Citrix completes XenSource virtualization buy
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Citrix's $500 million acquisition is done. Next up: new server and desktop virtualization products.
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InfoWorld - Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.
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XenExpress OEM Edition for servers The hype for virtualization may be reaching a fever pitch, but market penetration remains at a high-ball figure of only about 7 per cent. The aim now falls squarely on selling in volume, so it's not a surprise to see the market eyeballing OEM vendors.â¦
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Strength in numbers Looking to strengthen its virtualization wares, XenSource has formed an intriguing alliance with Symantec.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Virtual Iron and XenSource both are introducing new virtualization software to undercut on price the dominant player in the field, VMware. On Monday, Virtual Iron is set to start offering Version 3.1 of its enterprise-class virtualization platform for a license price of $499 per socket, which is less than 20 percent of the $2,875 per socket price for a comparable VMware license, according to Virtual Iron. Virtual Iron argues that VMware's pricing is a barrier to more widespread adoption of virtualization in data centers, citing IDC research that only 6 percent of data center operators deploy any type of virtualization. Also Monday, XenSource introduced new and upgraded virtualization products, also at sub-$1,000 prices. Both XenSource and Virtual Iron build their proprietary products on top of the open-source Xen platform for virtualization hypervisors. A hypervisor is technology that makes it possible for one computer to run multiple operating systems at the same time. VMware's products are not based on open source. Virtualization refers to software and other system management tools that are used to better utilize servers. Virtualization makes it possible for one physical server to run multiple applications simultaneously. Advanced virtualization features include tools to seamlessly move computing workloads from one physical server to another, set up infrastructure and test new software. Revenue at VMware, a wholly owned subsidiary of storage vendor EMC, grew 86 percent in EMC's fiscal third quarter to $188.5 million. If that pace keeps up, VMware's annualized revenue would be $750 million, VMware said. Virtual Iron and XenSource intend to slow that pace. "We are taking a very aggressive stand on pricing," said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer for Virtual Iron. The Charlotte Observer newspaper in North Carolina uses Virtual Iron. It took 45 minutes to run a particular job on its legacy Unix-based servers, said Geoff Shorter, the Observer's IT infrastructure manager. VMware completed the same job in 11 to 13 minutes, but so did the less expensive Virtual Iron. The license for the high-end VMware product costs $5,750 to run on a dual-socket server, Shorter said. Virtual Iron's license is $499 per socket, so the total cost for a dual-socket machine license would be $998. Pricing for XenSource's XenEnterprise starts at for $488 for an annual subscription license for a dual-socket server or $750 for a perpetual license. XenServer for Windows, introduced Monday, sells for $99 per dual-socket server, per year. It has fewer features than XenEnterprise. "Our intention is to dramatically shift the landscape under VMware," said Simon Crosby, XenSource's chief technology officer. Virtualization is following a classic economic model of an early mover dominating a market and charging a premium, soon followed by challengers competing on price, said Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor at Illuminata Inc., a technology research company. Haff said enterprises that have deployed VMware are seeing a positive return on their investment despite the price and he doesn't think price alone is keeping enterprises from adopting virtualization. "Even if virtualization software were free, it wouldn't become ubiquitous because of the complexity of the implementation," he said.
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Hypervisor flash The rumors about VMware putting ESX Server on dietary supplements have been confirmed. The virtualization darling today revealed ESX Server 3i - a super-thin hypervisor that will be built into the memory of servers from companies such as Dell, HP and IBM.â¦
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Novell and Intel develop software that speeds Xen's ability to run Windows as a virtual machine.
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Friends of friends XenSource, the server virtualization company, has added a second former Microsoft staffer to its management ranks, recruiting the exec responsible for leading a number of big Windows products.â¦
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Combined with recent Netscape app purchases, the move gets Linux provider closer to integrating desktops with network services. By Larry Greenemeier.
