Far from quiet on the virtual front

This summer's intense activity in virtualisation could shape the options for smaller businesses as well as for data centres. Quocirca's Dennis Szubert picks out the main developments.

What's been happening in the world of virtualisation over the quiet summer break? First, Intel and Cisco invest in VMware, then VMware introduces the world's first virtualisation benchmark.

Next, XenSource teams up with Symantec over storage virtualisation, F5 acquires Acopia Networks, and XenSource brings out XenEnterprise 4.0. On top of all that, VMware is valued at $20bn as it floats on Wall Street, and Citrix acquires XenSource. Fairly uneventful, then.

Given that flurry of activity, it would have been easy to miss the 31 July strategic partnership struck between Invirtus and Vizioncore. Both companies are owned by Quest Software - in Vizioncore's case majority-owned.

That ownership could only have smoothed the way for this marriage made in virtual heaven. In effect Quest bought Invirtus early this year and folded it into Vizioncore, which is operating as its de facto virtualisation arm. Both Invirtus and Vizioncore continue to exist as separate entities.

In its first five years, Chicago-based Vizioncore has managed to accumulate about 5,000 customers worldwide - 1,500 of them in Europe. What makes Vizioncore interesting is how it has done this. The company has turned the use of virtualisation for business continuity and disaster recovery into its own fiefdom.

While other companies were promoting virtualisation for consolidation in large environments, Vizioncore linked up with VMware to introduce virtualisation and disaster recovery to smaller businesses.

Vizioncore provides tools to simplify the management of virtual environments, covering dynamic back-up, performance monitoring, migration and disaster recovery. The company is part of the VMware partner ecosystem.

But Vizioncore says it will now also be able to support Virtual Iron and Microsoft Virtual Server through its partnership with Invirtus. To reflect this widening of focus, its tools will be renamed vCharter, vMigrator, vRanger and vReplicater - dropping the VMware inspired "esx" suffix and replacing it with the more generic "v".

Atlanta-based Invirtus is perhaps best known for its VM Optimizer technology which automatically reduces virtual machines to the smallest size possible and optimises them for speed and efficiency.

It also has a physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) converter, as well as technology to abstract delta configurations from original base images and then compact, optimise and catalogue them as packages.

These tools will similarly be rebranded as vConvertor, vOptimizer and vPackager and sold through Vizioncores's sales and distribution channel as part of its suite of products.

Virtualisation is moving into the mainstream and becoming a standard part of the data centre environment. Once deployed, a virtual infrastructure needs to be as robust and flexible as possible, so the ability to replicate, migrate, back up, monitor and improve is crucial.

Building on its message of simplicity of use, Vizioncore has established a presence in the small business sector as well as in the enterprise. The market for smaller companies is a good place to be and somewhere many of the larger IT vendors are struggling to enter. Smaller businesses represent by far the largest sector of the market and are driving the strongest growth.

Although most of Vizioncore's effort will no doubt still be in the VMware camp, the broadening of its offerings to a more heterogeneous environment hedges its bets over competing technologies and is a good move.

In particular the V2V capability brought in by the Invirtus agreement is interesting as it allows users to migrate virtual machines from VMware to Virtual Iron or Virtual Server - and perhaps Xen at some future stage - and vice versa. This possibility reduces the risk of making the wrong choice when plumping for a particular hypervisor platform.

What the future virtualisation landscape will look like is by no means certain but it is unlikely to be homogeneous as it is today. Xen is nascent, and with Microsoft about to enter into the market with its second attempt at free server virtualisation, it takes a brave man to bet against Microsoft dominating by the end of this decade or early in the next one.

As for the other summer announcements, the XenSource Version 4.0 release brings it into direct competition with VMware, adding live migration of virtual environments, a new management interface, native 64bit support and automated management of resource pools.

Being acquired by Citrix gives XenSource heavyweight backing and strengthens its position in the enterprise market. Couple that with Microsoft's impending Viridian release, as well as its interoperability agreements with Linux vendors incorporating Xen, and perhaps for the first time VMware could be facing some real competition in the hypervisor market.

Also, XenSource has signed an OEM agreement to embed the Veritas Storage Foundation storage management software into XenEnterprise to help develop unified server and storage virtualisation capabilities that will further bring it into competition with VMware.

On the minus side, losing its independence to Citrix could eventually call into question XenSource's role in leading the open source Xen hypervisor project.

The acquisition of Acopia by F5 brings it into the storage market and into file virtualisation in particular. The move is part of F5's strategy to optimise the application infrastructure, from the data centre to the edge of the network.

The investments by Cisco and Intel in VMware buys them a seat on the board - in Cisco's case the promise that VMware will consider the appointment of a Cisco executive. This is probably more about cementing partnerships than anything else.

Although the 1.6 per cent and 2.5 per cent owned by Intel and Cisco respectively will makes them privy to major developments at the company, those shares are not enough to influence future direction should the heavyweight stakeholder, EMC, decide Intel or Cisco's wishes are not in its interest.

The benefit for Intel is obvious - after all, it is its hardware that VMware is virtualising. Cisco expects that the data centre market will be transformed by virtualisation and that in the highly virtualised data centre environments of tomorrow the network will be the platform.

What with mergers, agreements, acquisitions and flotations - not to mention new product releases and benchmarks - who knows what will happens in the virtual world once everyone returns from their summer break.