VMware reports Essentials growth, but SMB market share remains unclear

VMware revealed on last night’s earnings conference call that revenues from its low-end Essentials license SKU grew 100% from the first quarter of this year to the second.

This is an interesting data point given VMware’s recent moves to lower pricing and add features such as VMotion to Essentials Plus and Standard editions of its licenses. However, while Microsoft is offering HA and Live Migration free (along with the free Hyper-V hypervisor that’s part of Windows), VMware raised the price of those licenses with the addition of VMotion.

Continued »

Virtualization Vendor Profile: VM6 Software

Welcome to the latest edition of the Virtualization Vendor Profile. Every once in a while I’ll talk with a smaller or lesser-known company, learn about their business, discuss some industry trends, and write up a recap.

Last week I covered the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference for our VAR-focused sister site, SearchSystemsChannel.com. While at the show in Washington, D.C., I met with Eric Courville, founder and COO of VM6 Software, a Toronto-based vendor. The company has a history that’s as interesting as its product, VMex, which it calls an “all-in-one virtualization solution” for SMBs.

VM6 started six years ago as a virtualization-focused systems integrator that got 95% of its business from providing VMware services, Courville said. After a year, the company ran into challenges getting SMBs to implement virtualization, so it took its consulting revenue and invested the money in developing VMex. But when the first version flopped, VM6 sold off its consulting business, reinvented itself as an ISV and now sells version 2.0 of VMex, which includes a two-server cluster, a virtual SAN, VDI broker, integrated management console and more — all based on Hyper-V R2.

Naturally, one of the first questions I asked was, “Hyper-V? Why not VMware?”

Continued »

VMware adopts per-VM licensing, pricing

VMware released vSphere 4.1 today, but that wasn’t the only news out of Palo Alto.

VMware is also introducing a per-VM licensing and pricing model for most of its management portfolio. Customers can now buy licenses for vCenter Capacity IQ, vCenter AppSpeed, vCenter Site Recovery Manager and the Ionix management line on a per-VM basis.

Continued »

vSphere vs. Azure: The real battle

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hyper-V vs. vSphere is SO last year.

Cloud computing is the main theme at this week’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, and Hyper-V has taken a backseat to Windows Azure. The focus on Azure, a Platform as a Service (PaaS), marks a significantly different approach to private clouds than VMware has taken with its cloud infrastructure model.

And it means that when we talk about the battle between VMware and Microsoft, the folks in Redmond want us to talk less about vSphere vs. Hyper-V and more about vSphere vs. Azure.

Continued »

Virtualization Vendor Profile: enStratus

Welcome to the debut of a new feature here on the SearchServerVirtualization Blog, called the Virtualization Vendor Profile. Every once in a while I’ll talk with a smaller or lesser-known company, learn about their business, discuss some industry trends, and write up a recap.

Yesterday I spoke with George Reese, CTO of enStratus, a Minneapolis-based management vendor. The company’s software provides monitoring, provisioning, security and access-control features, but the real selling point, if it works as advertised, is a feature for moving data across private and public clouds. (The company says it supports most major cloud providers, including VMware, Rackspace, Azure, Amazon Web Services, Eucalyptus and Google storage.)

Continued »

VMware: The Papa Tomato of virtualization

You know that old joke about the family of tomatoes and the baby that falls behind?

You don’t? OK then, I’ll let Uma Thurman tell it:

Sometimes IT customers can feel like Baby Tomato, lagging behind all the innovation and hype that vendors are throwing out there and eventually getting squished. It’s a big issue for SAP now, as my colleague Courtney Bjorlin at SearchSAP.com just blogged about. But it’s an equally big concern in the server virtualization market — particularly for VMware, thanks to its focus on cloud computing.

Continued »

Oracle VM machine targets Cisco, HP

Appliances like Cisco’s Unified Computing System are designed to help you kick-start a virtualization deployment.

Now, Oracle is banking on an appliance to do the same for its lagging virtualization market share.

Our sister site SearchITChannel.com reports that a so-called “Oracle VM machine” (perhaps developed by Oracle’s Department of Redundancy Department?) is in the works. Oracle President Charles Phillips disclosed the news during the company’s quarterly earnings call last week.

Continued »

Red Hat KVM: A bold vision

BOSTON — Is Red Hat’s move to KVM bold and forward-thinking, or does it show a lack of strategic vision?

That’s the question our virtualization columnist Mark Vaughn asked me on Twitter yesterday as I covered the Red Hat Summit here. My 140-characters-or-less response was, “It’s definitely bold, and they clearly have a vision. The real question is, has Red Hat bet on the right horse?”

That’s a pretty good summary of Red Hat’s virtualization efforts and its shift from Xen to KVM, but let’s break it down in more detail: Continued »

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 includes Xen converter

BOSTON — Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is out today, and it includes a couple of enhancements for server virtualization.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 guest OSes will support up to 256 GB of RAM and 16 virtual CPUs. (The previous limit was 64 GB of RAM and 16 virtual CPUs.) The platform will also be able to import and export VMs in the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which VMware and Oracle VirtualBox already support.

But perhaps the most important enhancement is a new V2V converter that will let you migrate VMs from VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Xen to OVF, so you can run those VMs in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2.

Continued »

That’s stall, folks: When bureaucracy impedes virtualization

My recent article on ISV stall struck a chord with some readers — mostly because they’d never heard the term “ISV stall” before.

Basically, ISV stall is a roadblock to virtualization that occurs when software vendors won’t support their applications on virtual servers. It’s part of a larger problem that CA’s Andi Mann recently termed “VM stall” — when a virtualization roll-out hits a wall after the initial consolidation phase.

This afternoon I spoke with David Lynch, vice president of marketing for Embotics, about VM stall. He said the problem affects most of Embotics’ customers, and it’s a tough one to solve because technology alone won’t cut it.

Continued »