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Virtualised SAN and NAS bid for your storage grid
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(InfoWorld) - Sun will start selling its lineup of 64-bit PC servers preinstalled with the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft within 90 days, the two companies said today. The two longtime rivals also said they will cooperate on technical development of Microsoft's server operating system on Sun Fire hardware as well as making Sun's Solaris Unix operating system fully manageable under Microsoft's recently introduced System Center Virtual Machine Manager software.                                                     "Management interoperability is part of our management strategy," said Andrew Lees, corporate vice president for the server and tools marketing and solutions group at Microsoft. The moves could help Sun boost sales of its servers, which have been hurting ever since the bursting of the dot-com bubble saw the rise of cheap PC servers running either Linux or Windows. "People who might not have in the past considered a Sun server for Windows will now consider it," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. Sun has been making aggressive partnership moves. IBM said last month that it would sell PC-based servers and blades using Solaris. For Microsoft, the tie-up could help the company compete in the hot virtualization market, where it is No. 2 to market leader VMware. Sun has long had its own virtualization technology, called Solaris Containers. Today's announcement, the companies said, is an expansion of an initial technical cooperation agreement signed in April 2004, during which Microsoft also paid Sun $1.6 billion to settle lingering antitrust and patent disputes. "What we have had has already produced good fruit, but we are looking forward to a significant expansion," Lees said. Sun will also build an interoperability center on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash. The companies will also expand their Internet Protocol television partnership, which involves Microsoft's MediaRoom IPTV and multimedia platform and Sun's server and storage systems. Sun launched its Sun Fire servers two years ago as its first foray into the fast-growing PC server market. The servers run less-expensive but powerful AMD Opteron processors and start at prices of less than $1,000. The Sun Fire servers already support Windows Server, along with Red Hat Linux, Novell's Suse Enterprise Linux, VMware's ESX virtualization system, and Sun's own Solaris operating system, according to Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing at Sun Systems. That allowed customers who had volume-license agreements with Microsoft to send their image DVDs to Sun and have the company preinstall Windows Server, Sieker said. But with this agreement, Sun will now officially be able to ship servers preinstalled with Windows Server to any customer or channel partner, she said. Windows Server will still be unable to run on Sun Fire servers using Sun's own Sparc64 chips, she said. Sun will continue to support and resell Red Hat and Suse Linux on its Sun Fire servers, she said. Future versions of those servers will also use Intel processors. Asked if Sun's latest alliance shows its intent to compete more directly with Linux and VMware, Sieker said, "We are responding to strong customer demand for this.... It's a complex marketplace out there." Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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At VMware's user conference, server vendors lined up to pledge support for a "thin hypervisor" version of the company's virtualization software that can be built directly into systems.
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DECEMBER 22, 2004  - Citrix Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. this week announced an extension to their long-standing partnership that will allow Citrix to support the next version of Windows
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Sun is expected Tuesday to ship xVM Ops Center, a datacenter automation console compatible with Linux- and Solaris-based x86 and Sparc environments.Ops Center&#39;s features include automatic installation of firmware and bare-metal operating systems; scanning and tracking of servers in a network; and patch-management tools for SUSE, Red Hat, and Solaris, according to a company statement.James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research, said the last feature is particularly compelling, but not enough to attract a great deal of new business to Sun&#39;s platform.&quot;The patching mechanism they have is very impressive and works with both Linux and Solaris, but given that this is a 1.0 product the appeal will remain mainly with existing Sun customers,&quot; he said via e-mail Friday.&quot;It&#39;s a substantially better entry in systems management than their previous attempts, and much more open,&quot; he added.The Ops Center codebase has already been released under the open-source GPLv3 license and is available at www.openxVM.org.Sun previously said the first commercial version of Ops Center would be available on Jan. 8.Oren Teich, director of product management and marketing for xVM, said the company needed additional time to make some final tweaks and improvements in areas including firmware provisioning and reporting, following requests from early beta users.He disagreed with the notion that mainly existing Sun customers will buy the software, saying the company expects that sales will be split between current and new users. While it is a 1.0 release, code from two existing Sun products, N1 System Manager and Sun Connection, are running under the hood of Ops Center&#39;s GUI, he said. &quot;In some ways, this is a very mature project.&quot;Yet the first version has a key omission: support for Windows. &quot;Although Windows support is not currently available, we&#39;re committed to offering it in the future,&quot; Teich said.Sun is also developing xVM Server, a bare-metal, Xen-based hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems.While Sun&#39;s xVM brand stands for &quot;the intersection of virtualization and management,&quot; according to Teich, the Ops Center 1.0 release does not feature a broad range of functionality around virtualization. This summer, Sun will release its hypervisor product and &quot;an update to Ops Center that will have a lot of virtualization capabilities on top of it,&quot; Teich said.The company will battle along with leader VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and an array of other vendors for a stake in the virtualization space, which analysts have pegged as remaining wide-open despite the voluminous hype around the topic in recent years.With Ops Center, Sun will go up against IT management powerhouses such as HP and IBM.Subscription pricing for Ops Center, with support and network-delivered services, ranges between $100 and $350 per managed server per year.
