Two start-ups hoping to profit from virtualisation are giving details of new strategies this week. It's a sign that the technology, while a hot item, doesn't mean easy profits.
Virtual Iron and XenSource both have altered course with their virtualisation products, which is software that lets a single computer run multiple operating system instances simultaneously. Virtual Iron has scrapped its own virtualisation software in favour of the open source Xen project. Meanwhile, the leader of that project, XenSource, is steering away from management tools and aiming squarely for virtualisation leader VMware.
The two companies are describing their new strategies at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston this week. And with more news in the area from VMware, Microsoft's Virtual Server group and SWsoft, the show might well be called VirtualisationWorld.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, VMware executives might blush at the strikingly similar rhetoric from Virtual Iron and XenSource.
"The market really wants a competitor to VMware," says Simon Crosby, XenSource's co-founder and chief technology officer.
"It's time for a company to step up and be a viable commercial competitor to VMware," said Virtual Iron's chief executive, John Thibault.
It's no surprise why competitors are angling for advantage. A February Forrester survey of 1,221 customers with at least 1,000 employees found that 41 percent of North American customers are using virtualisation already or are planning pilot tests. And 60 percent plan to spend more money on the technology in the next 12 months.
VMware leads the market, the study found, with 43 percent of customers considering it most often for x86 server virtualisation, compared with 24 percent for Windows Virtual Server. Xen "is not yet on the radar for customers", the report says.
Virtualisation, in the form most widely discussed these days, lets a computer run many operating systems simultaneously and therefore lets administrators replace several largely idle servers with one efficiently used machine. The technology works by fooling programs into thinking that they're running on real hardware, when they actually are running on a virtual layer called a hypervisor.
That sleight-of-hand means that operating systems can share the same hardware, or be moved while running from one computer to another to cope with hardware failure or new processing demands.
Virtualisation is an established feature in higher-end servers. Now, since it's arriving in mainstream models with x86 chips from Intel and AMD, companies like Virtual Iron and XenSource are trying to commercialise it as a stand-alone technology.
A big change coming with virtualisation support from AMD and Intel means that virtualisation companies today can sidestep some of clever engineering techniques VMware employs. AMD Virtualisation, set to debut in months and formerly known by its code name Pacifica, and Intel's corresponding VT, which started arriving in 2005, permit Xen to run an unmodified operating system. In practice, that means Xen can run Microsoft Windows as well as Linux.
The side effect is that VMware will be getting more direct competition from XenSource and Virtual Iron. But that's not all: Another start-up called Parallels also hopes to give VMware a run for its money.
Its US$50 hypervisor-based Parallels Workstation 2.1 product runs on Windows and Linux desktop machines right now, and the company plans to launch a midrange server product in mid-2006 and a high-end server product in late 2006, the firm's marketing Manager Benjamin Rudolph said.
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