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. Cisco may announce the major step in early 2009, possibly at VMworld Europe 2009.

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.

In September a new virtualization startup surfaced the crowded market: Virtual Computer.
Founded by the same man that created Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky, the young company didn’t reveal much about its strategy so far.

But this week Virtual Computer moves its first product, NxTop, in private beta and it’s worth a check.

Like a small number of brave companies (for example Phoenix Technologies or Neocleus), Virtual Computer enhanced the open-source Xen hypervisor to fit a client hardware (like a laptop).

At the same time the company took the Microsoft hypervisor, Hyper-V, and put it on a central server.

On server-side, Hyper-V is used to serve a master virtual machine for VDI. 
On client side, the modified Xen is used to serve a branch of the the master virtual machine.

Basically, every time the administrator decides to change the master VM on the server (for example to patch it), the modified bits are saved in a delta disk (like for any snapshot) that is compressed and streamed to the client where NxTop merges it with the main virtual disk.

On top of that the product wraps the virtual machine in a security layer, like Kidaro (now acquired by Microsoft), Sentillion or MokaFive do, applying the corporate policy of choice.

In this way Virtual Computer merged together several approaches, offering VDI and offline VDI in an interesting way.

Enroll the private beta here.

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

Two weeks ago the Red Hat CEO hinted at his upcoming virtualization strategy but was careful enough to not say when KVM would be integrated into the company enterprise distribution.

Now CBR reports that Red Hat may be ready by the first half of 2009.

By that time the company will completely replace Xen with KVM in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but will continue to offer support for the former virtualization plaform for another seven years.

The company Vice President for EMEA, Werner Knoblich, insisted that KVM is better than Xen (or VMware ESX) when talking about large-scale deployments (thousands of virtual machines) because the virtualization engine fully leverages the Linux kernel capabilities while the bare-metal hypervisors cannot.

True or not, such comment highlights how Red Hat is looking at KVM for cloud computing much more than for server consolidation.

In February Novell took its first major step to become a relevant player in the virtualization market by acquiring PlateSpin, one of the most famous VMware partner in P2V migration and capacity planning.

Novell anticipated a full integration of the new subsidiary by the end of this year, despite the two vendors use very different technologies to develop their products.

It remains unclear if PlateSpin PowerConvert and PowerRecon will ever be included in ZENworks Orchestrator, but today Novell at least unveiled its go-to-market strategy:

• ZENWorks Orchestrator is moved into the PlateSpin product portfolio, rebranded as Orchestrate
• PlateSpin PowerRecon becomes just Recon
• PlateSpin PowerConvert is forked in two products: Migrate and Protect

The four products now go under the portfolio name of PlateSpin Workload Management.

The rebranded version of ZENworks Orchestrator should be released in Q1 2009.

Yesterday at the Data Center Conference 2008 in Las Vegas, Thomas Bittman, Vice President of Data Center Research at Gartner, announced three remarkable predictions about the virtualization industry:

• By 2012, at least 14% of the infrastructure and operations architecture of Fortune 1000 companies will be managed and delivered much like a cloud-computing provider, internally
• The installed base of VMs will grow more than tenfold between 2007 and 2011
• By 2012, the majority of x86 server workloads will be running in a VM

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

In May Citrix released its first fully-featured VDI platform combining together a hypervisor, XenServer, a connection broker, Desktop Deliver Controller (DDC), an OS streaming solution, Provisioning Server, its blockbuster presentation/application virtualization & streaming plaform, XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and a bunch of other applications.

Only the most skilled Citrix customers know that this rich suite, called XenDesktop, has a limitation: the remote desktop protocol it uses (internally called PortICA) it’s not exactly the same ICA that powers XenApp.

The reason behind this difference is that the ICA protocol is built on top of the Microsoft Terminal Server platform that is missing in the Windows XP and Vista guest operating systems that populate VDI environments.

