Today Phoronix broke the news that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics.

The little company is behind the development of hugely popular Linux graphics technologies like:

• Mesa3D, the OpenGL component used by the X Window System
• Gallium3D, a software library for 3D graphics drivers
• TTM Manager, a video memory manager

So far VMware didn’t confirm the news or unveiled the amount of the acquisition, but the news is reported on the official website of the new subsidiary.

It seems pretty clear that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics to power its upcoming client hypervisor, a key part of its pervasive VDI strategy vCloud, where every centrally-managed virtual machine can be checked out and executed locally.

Running a hypervisor on consumer hardware like laptops granting all functionalities that the real hardware provides, like 3D rendering, requires some remarkable engineering work.
Several companies are walking the same path, including Phoenix Technologies, Neocleus and Citrix but none of them acquired yet a company that masters the art of graphics acceleration.

With Tungsten Graphics VMware reaches twelve acquisitions:

11. Trango Virtual Processors (mobile hypervisor)

10. Blue Lane Technologies (intrusion prevention system)

9. B-hive (performance monitoring)

8. Thinstall (application virtualization)

7. Foedus (consulting services)

6. Sciant (software development)

5. Dunes Technologies (virtual data center orchestration)

4. Determina (intrusion prevention system)

3. Propero (virtual desktop infrastructure)

2. Akimbi (virtual lab automation)

1. Asset Optimization Group (capacity planning)

Surprisingly enough, Microsoft decided to test large scale deployments of its new hypervisor Hyper-V pushing hard its adoption among hosting service providers.

It was clear that the software giant would had a hard time entering the enterprise segment with Hyper-V where VMware has ruled for the last years, but most hosting shops have been fascinated by Virtuozzo so far and Microsoft was supposed to start a deep partnership with Parallels to win them.

Anyway Hyper-V was not developed from scratch for hosting providers, so it doesn’t come with a user interface that can be used by customers to buy and maintain their VPS.

DotNetPanel is filling this gap by announcing an Hyper-V module for its control panel, already popular for its support to Virtuozzo.

In July 2007, when VMware was preparing its IPO, one of the most impressive in the IT industry history, Intel invested $218.5 million in the virtualization vendor.

What happened after that between the two companies is a secret.
The VMware co-founder and former CEO, Diane Greene, may have tried to sell her creature to Intel just under the EMC nose, and eventually failed.
What is known is that Intel is now it’s getting rid of its VMW shares.

In November the chipmaker announced the intention to sell 3.75 million shares.
500,000 of them were sold the same month to Cisco.
Now another 967,398 share are sold for a value of over $23 million.

The startup MokaFive loses its CEO, Bill Demas, after just one year of work.

Demas took the position in July 2007, in concurrence with the second round of financing secured by the company.
Under his management MokaFive changed name (it was formerly known as moka5) and strategy, shifting its focus from the consumers to the enterprises.

Demas left in August to join Turn, an advertising company.
He has been replaced by a top figure in the IT industry: Dale Fuller.

Fuller served as interim CEO at McAfee for 1,5 years, as CEO at Borland, as Vice President of Macbook division at Apple.
Additionally Fuller is in the board of directors of AVG, one of the most popular anti-virus engine around, and covered the same role in Phoenix Technologies.

After all MokaFive doesn’t seem to have lost its consumer vendor identity, and the appointment of Dale Fuller seems to confirm this.

The startup Virtual Computer is completing the last steps to officially enter the market.

Last week its hybrid VDI solution, NxTop, moved to private beta, and now the company appoints its Vice President of Sales: Sandrijn Stead.

Prior to joining Virtual Computer Inc., Sandrijn served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Reflex Security Ltd (now Reflex Systems). As the first employee for Reflex Security in the EMEA region, Sandrijn built the global sales, technical and marketing teams and created a stable channel across the globe, including 300 VARs and 16 distributors.

Sun has just temporary shut down its cloud computing facility at Network.com.

The online platform was launched in March 2006 and offered the opportunity to buy certain amount of processing cycles at $1 / hour through simple PayPal account.
The user just had to upload its application and specify in how much time he wanted the execution of a certain workload.

