In the last months virtualization.info reported several times that virtualization vendors were moving to attack the mobile and embedded devices market.
We mentioned the Samsung effort to port Xen on ARM processors, the Qumranet plans to distribute KVM as part of any Linux mobile, and even the prediction of the Citrix Vice President of Advanced Products.
Now VMware confirms 100% the trend acquiring one of the very few players in this emerging market: Trango Virtual Processors.
Right now the Trango hypervisor supports an interesting (but very limited) range of real-time OSes, including: Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.
Through Trango, VMware plans to release a Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), probably a scaled-down, optimized version of ESX for embedded devices powered by ARM CPUs (like the new Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9).
Of course VMware doesn’t say when the mobile revolution will happen as there’s a couple of complex issues to solve:
- First of all the fact that customers can run a Windows XP virtual machine on their phones doesn’t mean that it’s usable. So the mobile market has to release a device able to satisfy certain requirements (what Citrix calls the Nirvana phone since a long time).
It’s just our opinion but to interact with a guest OS this device should be something like an Apple iPhone or a Nokia Internet Tablet but much bigger (probably 4 times the iPhone or 2-3 times the Internet Table). - Secondarily, the vendors producing the real-time OSes (Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Palm and now Google) must accept the fact that their platforms are virtualized and provide support accordingly.
This is going to be the same slow, painful process already experienced when VMware first introduced its products for server virtualization.
Despite these two issues seem huge to address right now Gartner is optimistic and predicts that by 2012 more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized.
If true the virtualization vendors that want to compete with VMware will have to build the necessary know-how very fast, possibly acquiring Trango competitors.
A very interesting one is VirtualLogix which has a solid position and it’s funded by Intel.
The Gartner prediction has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions.
For those who would like a quick “Google-able” article on how to deploy the new XenApp Web Plugin (formerly known as the web client) this is the article for you. To do this, you basically follow the instructions from CTX114097, “Deploying the Web Client 10.1 for Windows through Web Interface 4.6” but with a few modifications. First, download the XenApp Web Plugin from Citrix.
For Web Interface 4.6 Rename XenAppWeb.msi to Ica32Web.msi.
Copy Ica32Web.msi to \Program...
Almost one month after VirtualCenter, VMware updates also ESX to version 3.5 Update 3.
Pretty much like for VirtualCenter, this new build (123630) is mainly for bugfixes. Nonetheless there are some important improvements:
- Support for 20 vCPUs / core (previous limit was 8 or 11, in case of VDI workloads)
- Support for Solaris 10 Update 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 and Ubuntu 8.04.1
- Support for Broadcom 5771x 10GB NICs (despite the TOE aboard is not supported)
- Support for Broadcom HT1000 and Intel ICH-7 SATA controllers
- Experimental support for Intel MFSYS25 SAS networked controller
- Experimental support for a new VMDK Recovery Tool (a script that recovers deleted VMDK data stores on VMFS volumes)
- and more
Download the trial here.
Today a new startup leaves the stealth mode: Replicate Technologies.
The company was founded in US last year by Rich Pelavin, now covering the role of CTO, and Ken Novak, its Chief Architect.
Pelavin comes from Cisco where he was Director of Engineering while Novak comes from CGNET where he was CTO.
The startup CEO is Rich Miller, coming from Univa UD where he was COO. Miller maintains a really high quality personal blog about virtualization and security.
It’s very important to note that with these three there is a forth key figure, Oren Teich, Vice President of Product Management, who comes from Sun where we was responsible of the upcoming xVM virtualization product line.
Despite the headquarter is in Menlo Park and the company is brand new, Replicate is not yet VC funded.
The first product launched is called Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA), a scanner that analyzes a give virtual infrastructure and recognizes its configuration errors.
RDA 1.0 is a modular platform and each of its modules can discover different types of problems: misconfiguration on the service console firewall, NICs and physical cabling errors, issues that prevent VMotion and/or DRS, etc.
Once RDA found the configuration mistakes (through an agent-less scanning) it suggests a series of steps to recover:
The product is very interesting and it’s definitively worth of a deep review: Replicate Technologies published a series of demo for this purpose.
At its first release RDA, released as virtual appliance, only supports VMware Infrastructure 3 but the company is working to add other major virtualization products.
Replicate Technologies sells it starting at $500 per year subscription (2-way server).
Download a trial here.
Replicate Technologies has been added to the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
RDA 1.0 has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap.
At the end of last week AMD announced a breakthrough achievement: migrating a running virtual machine from a virtualization platform to another, each running different CPU brands.
Despite many progresses in this area (AMD-V Extended Migration and Intel Flex Migration), so far the only thing possible was to live migrate VMs between different CPU families of the same vendor.
AMD and Intel never cooperated as much to cross such boundary and in one case we are pretty sure that an Intel executive said that the thing would be unlikely to happen.
Now AMD has found a way to mask the CPU information and operate the migration from an Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420 to its own forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core Opteron.
To achieve the goal the company worked together with Red Hat so everybody would expect that the migration happened through Xen hypervisors. It’s not the case.
Red Hat fully embraced KVM as replacement of Xen in June and this is the virtualization platform that was used for the demo:
After its co-founder and its Chief Marketing Officer, the virtualization vendor Virtual Iron lost another key executive: Tony Asaro.
Asaro joined the company in January 2008 as Chief Strategy Officer and replaced Mike Grandinetti, the former CMO, in the relationship with press and analysts when he left.