Citrix has rebuilt many of the features in the new PortICA and it’s working to have the same feature-set across the two protocols. But for now there’s a gap.
Martin Maierhofer, Product Architect at Citrix, details the missing capabilities on his corporate blog:

• Kerberos SSPI: while a useful feature, this integrates deeply with the logon process, and this is one area where - you guessed it - XenApp and XenDesktop differ considerably. Moreover, for it to be really useful you will typically have to mark the computer that your end users connect to as "trusted for delegation" - and typically . While that may be ok for a relatively small number of well managed XenApp server, it's less clear that you'd want to do this for thousands of virtual desktops, where your users may have full admin rights. Morever, Windows XP doesn't support constrained delegation, which makes this a less attractive solution. Hence we decided to leave this aside for the initial release.
• SmartCards: this is a very important feature for a relatively small, but vocal target market. Again, from a technical point of view it is far from a straight port from XenApp. Having said that, it is a high priority item and we are working on delivering it as soon as possible.
• SpeedScreen: SpeedScreen is a term that refers to a large array of technologies that optimize the end user experience. The first version of XenDesktop shipped with support for the majority of SS features, including SS Browser Acceleration, SS Flash Acceleration, SS Image Acceleration, and SS Progressive Display. Now for the features that didn't make the cut: SS Multimedia Acceleration was unfortunately too late to make it into the first release, but we are well under way with it now. The situation is less clear with SS Zero Latency - XenDesktop already supports mouse click feedback, but keyboard type-ahead is a technology that is not terribly easy to set up, and can be tricky to get working with more recent applications that you would typically find on a virtual desktop. For now, we are assessing how we can best make this functionality available on XenDesktop.
• PDA Sync and Twain: again, these are fairly tied to the Terminal Services infrastructure on XenApp. Moreover, virtually all PDAs and scanners nowadays are USB devices, and we will tackle them in a more compatible and user-friendly manner through our upcoming USB remoting technology in XenDesktop.
• Shadowing: as I mentioned before, on XenApp this is based off Terminal Services capabilities that just aren't available to us in XenDesktop. XenDesktop Platinum comes with Citrix GotoAssist, which is a more than capable replacement for shadowing, or you can also use the built-in Remote Assistance feature built into Windows for a premise-based solution. We also have plans to support shadowing functionality in future.
• SmartAuditor: SmartAuditor is used by a relatively small customer segment, and thus wasn't among the highest priority items for a first XenDesktop release. There has been quite a lot of prep work for this already, and I am confident that we'll include this in one of the future XenDesktop releases.
• Audio on Vista: this is a bit tricky - Vista's audio architecture differs fundamentally from that used in Windows XP, and we need to completely re-implement the audio framework in PortICA to support Vista, which unfortunately has taken a bit longer than we'd hoped, but is nearing completion now. The good news is that we will be able to take advantage of this rework to integrate much better audio codecs in future.
• Perfmon Counters and User Experience Metrics: again lack of support for these metrics was due to resource constraints, and there are only minor technical difficulties to make them available on XenDesktop.

As most of our readers know by now, the Virtualization Congress 2008 planned for October in London didn’t take place as planned.

While waiting for a second chance in Europe, our team decided to postpone the first edition by several months and move it to the US.

The result is that the Virtualization Congress 2008 becomes the Virtualization Congress 2009, taking place in Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, from May 5 to 7.

There are other three important changes:

First of all, for this first US edition, the event is co-hosted with other two events: the Citrix iForum and the Network World Live!
Along with them, the Virtualization Congress 2009 will benefit the event coordination and logistics that Citrix calls Synergy.
This will give virtualization.info enough resources to deliver the great event that we have planned.

The fact that the Virtualization Congress is under the umbrella of Citrix Synergy doesn’t impact the independence of the event.
virtualization.info is still in charge of the whole agenda and has no constrains.
Citrix will not have any special benefits in terms of exposure during the event.
Every vendor, including the Citrix competitors, are more than welcome as sponsors.
Delegates will be able to attend all the three events if they like, otherwise they are totally free to just attend the Virtualization Congress 2009.

In other words, the Virtualization Congress remains “the independent stage for virtualization technologies”.

Secondarily, the Virtualization Congress 2009 agenda will become much more technical, specifically designed for virtualization architects and engineers.
We ditched the “Reseller Day” planned in Europe, and extended the main agenda up to 2.5 days.
We are working to include in the schedule every possible topic about virtualization, such as:

• Application virtualization & streaming
• Benchmarks
• Cloud computing
• Hosted virtual desktops infrastructures (connection brokering, thin clients, etc.)
• Software development & testing through virtual lab automation
• Storage virtualization
• Technology adoption challenges
• Technology ROI
• Virtual infrastructures maintenance  (operational frameworks, best practices, etc.)
• Virtual machines disaster recovery / high-availability  (backup / restore, hosts synchronization, P2V migrations, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructure security (platforms hardening / patching, intrusion detection, permissions, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructures automation / orchestration
• Virtual infrastructures capacity planning
• Virtual infrastructures design
• Virtual Infrastructures performance monitoring / troubleshooting
• Virtual machines lifecycle management (provisioning, inventory, tracking, etc.) 