This approach was not very flexible, requiring the customers to develop (or re-engineer) their applications for parallel computing on UltraSPARC processors.
Over time the company tried to mitigate this remarkable cost of entry by offering pre-installed applications, like 3D rendering programs.
Despite that, Network.com never became as popular as Amazon EC2, who offers empty Xen virtual machines where customers can install Linux and Windows guest OSes.

Sun stays mum on which virtualization technology will be used for the next iteration, but it’s very likely that it will be similar to EC2, leveraging the upcoming xVM Server (which still is an implementation of Xen).

VMware continues to roll the Update 3 for its flagship product: VI 3.5.

At the beginning of October the patch was made available for vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 2.5.
One month later the Update 3 hit ESX 3.5. And now it finally reaches the free version of ESX: ESXi 3.5

But unlikely the other products this fix doesn’t just fix the bugs and extends the hardware support.
The ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (build 123629) introduces a full set of APIs.

The VMware documentation doesn’t mention this aspect but Rich Brambley reported the major improvement: so far the only way to automate the management (for example through PowerShell) of this free hypervisor was to pass through vCenter and use the VI SDK.

Now vCenter can be skipped and ESXi directly managed in a programmatic way (or through free/low-cost vCenter alternatives that may bring in some sort of innovative features).

As consequence of this, the Update 3 brings in a read/write Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI), meaning that finally the customers will be able to change the hypervisor settings without using the vCenter Client.

Virtual Iron finally found a replacement for Mike Grandinetti, former Chief Marketing Officer, who left the company in May.

Susan Roberts replaces him as Senior Director of Marketing.
She comes from Dassault Systems where she was Director of Global Branding and Marketing Communications and Paxonix where she was Director of Marketing.

She holds a U. S. Patent (pending) for interactive consumer instruction and her work has been recognized by numerous regional and national award committees including the prestigious Clio Award for Best Interactive Television Service, as well as the Business Marketing Association Silver Award for achievements in database marketing and  the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in Exporting.

Stephen Pollack, the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February) seems more busy now than when he was leading his own company.

Just two weeks ago Embotics, the Canadian startup focused on the VM lifecycle management area, announced the appointment of the successful entrepreneur as Advisor.
Now Enomaly, another Canadian company strongly refocusing on cloud computing, is doing the same.

Immediately after Pollack joined Embotics the company raised $4 million in a Series B funding.
We’ll wait to see what wonderful things will happen to Enomaly.

In September Citrix silently released the first minor update for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The new XenDesktop 2.1 becomes a serious multi-hypervisor connection broker, as it introduces the support for Microsoft products (both Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008) that goes side by side with the existing support for Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX.

The product also includes the new Provisioning Server for Desktops 5.0.

To celebrate Citrix has released an interesting evaluation guide: Citrix XenDesktop 2.1 with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Yesterday Symantec announced a new partnership with VMware to integrate its much appreciated Veritas Cluster Server with VMware Infrastructure.

As first step Symantec has enhanced VCS to cluster vCenter.

Additionally, the two companies may bundle together VCS with Site Recovery Manager (SRM) as the announcement mentions a very vague complementary HA/DR solutions as part of the joint operation.

The VDI market gets more crowded every day. All the biggest players in the space are developing, releasing, or rearranging their solutions to offer an end-to-end VDI platform to make the client consolidation through virtualization a viable option.

This is a space where Citrix, VMware and Quest/Provision networks lead, followed by aggressive newcomers like Red Hat (which acquired Qumranet and plan to use KVM), Pano Logic (which has its own platform), Leostream, Ericom (which supports many hypervisors but seems to bet on Oracle VM), Propalms and more.

Each one is trying to working to offer some sort of performance booster for the RDP protocol (while we all wait for Microsoft to enhance it with the technology acquired by Calista), or to completely replace it.

HP has some technology to push in this space so yesterday with a notable marketing exercise it relaunched its offering under the name of Virtual Client Essentials.

The new platform includes the connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM), a brand new Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Enhancements package, and its own remoting protocol called Remote Graphics Software (RGS).
The bundle doesn’t include a specific hypervisor as HP doesn’t own one but SAM supports both VMware and Citrix ones.