Asaro left in September but it seems that the relationship with Virtual Iron will continue in the role of Senior Advisor.
The company direction is now in the hands of Sandeep Bhangi, Vice President of Corporate Development & Strategic Alliances, who comes from Sun and Apple, and the rest of the leadership team.
Apparently VMware bought some technology from a company called Trango Virtual Machines last month which they're launching today as the "VMware Mobile Virtual Platform" (VMware MVP). The point of this is not so a user can run multiple VMs on a mobile device at the same time, but instead so that different types of phones can run the same OS image. (In this case, the Trango hypervisor or whatever you call it would "scrub" and hide the details of the hardware from the mobile...
Yes, it's true. The hit event of last year's Synergy and the latest Partner Summit conference is coming back to Des Moines on December 4th, 2008. Last June we (Citrix and Alliance Technologies) brought Geek Speak out on the road for the first time and had a great turnout. We had Jason Conger, Barry Flanagan, Doug Brown, and me. I'm still working on this event's speakers, but suffice it to say, they will be just as awesome as the last event. This year we...
If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times, change presents opportunities. The ability to adapt to change is a key advantage in business. To survive, compete, and win, enterprises must adapt. However, because change is often disruptive and expensive, few organizations are prepared to take advantage consistently of the opportunities that change presents. The IT organization, in particular, is sometimes often seen as a roadblock to business agility. This...
I have always followed some guiding principles when engaged in designing or reviewing customer environments. I've highlighted these before in past posts, but with last week's Citrix Summit, Mark T mentioned some of these guiding principles in his keynote and I wanted to share how they apply to the Citrix Delivery Center. Mark's keynote highlighted the some of the issues and challenges that customers have today. For instance, today's environments are still, for the...
SearchWinIT is reporting from Microsoft TechEd in Barcelona this week. In an article publised today, Margie Semilof wrote that Microsoft is extending Terminal Services Remote Desktop Services for Windows Server 2008 R2, due out in 2010. Quote from the article: Terminal Services now has a single broker to connect users to sessions, or virtual machines, or virtual desktop scenarios with Hyper-V, said Ward Ralston, group product manager in Microsoft's Windows Server group. This move was widely...
SearchWinIT is reporting from Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 in Barcelona that Microsoft announced that the new version of Terminal Server will not be called Terminal Server. Instead, it will be called "Remote Desktop Services." This is probably a good move for several reasons: The name Terminal Server doesn't really describe what this feature does. Remote Desktop services can apply remote desktops for workstations (VDI) as well as TS servers. Ok, so now we have server-based remote...
Behold the Dell Optiplex FX160 : Yesterday Dell announced their "flex client" series of desktop devices. This is basically a super-small Optiplex-branded client based on Intel's Atom processor . So what is it? A thin client? A desktop PC? A locked-down PC? A desktop appliance? Yes. This single client device model can be used in many ways, such as: Running Windows XP Embedded or embedded Linux, like a traditional thin client device. Receiving a streamed OS (like from Citrix...
Tim Mangan is at the Citrix Summit this week. Citrix runs the Summit is yearly to update their partners on upcoming product changes. While this is an NDA event, preventing reporting on much of the details, there still is much to talk about this week. Today he reports on Day 2.
This is the second Citrix Summit event of the year. Because Citrix chose to move Synergy (the conference formerly known as iForum) from the fall into the spring this year (presumably to get...
We've decided definitively that next year's BriForum will be from July 22-24, 2009. We're going to use the same venue as last year, which was the Chicago Navy Pier. 2009 will be our seventh (!) BriForum, and we're very excited about it. We'll launch the website and the early-early bird registration soon. In the meantime, circle the dates on your calendar. BriForum will be on a Tues-Wed-Thurs Wed-Thurs-Fri this year. That's not due to any kind of scientific analysis of...
Tim Mangan is at the Citrix Summit this week. Citrix runs the Summit is yearly to update their partners on upcoming product changes. While this is an NDA event, preventing reporting on much of the details, there still is much to talk about this week. Today he reports on Day 2.
This is the second Citrix Summit event of the year. Because Citrix chose to move Synergy (the conference formerly known as iForum) from the fall into the spring this year (presumably to get...
We launched a new version of BrianMadden.com last night. Hopefully the only changes you notice are that it's faster and more available. A few notes: The forums are pretty cool now. We have the Community News section, which has the RSS feeds of various sites around the web. We don't post the whole articles.. just the first 500 characters or so. Here's an example . We list those on the homepage in that little gray box. We realized after being live for about fifteen minutes that we...
I have just returned from a well needed mental break. I spent some time back "home" in California. It gave me a chance to recharge my batteries, to see old friends and colleagues, but it also gave me a chance to think about a post that I did back in July. It seems fitting that I come back to it given the current state of things in the economy and business in general. I was having dinner the other night with some old colleagues and we were talking about politics, business,...
Tim Mangan is at the Citrix Summit this week. Citrix runs the Summit is yearly to update their partners on upcoming product changes. While this is an NDA event, preventing reporting on much of the details, there still is much to talk about this week.
...(read more)
Tim Mangan is at the Citrix Summit this week. Citrix runs the Summit is yearly to update their partners on upcoming product changes. While this is an NDA event, preventing reporting on much of the details, there still is much to talk about this week. Today he reports on Day 0.
...(read more)
