One of the top virtualization firms in the country – Foedus, of Portsmouth NH, will no longer be offering services and products as the news came out days ago surprising just about everyone.

Foedus had an excellent reputation for virtualization services , documentation (many of their technical white papers are posted at vmware.com and creative marketing (Foedus World, etc)

VMware has purchased part of Foedus – key personnel from management and engineering.
The remaining sales, operations and marketing is rumored to have been purchased by another firm.

VMware is saying that the acquisition will help VMware, clients and partners by offering new services – probably re-packaging some of the popular services offered by Foedus in the past (VMware and WAN acceleration, VMware and FDA Compliance, Regulation, etc)

Mike Reilly the CEO of Foedus has done a terrific job in the past and Mike and his team should be a great addition to VMware’s professional services.

The authoritative MS article is here:
Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615

The authoritative VMware article is here:
http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/ms_support_statement.html

VMware Announces Support from SAP of VMware ESX Server for Production Environments
Today this was announced – VMware and SAP Establish Global Technology Partnership; VMware Infrastructure Supports SAP(R) Solutions with Both Windows and Linux on Industry-standard Hardware

Vkernel is about to revamp their product line with new virtual appliances that start at $199 per socket and their roadmap for 2008 is quite interesting.
What makes Vkernel interesting ?

a) they have done it before – their CEO and founder, Alex Bakman, led Ecora to a prominent position in the area of change control & patch management , etc

b) their software will be delivered as a virtual appliance – so there is really no installation to speak of and a client can be using their software in minutes

They look as if they will model their pricing and product offerings similar to what Vizioncore has done – a) inexpensive pricing b) solves a common issue for most VM shops and 3) the products that they offer work together

While the term “charge back” doesnt appeal to all , since many firms dont employ chargeback now (an accounting function) – it is critical for IT to understand what are the real costs associated with these virtual resources, so having “costing visibility” can be huge. Doing this via a spreadsheet is time consuming , static , and inaccurate.
With “costing visibility” ( no accounting transaction) you will now have a way to help budget properly and even if IT doesnt charge thier users – it is paramount that
your clients understand the value and the costs of a virtual environment.
If users believe it is free, you will not be able to get the accolades deserved and a true understanding of the business value delivered with VMware

The killer application for iSCSI vendors has been virtualization.

The company that has leveraged this the most has been Equallogic; they were the first iSCSI (only) company to get certified for VMware Vi3 and VMware customers have flocked to iSCSI and EQL in particular. There are several technical reasons why iSCSI and virtualization are a great marriage..

At VMworld – nearly every client that spoke about virtualization and DR was an Equallogic customer.
The $1.4 billion acquisition of Equallogic by Dell, validates for all that iSCSI and virtualization are leading the pack.

Also a quick note which I think is pretty interesting regarding high end FC SAN and iSCSI SANs and what VMware (an EMC company) is working on and supporting during the first phase of a new product release ; the word on the “street” is
that early next year when VMware releases VMware Site Recovery Manager (a new product that uses virtualization to provide end-to-end disaster recovery management and automation ) it will initially support two products – high end EMC DMX & SRDF and Equallogic iSCSI PS Series SANs and replication software suite which comes free with their hardware.

Equallogic will also make for an even more interesting VMware-DR bundle when VMware SRM is released – EQL will not charge to add for the SRM plug in software (they include their software suite for free – replication, cloning, etc and dont charge when new software features are added) while other vendors , EMC, etc will charge for this new feature set

Today I was listening in on a “town hall” meeting which involved Equallogic’s CEO Don Bulens and high end channel partner managers from Equallogic and Dell . That’s right I said Dell channel – a lot has changed since Michael Dell came back and found that the market has changed for certain products.

My take away, is that partners should embrace the Dell buyout of Equallogic and more importantly that Equallogic customers will be better served in the future from this new alignment . While it makes sense to be guarded , so far it seems like a win win for clients and partners alike.

From the NewScientist.com news service’s Catherine Brahic :

Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry, warns a new report.

Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK.

“Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk,” says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. “But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not.”

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.
Unknown cost

The group ran a survey of some of the largest businesses in the UK in an attempt to find out how aware the industry is of its carbon footprint.

The survey revealed that more than half of the IT professionals surveyed believed their environmental impact was “significant”, however:

• 86% of them do not know the carbon footprint of their activities

• two thirds of the departments they work for are not responsible for paying their own energy bills

• more than half do not even see those bills

The bottom line is that IT departments “are buying lots and lots of kit that they have to run and cool without knowing what the energy cost of that kit is”, says Restorick.

The survey also revealed that considerable amounts of electricity could be saved by more efficient data storage: 60% of the departments said they were using less than half their storage capacity and 37% said they are storing data indefinitely.

Restorick told New Scientist that simply increasing the efficiency of energy use and data storage could easily cut 30% of power use in businesses. “In theory, this could happen overnight,” he says.

One of my clients with a decent size VM environment (10 ESX hosts, multiple EMC FC arrays) had experienced an “application brownout” for weeks in their VM and physical environments.

Weeks and weeks of trying to fix this didn’t solve the problem, the tools in place (VirtualCenter, and others) didn’t have visibility from the VM down to the spindle nor did it find the I/O bottleneck and money was wasted by purchasing additional hardware.
BalancePoint was installed and they had data coming back within a few hours.
BP’s troubleshooting analysis found the issue , recommended the fix and the problem was solved within the first 48 hours of using this product.

http://www.akorri.com

“What is needed is a new approach to IT management to cope with the new challenges and complexity that server virtualization engenders. Toolsets for discovering and managing separate domains exist, but these traditional tools are inadequate in the interconnected and virtualized infrastructure. The lack of infrastructure-wide visibility and control in mixed physical and virtual environments is becoming a serious problem for IT”

http://infostor.com/display_article/307507/23/ARTCL/none/none/Server-virtualization-drives-cross-domain-management/

The red hot virtualization market gets hotter by the day.

Today Dell announced that they were going to buy Nashua, NH based Equallogic (leaders in iSCSI enterprise SANs) for a cool $1.4 billion. This probably means that the LSI OEM partnership will come to a hault and so will Dell’s MD3000i at some point. This deal is interesting at many levels:

a) just 4 years ago, when we picked up Equallogic ; many of the naysayers said that iSCSI wouldnt cut it – it is a toy, slow, poor management, security issues – etc , etc – simply just FUD (fear, uncertainty , and doubt) from people who didnt know better or made $ by selling FC SANs

b) Equallogic got themselves a great price it seems – considering that they were on target for around $100 million in sales this year. They were very close to going public on their own. So Dell in effect is trying to do what EMC did a few years ago , when they snagged VMware before they went public. Back then , that price seemed high too. Equallogic and NetApp are the platforms of choice today for VMware ESX farms.

c) Dell is saying that Equallogic’s partner channel will stay in place. It will be interesting to see if this is the case and how long this lasts. Dell will need the channel for awhile – enterprise iSCSI SANs with lots of competition are not going to sell themselves. Buying a $5000 AX150i is a bit different than what we have here.

d) How will the EMC reps in the field feel about this ? EMC and Dell have a great , symbiotic relationship now – however will the EMC reps still feel comfortable about referring business to Dell as a channel partner when the client might find out about the new Dell storage company – called Equallogic?

Today I was briefed on V-Kernel’s Capacity and Chargeback Virtual Appliance for VMware ESX.

For years, VMware users have been asking for a chargeback model.

Although VMware will save one a ton of money by lowering your data center costs (management, hardware purchases, power – cooling, etc ) – buying ESX, hardware , and consulting is expensive. Many VMware projects stall if IT doesnt have an easy way to fund this or chargeback their end users.

I was referred to V-Kernel by a very large customer of mine ( they have more than 10 ESX hosts) that was involved in the beta of this product and told me that we should look into it.

At VMWorld , Vizioncore awarded the company that I work for , Expert Server Group, a Strategic Partner member.