10 big virtualization and cloud stories from 2013

Those of us who have spent much of our IT careers wrapped up inside of a nice, warm cocoon of virtualization were fortunate to have front row seats to another great year, as virtualization technologies continued to flourish in 2013. Virtualization remained a key component in the modern data center, and cloud computing continued to grow in importance — both of which helped take all things virtual in a number of interesting directions.

In 2013, we witnessed big news around some of the usual suspects and brought attention to a number of new players hoping to make a name for themselves. If you’re a fan or student of this technology, last year did not disappoint.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Parallels says key to success is cloud virtualization, not Mac desktop virtualization | >Review: VMware vSphere 5.5 adds speed and usability | Track the latest trends in virtualization in InfoWorld’s Virtualization Report newsletter. ]

To spotlight a few of the events that took place in 2013, here is a list of 10 virtualization and cloud news stories that grabbed my attention.

1. VMware acquires, then kills virtual storage company Virsto

Back in February, VMware announced the acquisition of virtual storage company Virsto Software, rounding out the company’s software-defined data center strategy.

At the time of the acquisition, John Gilmartin, VMware vice president of storage and availability, said this of the company: “Virsto has developed a VM-centric storage management model that accelerates I/O performance for any block-based storage system while providing efficient data services like VM snapshots and clones.” According to Gilmartin, VMware planned to continue to offer Virsto’s virtual appliance as a stand-alone product, as well as integrate it into VMware’s solution stack.

Fast-forward to the end of the year, and VMware was already announcing the end of availability of all VMware Virsto versions, effective Jan. 1, 2014. The company added that “after this date, you will no longer be able to purchase these products. All support and maintenance for the removed versions will be unaffected and will continue as per VMware Lifecycle Support Policy through the published support period, September 19, 2015.”

While the Virsto technology wasn’t long lived within the halls of VMware, the company did remove a possible key piece of technology from the hands of hypervisor competitors such as Microsoft and Citrix, while at the same time increasing the knowledge and skill set of its own internal software development team with the acquisition of those employees who came over from Virsto. Those folks probably had a hand in developing VMware Virtual SAN.

2. Citrix gives Xen to the open source community

In 2013 the hypervisor may have become more of a commodity play, but Citrix still wasn’t receiving the amount of love and respect for XenServer that it thought it should. With VMware and Microsoft capturing the majority of the market share in this space, and other Linux open source technologies like KVM making faster inroads within the Linux community, Citrix decided to make a change.

In April, Citrix announced at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco that it was going to donate the open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation, and along with it some of the proprietary technology that Citrix had been adding to XenServer since it acquired XenSource back in 2007.

In turn, the Linux Foundation said it would support continued development and maintenance of Xen. As a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, the newly named Xen Project would get support, infrastructure, and guidance from the nonprofit foundation.

The hope here was that by donating Xen back to the community, it would provide the Xen hypervisor with a wider, more diverse group of contributors and perhaps allow it to more effectively compete with the larger hypervisor vendors — and try to win back some of the Linux community who fled to KVM. Companies like Amazon, AMD, CA Technologies, Cisco, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung, and Verizon all pledged to support the newly named Xen Project.

This move seemed in line with the company’s earlier donation of CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation. Again, Citrix wanted to expand that open source technology to contributors in order to better compete with the less mature but more popular OpenStack community.

Only time will tell if either technology will win back the hearts and minds of the community, and whether it will make a big difference to the development of either platform.

3. End-user security improved with new Bromium microvisors

Let’s face it: As more and more employees are allowed to work remotely, the likelihood that an end-user’s environment (or more to the point, the corporate environment itself) will become infected goes up dramatically. Why? Because mobile users often need to access enterprise applications and the Web while on an untrusted network that could be used to attack the endpoint.

In 2013 we saw a host of new end-user devices hit the market, and we watched as the workforce became much more mobile. While that freedom may have increased productivity and worker happiness, it also added a significant challenge to companies’ security threat levels.

One of the companies attempting to address the endpoint security challenge was Bromium, which first caught my attention in 2011 when it emerged from stealth mode. It continued to keep my interest throughout 2013 with its unique approach to solving desktop security via microvirtualization in a product called vSentry. The technology isolates advanced attacks targeting the endpoint through Web, email, and documents; vSentry also protects desktops without requiring patches or updates, defeating and automatically discarding all malware and eliminating the need for costly remediation.