Update: virtualization.info just received multiple confirmations that the new HP RDP Enhancements package is a licensed version of the Quest/Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack launched in September.
The product can score up to 8x compression for RDP sessions and it’s remarkable that HP decided to use it despite the existence of its RGS protocol.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

In June Veeam completed its first acquisition: NWorks, a company focused on management plug-ins for enterprise management systems like HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).

After six months the company is ready to release the first rebranded version of NWorks technology under the new name of Veeam Management Pack for VMware 4.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

Beside the fact that maybe Veeam has to work a bit on the name, the new release is interesting because it gives to SCOM a much detailed visibility of the VMware Infrastructure 3 environment.

The biggest change is that now the product allows ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 host hardware monitoring through VMware Virtual Infrastructure SDK.

It’s clear that Veeam is now more than serious competition with Vizioncore and their vFoglight (formerly esxCharter and then vCharter).
It wouldn’t surprise if the nWorks technology would be integrated in Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter next year.

The two companies already compete in the virtual machine backup/restore area, and its clear that Veeam wants a bigger piece of the competitor’s market share.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

DynamicOps releases today the first minor update of its Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) 3.0.

VRM is a VM lifecycle management product that offers self-service provisioning capabilities, resources tracking (including abandoned virtual machines) and chargeback, and policy compliancy enforcement.

Following a questionable trend, the company jumped from VRM 1.0 (released in June) to this 3.1 in just six months.

Nonetheless this new version introduces a couple of key features:

• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V
• Support for Citrix XenDesktop (including its Provisioning Server component) and VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) connection brokers
  (support for the new VMware View 3.0 will come in early 2009)

Additionally DynamicOps seems to have extended its list of core partners, by adding Sun.
This means that VRM may be one of the few (or the only one) virtualization managers able to support at the same time VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Sun xVM Server.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Tripwire is an old and well-known security vendor focused on host intrusion detection (specifically file integrity checking).
Over one year ago the company saw an opportunity in virtualization and joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program.
In June 2008 they release a free tool (and a blueprint developed in collaboration with VMware) to verify the ESX configuration.

The product was so successful that Tripwire must be in the process of reconsidering its corporate mission. Today in fact it was announced the recruitment of a well-known virtualization expert: Stephen Beaver, former System Engineer at the Florida Hospital in Orlando.

Beaver will work at Tripwire as Virtualization Evangelist and will write on a new blog that the company will formally launch on Dec. 15.

In the last period Virtual Iron lost a number of key executives: the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Strategy Officer (still working as consultant), and the Director of Corporate Marketing.
Even before this, the company decided to not show up at industry events like the VMware VMworld for a couple of times.

Considering these facts the impression is that Virtual Iron is trying to contain the costs and avoid to burn the $65 million that raised in five rounds (the highest financing ever in the virtualization industry, excluding VMware).

Virtual Iron may not have another chance to collect capital, so it must to gain a more significant market share (Gartner reports no more than 1%) or to be acquired.

While there’s obviously no news about an acquisition, the company revealed some information about its growth: 130% revenue increase from Q3 2007 to Q3 2008, and 2,000 customers worldwide.

While these are great numbers the real problem is understanding if they are great enough to survive against the competition with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Sun and Parallels (and probably more coming).

Immediately after the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin, Stephen Pollack, joined Embotics as board advisor the company announced its second round of funding.

Despite the credit crunch, Covington Capital Corporation managed to raise $4 million for this Canadian startup focused on the so called VM lifecycle management segment. 
The entity of the first round stays undisclosed.

The number of financing rounds in the virtualization industry dropped near zero in the last six months, and it doesn’t seem it will go any better for a while.
Embotics is certainly lucky as this money will grant oxygen for the next few quarters.

Virtual Bridges is a company founded at the end of 2006, that always offered commercial flavors of QEMU for Linux, BSD and Solaris platforms.
After KVM made its appearance Virtual Bridges started to implement support for it on its products for Linux. Where KVM is not available KQEUM is automatically used.

In August it significantly extended its scope by releasing its first VDI connection broker for KVM: Win4VDI.

Compared to other products in this space, Win4VDI doesn’t connect the user to the actual guest OS, but rather to the underlying host. From there the user session is started.
In this way Virtual Bridges can leverage the authentication methods and profiles that the host is using.

