fits well with its business-oriented features like SAS 70 Type II compliance, remote wiping of data in case of device loss and comprehensive administration.

Still unclear is the product placement compared to Project Octopus from VMware where EMC is the majority shareholder, this empasse probabily will be solved with customer segmentation.

On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.

This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.

All the new key features are devoted to simplify the work for Virtualization Administrators and follows the application-driven approach to virtualization that Oracle has kept so far.

The new features could be summarized as follows:

• Enhanced User Interface: The new Oracle VM 3.1 Manager introduces a new set of wizards for large-scale deployments, tasks and workflows execution in a Web browser interface.
• Enhanced Storage Configuration Capabilities: Focused on the simplification of backup and disaster recovery, now allows access to NFS external storage and the quick copy of iSCSI and Fiberchannel-based storage repository from one cluster to another, including across WANs.
• Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops

Other relevant information from the press release:

• Oracle VM’s Windows drivers (PV 3.0.1) and virtualization implementation have been validated as part of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Vendor Program (SVVP).
• Three new pre-built, pre-configured Oracle VM Templates for the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3; Oracle PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1; and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c add to the more than 100 available templates that enable faster application deployment.

In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the release 5.1 of VMware View.

The post touches 4 main points:

• PCoIP Efficiency: The Team claims to have achieved, through compression protocols refinements and general performances optimization, up to 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.
• Client Optimizations: Even in this case the Team talks about up to 3X improvement in video playback performance, with a particular focus to low-performing processors that can now reach a smooth 720p playback.
• Network Improvements: On this side good news for that kind of users working in adverse network condition, over congested and lossy WiFi networks the improvement can be as high as 8X.
• Interactivity Improvements: Improvements in this area have focused on the fluidity of users interactions in the remote desktops. The Team presents a simple visual test that shows a user rapidly drawing a spiral in Microsoft Paint via View 5.1 compared to the standard RDP7 protocol.

On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.

This new platform promises to deliver a desktop experience  comparable to a local PC, up to 100 VDI users for each single server equipped with a VGX board.

NVIDIA VGX represents a new era in desktop virtualization. It delivers an experience nearly indistinguishable from a full desktop while substantially lowering the cost of a virtualized PC.

said Jeff Brown, general manager of the Professional Solutions Group at NVIDIA.

This product is intended for those kind of users who work with 3D design softwares and simulation tools and is designed to be integrated into enterprise IT departments providing an integration layer for commercial hypervisors (the news only talks about Citrix XenServer) and a level of manageability that allows to configure the graphics capabilities delivered to individual users in the network, based on their demands.

NVIDIA describes as follows the three key technologies of this solution:

NVIDIA VGX Boards
NVIDIA VGX boards are the world’s first GPU boards designed for data centers. The initial NVIDIA VGX board features four GPUs, each with 192 NVIDIA CUDA® architecture cores and 4 GB of frame buffer. Designed to be passively cooled, the board fits within existing server-based platforms.

The boards benefit from a range of advancements, including hardware virtualization, which enables many users who are running hosted virtual desktops to share a single GPU and enjoy a rich, interactive graphics experience; support for low-latency remote display, which greatly reduces the lag currently experienced by users; and, redesigned shader technology to deliver higher power efficiency.

NVIDIA VGX GPU Hypervisor
The NVIDIA VGX GPU Hypervisor is a software layer that integrates into a commercial hypervisor, enabling access to virtualized GPU resources. This allows multiple users to share common hardware and ensure virtual machines running on a single server have protected access to critical resources. As a result, a single server can now economically support a higher density of users, while providing native graphics and GPU computing performance.

This new technology is being integrated by leading virtualization companies, such as Citrix, to add full hardware graphics acceleration to their full range of VDI products.

NVIDIA User Selectable Machines
NVIDIA USMs allow the NVIDIA VGX platform to deliver the advanced experience of professional GPUs to those requiring them across an enterprise. This enables IT departments to easily support multiple types of users from a single server.

USMs allow better utilization of hardware resources, with the flexibility to configure and deploy new users’ desktops based on changing enterprise needs. This is particularly valuable for companies providing infrastructure as a service, as they can repurpose GPU-accelerated servers to meet changing demand throughout the day, week or season.

Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.

The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review period will run through July 5th.

To download the beta materials on Connect follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

To join the beta review program follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=171065

The new features introduced in version 7.0 include Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness assessment, VDI readiness assessment and the ability to plan for virtualization assessment of Linux server.

MAP 7.0 supports SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration planning and, along with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, simplifies the migration of VMware virtual machine to Hyper-V.

Key features and benefits of MAP 7.0 Beta help you:

• Understand your readiness to deploy Windows in your environment with hardware and device readiness assessments
• Determine Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness
• Investigate how Windows Server and System Center can manage your heterogeneous environment through VMware migration and Linux server virtualization assessments
• Size your desktop virtualization needs for both Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote Desktop Services
• Ready your information platform for the cloud with the SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration assessment
• Evaluate your licensing needs with usage tracking for Lync 2010, active users and devices, SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 Beta

Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.

vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure and SQLFire Enterprise Edition, an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale with the needed performances.

vFabric Suite leverages Spring development framework, inherited from SpringSource acquisition in 2009, vFabric application services and a per-VM licensing model to provide a comprehensive infrastructure oriented to the deployment of cloud-ready applications.

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.

said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.

One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long seven-part video series, was the need to increase the automation and integration between VMware’s various products, topic about which Herrod reassured those present confirming VMware’s awareness of the problem.

Of this long speech the statement that has inflamed internet is

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.

as reported by Dave Northey on Microsoft’s TechNet blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So a huge focus for the company is really how we make it become a suite.

as cleverly noted David Marshall in his article, this confirm the awareness of VMware and the will to solve the problem, as mentioned before.

What Herrod said simply describes the reality of a company that has acquired a variety of technologies from different companies and now is struggling to reunite them together in one or more suites, what we can certainly say is that the new position of prominence of vCOPS and the new integrations provided by VMware’s partners are a signal of a new path towards the light.