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TechWeb - The company&#39;s technology includes software for agent-less deployment of physical and virtual machines from a centralized deployment library; and VM management support.
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XenSource, a start-up commercializing the open-source Xen virtualization software, has hired Gordon Mangione as senior vice president of product operations.
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Microsoft has laid out plans to become a bigger force in the market for virtualization software, stepping up its assault on established leaders such as VMware.The plans announced Monday include the acquisition of a startup company, Calista Technologies, whose graphics technology is designed to improve the end-user experience for people who access their Windows desktop remotely from a server, Microsoft said.The company also loosened some of its licensing terms related to virtualization. Consumers who use the Home Basic and Home Premium editions of Windows Vista will now be able to run those OSes in a virtualized environment, Microsoft said. It also announced new licensing rates for corporate users.Finally, Microsoft extended its partnership with Citrix Systems to make that company&#39;s Xen virtualization software work better with Microsoft&#39;s server and desktop software, it said.Virtualization technologies separate the software on a computer from its underlying hardware, allowing it to be deployed in more flexible ways. Virtualization can allow multiple operating systems to run on one computer, for example, or allow application workloads to be shifted between computers more easily to improve hardware utilization.The technology has been around for decades but was popularized in server environments recently by VMware and others. More recently, Apple introduced virtualization for its Macintosh desktops so that users can run both the Mac OS and Windows on the same machine.Microsoft has not been a significant player in virtualization, but it hopes to change that with its announcements this week. It plans to discuss the changes at its Virtualization Deployment Summit, a two-day event for 300 of its customers and partners that starts Tuesday.It argued that the virtualization market remains open for newer players like itself.&#8220;Very few customers are able to reap the benefits of virtualization today,&#8221; Bob Muglia, senior vice present of Microsoft&#39;s Server and Tools Business, said in a statement. &#8220;We estimate that less than five percent of companies are utilizing virtualization technology because it is simply too cost-prohibitive and complex.&quot;Microsoft&#39;s strategy will be to offer a full range of virtualization products, including desktop, server and management software, and do so at a competitive price, Muglia said.Customers with the Home and Home Premium editions of Vista can now run them as a guest operating system on a virtual machine, the company said. Among other things, that should mean that Apple Mac users who want to run Vista alongside the Mac OS can now do so without having to buy a more expensive version of Windows.For businesses, customers who subscribe to Microsoft&#39;s Software Assurance maintenance program can now get an annual subscription to Microsoft&#39;s desktop virtualization software for $23 per desktop, the company said.Citrix is developing a software tool that will make it easier for customers to transfer virtual machines between Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. A test version of the tool will be available in the second quarter, and the final version will be released along with Hyper-V, Microsoft said.The technology from Calista aims to improve the experience for people who access their Windows desktops remotely from a server. It allows people to view multimedia content on a PC or thin client without the media player or software codecs they would normally need installed.Microsoft will add Calista&#39;s graphics technology to future virtualization products, it said. Calista, of San Jose, California, is now a Microsoft subsidiary.