The choice has been courageous.
Even if KVM is part of the Linux kernel and even if its maintainer, Qumranet, has been acquired by Red Hat, the spread of a new virtualization platform must surpass a huge obstacle: the ISVs support.
And at this point no ISV formally supported its applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Despite that, Virtual Bridges has been rewarded as IBM just closed an agreement with them to resell a bundle made by:

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux (which is adopting KVM in place of Xen since February)
• Virtual Bridges VERDE (a subset of WIN4VDI that only supports Linux guest OSes)
• IBM Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes and the other Lotus applications (dubbed Open Collaboration Client Solution)

The whole package is available at $49 per concurrent user.

So the move is remarkable because IBM is the first big player supporting (and actively selling) KVM-based virtual infrastructures. But it’s also remarkable considering how heavily IBM invested in Xen in the past.
After the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, a number of entities behind the open source hypervisor development were reportedly unhappy and decided to shift to KVM. And this seems the first concrete step that demonstrate how unhappy IBM is about Xen.

True or not, looking at what IBM just did, we can have an idea of what Red Hat could do.
The difference between the two vendors is that Red Hat is in a much better position to sell an out of the box VDI package: it controls the operating system, it (indirectly) controls the virtualization platform, it controls the connection broker, and its role in the industry as OS provider certainly gives much influence on what ISV applications will be supported on top.

Now, considering that, besides Qumranet, Virtual Bridges is currently the only other vendor offering a connection broker for KVM and that its experience has to be somewhat limited, the real question is: why IBM didn’t do this with Red Hat instead of Ubuntu and Virtual Bridges?

Last week VMware silently released the first update for its disaster recovery solution: Site Recovery Manager 1.0.

The new build (128004) introduces some important new features like: a more granular permissions scheme that differentiates between users allows to test the recovery plan and users allowed to actually run it, and the support for raw disk mapping (which brings in the support for Microsoft Cluster Server)

The bad news is VMware doesn’t offer backward compatibility for the Update 1, so all SRM 1.0 clients must be updated along with the servers.

As you may see the update brings in also a new name: vCenter Site Recovery Manager.
VMware has recently renamed many products, highlighting how they are integrated with vCenter (renamed as well from VirtualCenter). 

It’s a pleasure to see how the size of the product names is invariably proportioned to the size of the company. The only other explanation is that Microsoft marketing experts are now hired at VMware.
In any case now it will be hard to have fun of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 if it will ever come out.

At the recent Xen Summit 2008 in Tokyo a specially interesting project finally reached version 1.0: Kemari.
The project was presented for the first time in April 2007 but only now it reaches a version stable enough to be marked as GA.

Developed by Yoshiaki Tamura, Kemari is a patch for Xen 3.3 that brings host fail-over.
It works with both Linux and Windows guests OSes.

A briefly description tells enough to understand how it works:

Kemari in VMM taps event channel, pauses the guest (not suspend), prepares for transfer, and Kemari in userland transfers the guest. On failover, Kemari on the secondary restores the guest, and the backend drivers in dom0 set up the backend rings from the state of the shared rings in the guest

Here a video where a Windows XP virtual machines survives the shut down of one node in a hardware cluster of two:

The exiting news is that Kemari is now part of the Xen roadmap, and this means that the open source hypervisor may offer out-of-the-box fault tolerance as soon as it hits version 3.4.
Citrix will be probably very happy. We wonder if Marathon Technologies will be happy as well.

Third Brigade is a security company that offers a modular solution including IDS, IPS, firewall, file integrity checker, and more modules under the name of Deep Security.

Today the company enters a dangerous territory by offering a scaled-down version of this platform to protect up to 100 virtual machines for free.
The lightweight edition is called VM Protection, offers IDS, firewall and file integrity monitoring and it’s integrated with VMware vCenter.

The danger lays in the communication, which claims thinks like “deploy cloud-ready security” and “achieve compliance with PCI and other regulations”.

The new security columnist that virtualization.info is proud to host, Christofer Hoff, already described on his personal blog the lack of security regulations in virtualization and cloud computing areas.
And he’s so right that VMware had to join the PCI Security Standards Council to influence the Data Security Standard.

How Third Brigade can promise something that not even the PCI council can?

While customers continue to wait for the Sun virtualization offering that seems never ready, the company continues to tease with short glimpses of its interface and feature-set.