The third and most important change in the Virtualization Congress 2009 is that we finally accept session submissions from anybody in the industry. No more sponsored sessions only.

If you are an independent professional or a solution provider that wants to unleash some deep knowledge on stage about the topics above, then you are welcome.
We are looking for unbiased speakers that want to present breakthrough sessions through one the following formats:

• Best practices
• Case history
• Research analysis
• Designing
• Implementing
• Introduction / Overview

We’ll accept submissions until the end of December 2008.

In the first week of January the submitted sessions will be published on virtualization.info and the audience will be able to vote for ones that they like the most.

Submit your sessions here: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/cfp.htm

Hello virtualization.info readers!

My name is Christofer Hoff, or Hoff as everyone usually calls me.

I was really thrilled when Alessandro asked me if I would like to  contribute regularly to virtualization.info by bringing to life articles and  discussions focusing on the operational realities of security and managing risk in virtualization  and cloud computing.

As a bit of background, I've spent the last 15 years or so in global network and security engineering, administration and architecture roles, elbows deep in network and security startups and as a CISO.

Having lived through through the dot.com era and escaped relatively  unscathed to push the boundaries of network and security virtualization before its time only to see it emerge as
it has today, leaves me with both a giddy sense of enthusiasm balanced with a skeptical perspective of caution, jaded  grumpiness and rational pragmatism.

virtualization.info is a fantastic source for breaking news and  reliable information on all things virtualization, so what better place to bring even more eyeballs to the importance of
security as the community grows?

The content I provide here will be original and exclusive to  virtualization.info but will also ultimately be mirrored and supported by my personal blog which focuses on similar topics at rationalsecurity.typepad.com

I look forward to contributing and interacting with all of you.

Regards,

/Hoff

There’s no doubt that hardware virtualization has a chance to significantly reduce the power and cooling usage in most companies thanks to remarkable server consolidation ratios. But some vendors are trying to use automation to make the IT greener (as marketing people love to say).

Virtual Iron and VMware now offer the capability to consolidate into a single server the virtual machines served across a bunch of virtualization hosts.
The VMs are live migrated and the empty virtualization hosts are powered off until there is an actual need for them.

While this sounds a great thing it may have some side effects that few companies are considering.

Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, is wondering if this dynamic power management has a concrete impact on the hardware mean time between failure (MTBF).

Interesting enough the major IHVs that he contacted didn’t perform any test to find out.

The ClearCube spin-off VDIwork announced an upcoming extension of its connection broker that promises to introduce the much wanted offline VDI (sometimes dubbed mobile VDI) capability.

Expected for the end of this quarter, VDIwork2Go will allow the mobile workforce to check-out the hosted virtual desktop, run a local copy on the laptop of choice (through VMware Player) and leave the network.
Once the user checks-in again, the changes made inside the local VM will be synchronized back to the virtual desktop infrastructure.

The VDI approach is certainly something that many customers are evaluating these days but the implementation still implies some major challenges. This is one of them and many vendors are working to solve it so to boost the confidence in the solution.

VMware is working to offer offline VDI as well: the company previewed the technology for the first time at VMworld Europe 2008 in February, and then formally announced it as a feature of the upcoming VMware View.

Just few months after the first release, Microsoft is back with its patch management solution for offline virtual machines.

As virtualization professionals and security expert know, one area where virtualization can become a security issue instead of a security enabler is the operating system patching.
VM library templates and offline virtual machines in production may skip the patching process in those companies without a strict operational framework.
This happens also in the physical world, but inside a virtual infrastructure an administrator can clone tens or thousands of virtual machines in minutes, making the offline server patching a much bigger issue.

For this reason some virtualization vendors are offering the capability to patch the offline VMs.
VMware does this through its Update Manager, introduced with VI 3.5.
Microsoft offers the same capability through a stand-alone product called Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool.

This new release doesn’t change the way the offline virtual drive is patched, but introduces support for Hyper-V 1.0, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 SP1 and R2, and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 SP1.

Download it for free here.