In June, Bromium made news with the release of vSentry 2.0, which improved end-user mobility and collaboration. The release focused on safe collaboration, giving users the ability to access and edit content without ever having to trust it because these things always run in a micro-VM. But one of the interesting twists with that release was that the company began using the Xen hypervisor for its microvisor technology, taking advantage of the virtualization benefits that Xen already provided as well as being able to further reduce the size of its own code base. Since a few of the founders of Bromium came from XenSource, the company that originally created Xen, it seemed like a coming-home party.

4. Nvidia accelerates desktop virtualization with virtual GPUs

Desktop virtualization technologies continued to advance, and because of that, VDI companies were able to gain momentum throughout 2013. The technology provides an organization with increased flexibility, manageability, and security, but one of the drawbacks has been that it cannot support all company use cases. Specifically, VDI has been plagued with not being able to support those users running applications requiring high-impact graphics.

In 2013 I witnessed firsthand how this tide is changing, visiting with Nvidia at Citrix Synergy, VMworld, and finally at Dell World to see the changes being made to a product offering from Nvidia called Grid.

Nvidia’s Grid offering is a server product and graphics board that allows a company to connect GPUs to a growing number of virtualization and cloud deployments. Nvidia currently produces two options: a dedicated GPU pass-through, which means a single VM would get access to a single GPU (a solution showcased back in 2012 but that doesn’t scale); and a new virtual GPU, which allows multiple users to share a single physical GPU.

By delivering fast 3D graphics capabilities to a virtual desktop from a hosted server in the data center, Nvidia may have touched on one of the key missing components of a VDI environment, also known as the VDI Holy Grail. That’s why major hardware manufacturers like Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM have been lining up to provide servers powered by Nvidia Grid technology.

By leveraging Nvidia’s virtualized desktop graphics capability, the following types of businesses and verticals can finally benefit from VDI technology: architects and engineers using computer-aided design (CAD) tools; businesses using PLM tools for manufacturing applications; digital-content creators using video and photo editing software; and health care specialists using picture archiving and communication system (PACS) applications.

5. VMware acquires Desktone to enhance its DaaS story

VMware continues to face increased challenges in the server virtualization market, so the company has been searching for alternative revenue sources. Because of its server virtualization expertise, VMware has been trying to capture market share within the desktop virtualization market; in 2013 end-user computing became one of the company’s new primary focuses.

In August the company hired former SAP executive Sanjay Poonen to head up the end-user computing division, and in October VMware announced the acquisition of Desktone, a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) vendor and VMware partner. With the acquisition, VMware instantly became a DaaS solution provider while at the same time validating the DaaS market for others.

Poonen explained: “As cloud adoption quickly gains acceptance, the market is ripe to leverage cloud technologies to deliver alternative desktop management and application delivery solutions and provide customers with a more flexible, predictable and streamlined way to evolve end-user computing. DaaS gives enterprises the ability to manage costs, extend capacity on-demand, and reduce the time required when desktop loads change.”

6. Amazon also throws its hat into the DaaS market

While companies have been able to implement VDI solutions within their organizations for years, managed service providers have been trying to figure out a way to deliver Windows virtual desktops to their clients as well. Unfortunately, they often came up against technical hurdles or cost issues that made the challenge difficult or next to impossible. But Amazon Web Services thinks it may have the answer.

In November, Amazon announced at AWS re:Invent that it would launch a new virtual desktop service called Amazon WorkSpaces that would deliver Windows 7 desktops on-demand to almost any client device.

The company also claimed it could deliver those virtual desktops at a better price point than anyone else. The company’s lowest-tier desktop would be available for $35 per user per month, with the basic package offering one virtual CPU, 3.75GB of memory, and 50GB of storage. Software would also be included, although it isn’t anything that most users couldn’t download and install themselves for free (such as Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Firefox, and 7-Zip).

Beyond cost, the early capabilities of WorkSpaces appear to be lacking some of the more enterprise features found with other providers. And Amazon still has to come up with a real solution that deals with the Microsoft licensing restrictions, protocols, add-on peripherals, and application compatibility challenges. Only time will tell if Amazon will have better luck providing virtual desktops or delivering packages with drone technology.

7. VMware launches its own SDN technology

During VMworld in August, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used his opening keynote speech to emphasize the importance of virtualized networks to the audience. At the show VMware announced its next generation software-defined networking (SDN) solution, called NSX, which uses technology from VMware’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira.

SDN is an array of new techniques to separate control of networks from their underlying infrastructures that handle data packets. But Gelsinger explained it quite simply: “What ESX was to server virtualization, NSX is to network virtualization.

“We’re moving to a world where the network is just like the compute, where we will be able to spin up network services just like we can spin up [virtual machine] services,” he added.