This new (commercial) presentation of xVM Server 1.0 and xVM Ops Center 2.0 is the best demo so far of the two products and includes some precious details about the features that will be included in the new virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide:

• xVM Ops Center 2.0 will offer virtual machines Live Migration
• xVM Server 1.0 will be able to import VMware virtual machines

The startup VKernel continues its fast and furious release schedule. Last week was the turn of its free virtual appliance for virtual data center indexing and search: SearchMyVM.

The product hit 1.0 beta in September and now it’s already promoted to 2.0.
The only new feature included is the capability to export the query results in .CSV format.

The VKernel naming convention is very questionable. It seems that the company is trying to reach a high build number as fast as possible before the arrival of its first competitor in this space: Hyper9.

Unfortunately the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap tracks the release schedule of many companies in the market, highlighting which one makes ambiguous progresses.

There is no doubt that Cisco has seriously reconsidered its strategy in the last few years, taking several steps to extend its brand well beyond the image of a network vendor.

Obviously the most significant move so far has been the massive investment in virtualization: the company first invested $150 million in VMware IPO, then extended by another $13 million (buying 500,000 Intel’s shares), and now it’s preparing to release the first virtual switch for VMware ESX.

But Cisco may go much further than that: virtualization.info is collecting rumors from several sources that the company is preparing to fully enter the x86 server market by producing and selling a blade system  which embeds its new Nexus 5000 switches.

The company already sells a physical server, the Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), but so far the equipment has been pitched for a specific purpose: deploy a set of core enterprise services (like the DNS and the DHCP) to the branch offices.
And this is why the server comes with Windows Server 2008 preinstalled (and recently with an unveiled virtualization engine).

Of course offering a general purpose x86 blade system with integrated networking is a much different story and would put Cisco in direct competition with the biggest OEMs in the market: Dell, HP, IBM, etc.
All of them has a tight business relationship with VMware, but none of them currently invests in the virtualization vendor.

Cisco may surprise the market and release a blade system with VMware Infrastructure 4.0, its new virtual switch Nexus 1000V, its new physical switch Nexus 5000 and its virtual center automation suite VFrame Data Center.
The fact that EMC owns VMware would do the rest…

Update: virtualization.info continues to receive confirmations from additional sources that this more than a rumor. The platform is called codename California and Cisco may announce it in early 2009, possibly at VMworld Europe 2009.

Second update: virtualization.info has a final confirmation of the existence of this Cisco blade system currently called codename California.
The platform is going to feature a massive amount of memory, data center automation tools and deep integration with VMware Infrastructure.

Cisco is definitively going to shift its position in the IT market. Expect some serious consequences in the ecosystem.

Yesterday VMware released version 3.0 (build 127642) of its VDI connection broker, once known as Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM). The product is now named VMware View and offers three main new features.

First of all, the new release VMware moves deep into the Citrix and Quest/Provision Networks territory as View 3.0 is now able to coordinate end users access to Microsoft Terminal Server and generic Windows boxes with RDP enabled. VMware calls this Unified Access.

Much more than that the product experimentally introduces the much wanted offline VDI capability, allowing users to check out their virtual desktops and leave the corporate network with its image stored locally in their laptops.

Last but not least, VMware View introduces the capability to update a large-scale VDI through the use of the linked clone feature on a gold master virtual desktop.
Here the capability is called View Composer and VMware says it can cut up to 70% of the storage space (here’s a real-world example but what happens if the gold master image becomes corrupted?).

One major thing that this version of View is missing is the announced brand new remote desktop protocol that VMware is developing with the startup Teradici.
Nonetheless View 3 introduces some RDP enhancements thanks to the collaboration with the thin clients vendor Wyse Technologies.

Following Citrix and its XenDesktop in the attempt to bundle a complete application delivery platform, VMware offers View 3.0 in two editions.
The biggest one, Premiere, includes the hypervisor (ESX) and its management console (vCenter), the connection broker (View Manager), the application virtualization platform (ThinApp) and the desktop virtualization platform (Workstation).

But as Brian Madden says VMware View is still distant from Citrix XenDesktop as the former cannot seamless merge (yet) local and remote apps on the user’s desktop.Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap and the Virtualization Industry Radar have been updated accordingly.