Recently both Microsoft and VMware released their papers about running SQL Server in a virtual machine for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workloads:

• Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment - Best Practices and Performance Considerations
  Microsoft – 37 pages
• Benchmarking Microsoft SQL Server Using VMware ESX Server 3.5
  VMware – 16 pages

Microsoft, that is supposed to know its own product better than anybody else concludes:

From a performance perspective, Hyper-V is a viable option for SQL Server consolidation scenarios. The overall performance of SQL Server running in a Hyper-V virtualized environment is reasonable compared with the equivalent native Windows Server 2008 environment.

With proper I/O capacity and configuration, the I/O overhead is minimal. For best performance, you should have enough physical processors to support number of virtual processors configured on the server to avoid overcommit CPU resources. The CPU overhead increases significantly when the CPU resources are overcommitted. It is important to test each application thoroughly before you deploy it to a Hyper-V environment in production.

Unfortunately who authored the VMware paper took great care in hiding the version of SQL Server used for the benchmarks.

Nonetheless the two papers are greatly interesting for a (probably unfair) comparison.
Readers may also want to look at older benchmarks measuring SQL Server 2005 performance in VMware environments:

• SQL Server Performance in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment
• SQL Server 2005 Virtualization in the Dell Scalable Enterprise

In September 2007 VMware acquired one of the few companies busy in the virtual infrastructure orchestration market: Dunes Technologies.

After more than one year, the company has yet to unveil how Dunes products will be integrated into VMware Infrastructure, but at least we now know where a part of the knowledge is going: Dan Mitchell, former Technical Director of Dunes left VMware to join the startup DynamicOps in June 2008 (see virtualization.info coverage here). 

DynamicOps is busy in the VM lifecycle management segment and Mitchell certainly has some experience to share because of the powerful VS-O orchestration framework that Dunes developed in the last five years.

Performing a virtual machine live migration across different vendors' CPUs is probably one of the most wanted feature for several customers that can’t just replace their entire hardware set every time that a new generation of CPUs hits the market.

The topic is so hot that a recent demonstration of its feasibility performed by AMD in collaboration with Red Had immediately became a point of discussion.

VMware (and its investor Intel) commented the effort saying that a cross-CPUs live migration is a too risky operation for the stability of the virtualized workloads.

True or not the virtualization professionals that decide to take the risk may achieve the goal through the so called CPU masking technique.

Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware, discusses the topic and kindly shows how to turn off CPU checking in VI 3.5 in a couple of different ways.

It would be nice if virtualization.info readers could comment this post reporting the nasty effects of these CPU masking approach.

Just five days ago Symantec went under fire for its supporting policy about VMware VMotion.

Basically the company refused to support two of its core products in a VMware environment where VMotion was used because some of its customers reported several kind of problems.

Thanks to the power of the blogosphere, to the massive negative PR, or more likely to the powerful influence that VMware can exercise, Symantec immediately changed the offending knowledge base article, taking the responsibility of any odd behavior for its products after a VMotion:

At this time running the Symantec Endpoint Manager (SEPM) is considered an alternative configuration and will be handled with "Best Effort Support".

Customers have reported problems with Symantec AntiVirus Server and Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager with VMware VMotion ESX server. These problems may or may not be related to the presence of VMware VMotion or the presence of the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager.

…

Symantec is investigating each support case and will update Symantec products where necessary.

At its PDC 2008 Conference Microsoft hinted at a list of features expected with Hyper-V 2.0.
The second version of the hypervisor should appear in 2010, as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 (even if many rumors of these days suggest that the OS may arrive a little earlier than the virtualization platform).

Now Microsoft formalizes the list of features through a whitepaper: the Windows Server 2008 R2 Reviewers Guide.

Additionally, the document exposes the upcoming strategy about VDI, unveiled just few days ago:

• Live Migration
  Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 includes the much-anticipated Live Migration feature, which allows you to move a virtual machine between two virtualization host servers without any interruption of service. The users connected to the virtual machine being moved might notice only a slight slowing in performance for a few moments. Otherwise, they will be unaware that the virtual machine was moved from one physical computer to another.
  …
  Live Migration uses the new Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) feature within Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2. The CSV volumes enable multiple nodes in the same failover cluster to concurrently access the same logical unit number (LUN). From a VM’s perspective, each VM appears to actually own a LUN; however, the .vhd files for each VM are stored on the same CSV volume…
• Virtual disks hot plug
  …administrators can now add and remove vhd files, as well as pass-through disks attached to a virtual SCSI controller on a running VM, without requiring a reboot…
• Core Parking and CPU power consumption control
  The Core Parking feature allows Windows Server 2008 R2 to consolidate processing onto the fewest number of possible processor cores, and suspends inactive processor cores…
  Windows Server 2008 R2 has the ability to adjust the ACPI “P-states” of processors and subsequently adjust server power consumption. ACPI “P-states” are the processor performance states within the ACPI specification. Depending on the processor architecture, Windows Server 2008 R2 can adjust the “P-states” of individual processors and provide very fine control over power consumption…
• Support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)
  Hyper-V now supports Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), which uses new features on today’s CPUs to improve VM performance while reducing processing load on the Windows Hypervisor.
• Support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames
  TCP Offload allows a VM to dump its network processing load onto the NIC of the host computer. This works the same as in a physical TCP Offload scenario, Hyper-V now simply extends this functionality into the virtual world. This benefits both CPU and overall network throughput performance, and it’s fully supported by Live Migration.
  Like TCP Offloading, support for Jumbo Frames was also introduced with Windows Server 2008. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 simply extends this capability to VMs. So just like in physical network scenarios, Jumbo Frames add the same basic performance enhancements to virtual networking. That includes up to 6 times larger payloads per packet, which improves not only overall throughput but also reduces CPU utilization for large file transfers.
• Support for VDI
  The in-box Remote Desktop Services capability is targeted at low-complexity deployments and as a platform for partner solutions, which can extend scalability and manageability to address the needs of more demanding enterprise deployments. VDI includes the following technologies to provide a comprehensive solution:
• Hyper-V
• Live Migration
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
• Microsoft Application Virtualization version 4.5 in Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).
• Vista Enterprise VECD licensing

Unfortunately Microsoft continues to stay mum about its plans for client-side desktop virtualization (aka hosted virtualization).
Customers are still wondering if there will ever be a successor of Virtual PC or if the company will embed a version of Hyper-V into the upcoming Windows 7.

Microsoft just release the first beta of its long awaited help desk software called System Center Service Manager.

This first usable build was expected much earlier but the feedbacks received from the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) testers convinced the company to reconsider the features.

The new development of Service Manager brought in some enhanced capabilities in different areas.
A key one is the change management.

Several new vendors are emerging these days offering change management features for the most popular virtualization platforms. The need for such tools is becoming more concrete as the customers knowledge about virtualization matures and their pilot deployments becomes large-scale virtual infrastructures.

Service Manager will be part of the System Center family, where all the other components are virtualization aware and integrate with Virtual Machine Manager.
Additionally, the new product should arrive in early 2010, when Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V 2.0 are expected.

Now we wonder if Microsoft will be savvy enough to use Service Manager at its first version to introduce change management for its growing-in-complexity virtual infrastructure. We hope so.

Just two weeks ago VMware announced the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, a startup focused on the so called embedded virtualization.

VMware announced that the Trango technology will be used to power a new Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) without adding further details.

Now something about the timeline emerges: Reseller News published an article quoting Srinivas Krishnamurti, Director of Product Management and Market Development at VMware, who said:

…Two years ago we looked at the mobile phone market as the next frontier, and we wanted to build a hypervisor on a mobile device. These phones are no longer a communication device, but a computation device …

We don't expect people to go to our website and download it … We're speaking with a number of handset and carriers about proof-of-concept right now…

The products should arrive in around 12 to 18 months…

Immediately after the replacement its CEO (the former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz took the place of Diane Greene), VMware risked to lose a number of high-profile executives and software engineers loyal to the fired co-founder.

The mass exodus never happened (also thanks to some aggressive workforce retaining programs) but VMware lost a bunch of key figures nonetheless:

• Paul Chan (Vice President of Product Development) in August
• Richard Sarwal (Executive Vice President of R&D) in September
• Mendel Rosenblum (Chief Scientist and co-founder) in September as well

Now a fourth important leader leaves the company: Nand Mulchandani, who became the CEO of OpenDNS, as reported by Computerworld and several other news sites.

This departure is especially concerning as it happens exactly now that VMware is seriously entering the security market.
The company will release its VMsafe APIs within VI 4.0, expected within the end of this year and the beginning of the next one, acquired a couple of security startups (Determina in August 2007 and Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008), entered the PCI Standard Council.

