Virsto announces a $12 million in Series B venture capital funding and acquisition of EvoStor, a company specializing in storage virtualization technology for VMware environments. Virsto hope these factors will combine to help them transform virtual machine storage and move their Virsto Virtual Storage Engine beyond Hyper-V.
TVP Tag Archives
Small Business Virtualization: Part 1 – Licensing
VMware and Microsoft approach the Small to Medium companies quite differently, but which product to buy often depends on your business needs vs cost of the products. However, there needs to be at least one major distinction: SMB vs SME.
The Small to Medium Business (SMB) is quite a bit different than the growing number of Small to Medium Enterprises (SME), and VMware knows this does Microsoft or Citrix?
VMworld from an Open Source Perspective
VMworld is clearly the largest dedicated virtualization conference, and yet from an Open Source perspective it is slightly disappointing because the VMware ecosystem naturally attracts proprietary software vendors, and also some of the more interesting activities in Open Source are through multi-vendor foundations which do not have the same marketing budgets as vendors themselves.
Nevertheless, there are a number of key Open Source players, and some interesting smaller players, represented at VMworld.
More on OpenStack – Cloud.com, GPL, Citrix, Oracle and the DMTF standards.
Cloud.com had lined itself up with Citrix by using only XenServer in the commercially-licensed version of its IaaS product, and now is being used by Citrix to ensure OpenStack supports XenServer (which it doesn’t at the moment), presumably to keep Red Hat’s KVM under control and VMware out. We’ve also been trawling through the available OpenStack documentation to understand why NASA thinks its cloud is more scalable than Eucalyptus. It seems to be all to do with how the state information is passed amongst the various servers that make up the system. GPL-based Open Core models break down when you move to multi-vendor foundations because the cross-licensing of IPR under GPL immediately infects the recipient codebase, and precludes commercial licensing of the resulting combined work. The result is that the GPL Open Core business model doesn’t work in the same way, and both Eucalyptus and Cloud.com cannot apply their current business model in these multi-vendor foundations. It is a big blow for Eucalyptus. They have turned their biggest potential customer into a massive and credible competitor, built in their own image (only – at least from a PR perspective – much more scalable).
In OpenStack the API is implemented in a separate service which translates external http requests into commands across the internal message bus, and so it looks (on the face of it) possible for someone (preferably Oracle) to implement the Oracle DMTF submission as a separable new API server module without disrupting the OpenStack architecture. In OpenStack the API is implemented in a separate service which translates external HTTP requests into commands across the internal message bus, and so it looks (on the face of it) possible for someone (preferably Oracle) to implement the Oracle DMTF submission as a separable new API server module without disrupting the OpenStack architecture.
Growth of Citrix and Hyper-V EcoSystems
PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.
Citrix/Novell Partnership SLES and PlateSpin
In a slightly strange “didn’t they already have Xen in the kernel” kind of way, Novell has certified Suse Linux Enterprise Server as a “perfect guest” running on Citrix XenServer, allowing joint support of the combined solution. The deal is asymmetric (it wouldn’t really make sense to run XenServer on SLES) but it reflects an open approach characteristic of the way Novell operates, in embracing the reality that customers will want to use one of a number of possible hypervisors, and that Novell has to get along with everyone. In return Novell is starting to push it’s PlateSpin Recon product through the Citrix channel.