RSSVMware, Citrix rain on Microsoft virtualization with cloud initiatives
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published September 15, 2008, 5:56 PM
Microsoft may be "talking the talk" of cloud computing, but VMware and Citrix are already "walking the walk," with new strategies and products launched today at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.
VMWare and Citrix handily trumped Microsoft's recent virtualization announcements today by unveiling detailed and comprehensive "cloud" strategies and product families for creating virtualized data centers in both enterprise locations and outside hosting sites.
To support its vision for the Virtual DataCenter, VMware announced a new "OS for the data center" called the Virtual Data Center OS (VDC-OS). It's seen by the company as delivering three types of services: Infrastructure vServices, for aggregating servers, storage, and networks; Application vServers, for guaranteeing the right levels of availability, security, and scalabiliity to applications; and Cloud vServices; for federating computing capacity between on-premise and off-premise clouds.
The virtualization vendor also rolled out management capabilities for the new OS, such as vCenter ConfgControl and vCenter Capacity IQ, along with specific slates of infrastructure and application servers.
The Infrastucture vServices will include vStorage, with thin provisioning and linked clones, and a vNetwork Distributed Switch. The Application vServices will include fault tolerance and data recovery services for high availability computing, plus vApp and vStudio software for deploying and managing applications.
Also at VMworld, Citrix announced C3 Solution, a new data center virtualization product family encompassing the XenServer Cloud Edition infrastructure platform; Citrix NetScaler service delivery platform; Citrix Workflow Studio, for orchestration and workflow; and Citrix WANScaler, for bridging together hosted and enterprise-based services.
Citrix also released a tech preview of Citrix Workflow Studio. All of the other products in Citrix's new data center virtualization family are now available, according to a company statement.
During Microsoft's Hyper-V Server product launch last week, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner articulated a new strategy for supporting data center clouds running in a choice -- and often a mix -- of three environments: the customer premise, servers hosted by Microsoft partners, and servers hosted by Microsoft itself.
Yet although three new virtualization products -- Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5; a standalone edition of Microsoft Hyper-V Server; and the final release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that supports Hyper-V -- are now slated to ship within the next month -- Microsoft has delayed the expected rollout of live migration for Hyper-V for another two years.
Microsoft is certainly "talking the talk" of cloud computing, but its rivals VMWare and Citrix seem to be a lot readier to "walk the walk," too.
Question is how much time will it take for VMware and Citrix cloud computing solutions to mature and then leap forward beyond the current proven solutions provided by Amazon S3 for example...
Jack.
http://itprofessional-mastermind.com/blog
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|This was a direction that Citrix and VMware were already going, but the timing of thier announcement will serve well in their maintiaining the lead in the Virtualization market.
It's only a matter of time though before Microsoft's Virtualization momentum is fully realized. At that point it will be interesting to see if and how they will begin to take the lead in this market.
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|Lead?!! Are you kidding?
MS effectively has little marketshare here except in their vaporware announcements and dreams!
The thin client market is reaching maturity and a tipping point as we speak as a perfect storm of market drivers converge to make it a cost effective, secure, more easily administered and managed solution where the desktop centric MS approach - with a virtual server or not - is yesterday's news!
MS is panicking and simply reacting - as usual! - rather than leading or innovating!
And after 10 years and a very mediocre virtualization environment, and an almost non-existent central management tool for remotely managing thin clients, MS is nowhere near taking a lead. let alone even becoming a significant player - while both Citrix and VMWare possess quality existing shipping product for both the small-mid sized business as well as the extremely extensible remotely distributed enterprise model. They are in a position to grow their ownership of this market.
Meanwhile MS talks of finally rolling something(still just a virtual concept!) in two MORE YEARS that is 'comparable' to what is ALREADY mature and available NOW from the other vendors!!!
Market leadership?!? Nope, that's a joke.
Hell, MS is barely a follower in this market - and one simply announcing virtual vaporware.
And in the meantime they still lack a coherent plan for what to do about their overly bloated, minimally robust and secure desktop battleship of an OS where its biggest selling point is that you can play games on it (and that isn't even joking about attempting to admin the kludge! ;-).
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|While so many debate what form Vista 2 should take, MS had best get their act to gether quick, as their days of dominating the enterprise desktop in a fashion they have been accoustomed to may be quickly passing.
With virtualization and centralized models such as Citrix combined with low cost easily managed secure thin client desktops (such as Panos) - this model is poised to render the large format desktop OS inconsequential for all but a niche use in the enterprise. - and this model is easily extensible to the home with additional savings and ease of administration where a small server could easily manage several distributed thin clients providing targeted usage such as web browsing, VOIP, media center, smart house and business functionality, each secure and isolated from the others as necessary.
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