Mulchandani comes right from Determina, where he was the CEO.
Considering that virtualization has endless opportunities to revolutionize the world of security, his position at VMware as Senior Director of Security Products was critical.
But he basically said to Computerworld that the OpenDNS position was more interesting.

We’ll see who will replace Mulchandani at VMware.

Update: SearchSecurity.com reports that along with Mulchandani another key security expert, formerly employed at Determina, left VMware: Alexander Sotirov.

The list of executives leaving Virtual Iron gets longer and longer.

In May the company lost its public face, the Chief Marketing Officer Mike Grandinetti.
In November it also lost the one that was supposed to reshape the go-to-market strategy: the Chief Security Officer Tony Asaro. Asaro left the company after just

And now Virtual Iron loses its Director of Corporate Marketing Tim Walsh.

In realty Walsh left before Asaro, in October, to found, like its former colleague, his own consulting company.
Walsh left Virtual Iron after more than 3 years (and $65 million funding).  

Now, or the CEO Ed Walsh is working to completely renew its leadership team or the high-level profiles are leaving a sinking boat.

Just one month after the 6.5 release, VMware is ready to refresh again its Workstation.

Besides a bunch of bug fixes, the minor update 6.5.1 (build 126130) introduces a couple of interesting new features, both experimental:

• Experimental support for smart cards in Linux guests
• Experimental support for Unity mode in Linux guests

Download a trial here.

At the end of the last week VMware launched the public beta program for the newest version of its free P2V migration tool: Converter 4.0.

Converter 4.0 is already embedded into VMware Infrastructure 3.5 but the users that don’t buy the flagship platform can just use the stand-alone Converter 3.0.2, which is one year old.
It’s not clear why VMware is taking so long to synchronize the two versions.

The first beta build (122441) of the new version introduces key features that can be used with any VMware product besides VI 3.5:

• Support for Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu Linux distributions as source
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as source
• Support for Parallels Desktop virtual machines as source
• Incremental hot cloning (Converter now replicates any change happening to the source machine during the P2V migration)
• Power off source machine at the end of the conversion
• Selection of the target virtual disk and virtual volumes configuration
• Configuration of the target virtual machine

Enroll for the beta program here.

Since months now a serious number of companies and open source contributors is looking at Red Hat to understand its new virtualization strategy.

The company took a major step in June when it thrown out of window years of efforts on Xen to fully replace it with KVM.
Just two months after, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, the company that started KVM, that maintains it, that managed to inject it into the Linux kernel, and that sells a very interesting VDI solution.

What Red Hat wants to do now with KVM and Qumranet (somebody hopes that their highly performing VDI protocol SPICE will be open sourced) is critical to understand what chances has Linux to impose itself as a valuable virtualization platforms against the popular hypervisors ESX (offered by VMware) and Xen (offered by every other vendor except Microsoft).

Some hints of the new strategy surface in a recent interview that InformationWeek arranged with Jim Whitehurst, the Red Hat CEO:

Q: What is Red Hat's strategy with virtualization?

A: …We'll be offering both server and desktop virtualization. The first use-case of server consolidation is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a long-term use for grids of servers running large numbers of desktops. We plan to be the leading virtualization vendor based on the server operating system…

Q: What about cloud computing?

A: Clouds will run Linux.

It’s clear that Red Hat sees in KVM a huge opportunity to differentiate from Citrix, Virtual Iron, Oracle and its worst competitor Novell.
Now the company has to to execute in a much better way that how it did with Xen.

So far the CA activity in the virtualization space has been more than silent.
Yes, the company issued many press announcements stating that it’s reworking many of its products to support virtualization, but the software giant never took major steps to become a virtualization leader like almost every other major IT player did in the last two years.

Hiring the former co-founder of Virtugo (a virtualization startup that mysteriously disappeared shortly after its merge with uXcomm), Chris Dickson, as Vice President didn’t seem to help much.

Now things may change as CA just made a joint announcement with VMware, revealing that its Data Center Automation Manager is integrated with VMware vCenter and will interoperate with Stage Manager.
Additionally, VMware vCenter capabilities are integrated into the CA Advanced Systems Management (ASM), where the VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology can merge with the CA’s Dynamic Resource Brokering (DRB), and together they can possibly start a fantastic virtualization management sprawl.

The announcement seems to imply that these are just the first steps of a much more tighten relationship. We’ll see for how long CA will be happy to play this role in the virtualization industry.