The stated goal for NSX was to support any hypervisor, any cloud management platform, and any networking hardware — although out of the gate, NSX would offer certain additional advantages to vSphere environments.

VMware also stated it had lined up a number of key networking hardware vendors as a part of the product release, including Arista, Brocade, Cumulus Networks, Dell, HP, and Juniper Networks, to name a few. One of the companies missing from this initial announcement was Cisco, and VMworld audience members keyed in on this info.

8. Cloud storage provider Nirvanix closes its doors

Cloud storage was becoming all the rage with companies, but in September the market received its first big piece of sobering news when Nirvanix validated some customers’ fears with the announcement that the company was closing its doors and shutting down its service.

Numerous media and analyst reports came out to say the company had been informing customers and partners of its impending doom. The company was telling customers it could no longer replicate their storage or upload any more data to the Nirvanix cloud.

Initial reports said Nirvanix had given customers a two-week window with which to migrate all of their data elsewhere. But as Forrester Research analyst Henry Baltazar stated, the cloud provider’s demise validates warnings that it is far easier to import data into the cloud than it is to recover large quantities of data or move that data to a new provider. While not as sexy as moving your data up into the cloud, cloud exit strategies quickly became a must-have after this news posted.

At the time, Kyle Hilgendorf from Gartner offered the following piece of advice to existing Nirvanix customers: “It’s too late to build a strategy. Drop whatever you are doing and get as much of the data as you can back immediately.”

It’s 2014, are companies creating an exit strategy yet?

9. Citrix enters mobile virtualization and mobile device management

As a smartphone owner and a virtualization enthusiast, I’ve tried to keep up with the industry’s mobile virtualization initiatives — specifically those coming out of Citrix and VMware.

VMware has been talking about it for years — and it sounds great! Let’s use virtualization to separate a smartphone device into two parts: one for work and the other for personal. That way people don’t have to carry around two devices, and both sides can make sure to secure the user and the company sides from one another.

In February, Citrix introduced its product, called XenMobile MDM (mobile device management), which was part of a new Mobile Solutions Bundle for EMM (enterprise mobility management). It was also an enterprise mobile-device management solution designed to let end-users easily connect to their apps and data from their device of choice, while equipping IT with tools to manage and enforce compliance requirements on mobile devices.

XenMobile MDM lets end-users self-provision their devices, while letting IT provision policies and apps to large groups of devices automatically. In addition, it lets IT blacklist or whitelist apps, detect and protect against jailbroken devices, and wipe or selectively wipe devices that are lost, stolen, or out of compliance. It also integrates directly with Microsoft Active Directory, PKI systems, and security information and event management tools.

The technology still doesn’t seem to have the uptake that these vendors were hoping it would have.

10. PayPal’s “rip and replace” of VMware for OpenStack much ado about nothing

Early in the year, one of the stories that caused a fair amount of eyebrow raising was news that PayPal — and perhaps even its parent company eBay — was ditching VMware in favor of OpenStack. Looking back, that seems somewhat crazy given the current maturity of the OpenStack platform even today, and this was nearly 10 months ago!

Some media outlets reported that 80,000 servers at PayPal were getting an overhaul with OpenStack technology rather than remaining with VMware.

In the original news item, there was an underlying assumption that VMware and OpenStack do the same things. The story made it sound as if a customer, in this case PayPal, could choose one technology over the other. In fact, we know things aren’t that simple. Yes, PayPal could have chosen to use OpenStack rather than VMware vCloud, but that doesn’t mean it had to rip out or discontinue use of VMware vSphere, VMware’s flagship moneymaker.

This story received a lot of play across a number of different media sites and publications. The battle between OpenStack and VMware was once again ignited, in spite of the fact that VMware was now a board member on the OpenStack Foundation, and the company was making sure its ESX hypervisor was a working part of the OpenStack cloud environment.

In the end, this seemed to be a continuation of the back-and-forth banter taking place between some in the OpenStack community and VMware as to which cloud environment would prevail.

This time, the company whose employee was involved with the original FUD of the article came out and said the person who started it was “exaggerating the use case,” and quietly put an end to things — after a few weeks’ worth of articles had already been written on the topic.

So what happens next? Do OpenStack and VMware ultimately play well together?

These news stories were just the tip of the iceberg. 2013 was a great year to be a part of the virtualization and cloud computing market, and I can’t wait to see what 2014 has in store for all of us.

What news item stood out in your mind from last year?

This article, “10 big virtualization and cloud stories from 2013,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.