SAN FRANCISCO — In IT, a trend isn’t really a trend until vendors get behind it.

Case in point: mixed virtual environments. We’ve done a lot of talking about organizations running VMware and Hyper-V together. But I’ve been asking vendors about it since last VMworld, and their answers are always the same: “We’ll support it when there’s demand, and we don’t see enough demand.”

Now that’s at least starting to change. As senior news writer Beth Pariseau reported last month, the number of Hyper-V ISVs is growing. Now we can add another to the list: virtualization management vendor Embotics, which will demonstrate Hyper-V support on the VMworld 2010 show floor and make it available by the end of the year.

I sat down with David Lynch, Embotics’ vice president of marketing, earlier today. He said more customers are starting to explore multiple platforms.

“We don’t have any customers yet who have both VMware and Hyper-V in production, but we have lot who are playing with [Hyper-V] in labs, and they’re telling us it’s growing up,” he said.

Mixed virtual environments are still a ways off — Lynch said most customers won’t deploy in production until next year at the earliest — but they are definitely becoming more prevalent. In our Virtualization Decisions survey last year, 56% of respondents said they’d prefer a standardized virtualization environment, but 54% said they’d at least consider using multiple hypervisors.

Cost is an obvious factor, and it seems Microsoft’s strategy of bundling Hyper-V with Windows Server is also paying off.

“It’s one of those things, ‘I’ve got it, I might as well use it,’” Lynch said.

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SAN FRANCISCO — VMware is working on a new platform designed to improve network virtualization.

We got a glimpse of the company’s long-term strategy at this morning’s VMworld 2010 session called “Future Direction of Networking Virtualization.” The Distributed Virtual Network vision, as it’s called, aims at many of the networking problems that virtualization admins face, such as IP address assignment for newly created VMs.

“The line between servers and networking becomes very blurry,” said session speaker Howie Xu, VMware’s research and development director. “There’s no more black and white.”

The cornerstone of the Distributed Virtual Network vision is what Xu called the vChassis, which he described as a “workload-centric” platform that would use plug-ins to perform specific networking functions. “Workload-centric” means the vChassis will provide specific settings and resources to a VM at the moment it’s created and follow that VM wherever it goes. Examples of the plug-ins would include a Layer 2 Switch Line Card and an Intrusion Detection Service Line Card, Xu said.

Xu said at several times throughout the session that VMware had no specific product roadmap or announcement, but it’s clear the company sees networking as a major virtualization challenge and the Distributed Virtual Network and vChassis as the solution. Xu spoke about specific technical details of vChassis, like that it requires an agent on the VM to be able to deploy firewalls, for example, on demand.

Analyst Stuart Miniman, principal research contributor at Wikibon, said the Distributed Virtual Network vision ties into the strategy of making customers more reliant on VMware. By making infrastructure services more “intelligent” and “workload-centric,” VMware can differentiate itself from hardware vendors, Miniman said.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Citrix Systems is acquiring VMLogix.

Citrix made the VMLogix acquisition announcement today, the first day of the VMworld 2010 conference. The acquisition is expected to close later this quarter, Citrix said.

VMLogix makes LabManager and StageManager, tools designed to help create and manage test/dev and pre-production environments. Since making XenServer free last year, Citrix has put its money-making focus on management tools and other advanced features, and the VMLogix acquisition is another step in that direction.

VMLogix isn’t one of the first names you think about when you discuss third-party virtualization management vendors, but the company is one of the few that supports VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer, which was likely appealing to Citrix.

Shannon Snowden, consulting partner with Citrix partner New Age Technologies, said many XenServer deployments rely heavily on VMLogix for lab management, but support and integration haven’t always been perfect. The acquisition will likely address those issues, he said.

“It makes sense,” he added.

As with most virtualization news these days, there was heavy cloud spin. Citrix titled its press release, “Citrix Expands Leadership in Open Cloud Computing,” and the company said the VMLogix acquisition would “further accelerate its OpenCloud strategy.” The key appears to be VMLogix’s self-service portal, which could come in handy in a private cloud scenario.

Still, at its core this announcement is all about server virtualization — a market where Citrix has had mixed results. In less than two years, the company has lost its status as VMware’s top challenger (to Microsoft). Some observers, like a VMware partner I spoke with today, wonder why Citrix even bothers with server virtualization, given its desktop virtualization success. This partner said the VMLogix acquisition doesn’t make sense, because server virtualization doesn’t seem like a top priority for Citrix.

On the other hand, Citrix’s free XenServer strategy appears to be working, and the VMLogix acquisition falls right in line with that strategy.

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An animated elevator pitch on the three types of server virtualization and their benefits.

A virtualized application running on Ubuntu. See klikclient.googlecode.com for more information. The klik project is currently working toward making this vision come true. This technology demonstration uses an embedded VirtualSquare runtime.

Hot on the heels of the Intel/McAfee deal and the Dell/HP/3PAR bidding war comes more possible acquisition news: Rumor has it that SAP will acquire Red Hat.

Local Tech Wire, an IT blog based in Red Hat’s home state of North Carolina, reported on the SAP/Red Hat rumor this morning. Several Wall Street analysts came across the rumor yesterday, and Red Hat’s vaguely worded “product roadmap” announcement — scheduled for tomorrow — only bolstered the speculation more.

Virtualization clearly wouldn’t be the driving force behind an SAP/Red Hat acquisition. From a tech standpoint, Linux is a favorite among SAP shops, so there would be some natural synergies there, as they say. Or, like the Intel/McAfee deal, it could just make good financial sense.

But an SAP/Red Hat acquisition would definitely affect the virtualization market, even though SAP and Red Hat aren’t exactly leaders. Let’s take a look at where they stand:

• Red Hat has placed all its virtualization chips on KVM. It was one of the most-talked-about subjects at this year’s Red Hat Summit, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will support only KVM, not Xen. But the company is still playing catch-up in virtualization, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to migrate from Xen to KVM.
• SAP, meanwhile, has relied on partners to help customers virtualize applications, but it’s been slow going so far — mostly test and dev, not production environments. One thing SAP does have going for it is its partnership with VMware. To spur more SAP virtualization deployments, the company is bundling its software on VBlock Infrastructure Packages from VMware, EMC and Cisco Systems. And although SAP has never named preferred partners in virtualization before, there are indications that could be changing — with VMware at the top of the list.

So where would that leave KVM? It’s unlikely that SAP would break off its relationship with the virtualization market leader to go with a relatively new, unproven technology. SAP probably wouldn’t kill off KVM, but it doesn’t send a good message when even your parent company doesn’t use your own virtualization technology. Whatever KVM momentum Red Hat has built up over the past year or so would pretty much disappear.

Of course, the SAP/Red Hat acquisition is all speculation at this point. But these days, every vendor has some stakes in the virtualization ground, and it’s interesting to examine how every move — or potential move — could affect the market.

SearchSAP.com News Editor Courtney Bjorlin contributed to this report.

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