A cloud industry group has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, claiming that Broadcom is seeking to use unfair software licensing terms to control the European cloud market.

Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) is aiming to prevent Broadcom from terminating VMware’s Cloud Service Provider (CSP) partner program at the end of this month, saying it represents an existential threat to European cloud providers.

“With the termination of the Broadcom program allowing access to VMware virtualization software, businesses - both cloud providers and their customers - are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom’s unfair actions, which we believe are illegal," said CISPE secretary general Francisco Mingorance.

"After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the ‘coup de grâce’. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them.”

Earlier this year Broadcom announced plans to terminate the program in Europe, keeping only a minority of specially-picked partners and excluding most European CSPs from selling VMware products, CISPE claimed.

The trade group claims these changes will create virtual monopolies in some markets with vendors entirely dependent on Broadcom.

What CISPE wants from Broadcom

CISPE is now asking the European Commission to implement interim measures. It wants the decision to terminate its VCSP partner program to be immediately suspended, with the readmittance of European cloud service providers, allowing them to continue to sell VMware.

It also wants the reintroduction of the ‘white label’ program, axed by Broadcom in 2025, which previously allowed SMB and smaller cloud providers to offer VMware software as part of their cloud solutions.

Finally, CISPE believes that explicit protections against retaliation from Broadcom may be needed, with a system of fines to ensure compliance with these terms.

Broadcom is locked in an EU battle

The plan to terminate VMware’s Cloud Service Provider partner program came on top of other changes following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.

These included price hikes, bundling, and demands for up-front payments alongside minimum commitments based on potential, rather than actual, usage.

CISPE said these moves have increased costs for customers by more than 1,000% in some instances.

"In 2024, within just a few weeks, VMware changed its prices, licensing model, ordering processes, and more — without providing customers with the necessary information or sufficient time to adapt," said Danielle Jacobs, CEO at Beltug, the Belgian Association of CIOs & Digital Technology Leaders.

"To this day, our members continue to contact us about the difficulties they face. The announced shake‑up of the previously well‑functioning ecosystem between VMware partners and end users has only added to the challenges and uncertainty."

CISPE's complaint supports a similar request from Voice e.V, which represents many of the largest IT customers in Germany, filed in May last year. Broadcom has rejected the allegations.

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The exodus from VMware after its acquisition by Broadcom may not have been the stampede that was predicted, but customers are working to reduce their footprint regardless.

Customers voiced serious concerns about changes to its operating model in the wake of the acquisition, including rises in licensing costs and the removal of a series of popular licenses and products altogether.

Indeed, research from Civo at the time found more than half (51.9%) of VMware customers said they were considering ditching services while 48.7% said they were actively exploring alternative providers.

Fresh research from CloudBolt now shows that while the shift away from VMware wasn't immediate, organizations are actively unwinding dependence in a measured, workload-by-workload process.

"Two years ago, the market was dominated by knee-jerk speculation and worst-case projections,” said CloudBolt CMO Mark Zembal.

“This latest study separates noise and speculation from reality. The fear has cooled, but the pressure hasn’t — and most teams are now making practical moves to build leverage and optionality — even if for some that includes the realization that a portion of their estate never moves off VMware.”

Some are sticking with VMware because things haven't turned out as badly as feared.

In 2024, 73% of customers expected VMware costs to more than double, CloudBolt found, yet only 5% of respondents to this most recent study have seen that happen.

The majority (88%) are still concerned about future price increases, however, and these worries are shaping decisions now as the real squeeze begins. Around 86% reported they are actively reducing their VMware footprint, but progress is slow as this is a time-consuming and laborious process.

“The process of unwinding a decade of process dependencies is taking 18 to 24 months," commented one survey respondent. "This sideways abstraction is far more complex than a standard cloud lift-and-shift, leading to a significant loss of confidence in our ability to exit quickly enough to avoid the next renewal cliff.”

VMware strategies are all over the place

Notably, more than half (56%) of respondents said they’ve changed their VMware strategy more than once since the takeover. Just over half (54%) are staying with VMware while actively reducing dependence in a phased approach.

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of migrated workloads are heading to public cloud IaaS, with Hyper-V/Azure Stack (38%) and SaaS replacements (34%) also popular components of the mix.

“Enterprises aren’t just asking what they want to do — they’re confronting what they can execute safely,” said Rod Squires, CEO of CloudBolt.

“The panic phase is over. Now it’s execution: reducing dependency, managing dual realities during transition, and building optionality before the next renewal decision tightens the window – and slams the budget.”

A number of big tech vendors have capitalized on the disruption over the last two years by offering VMware alternatives or services aimed at assessing their dependency, such as Pure Storage.

Outright alternatives touted by competitors include Proxmox VE, Microsoft Hyper-V, XCP-ng & Citrix Hypervisor, and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Earlier this week, Cisco threw its name into the mix with a teaser for NFVIS-for-UC, a hypervisor for running its own applications.

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Virtualization has become the backbone of modern enterprise IT, underpinning everything from cloud deployments to disaster recovery strategies.

By abstracting workloads from physical hardware, virtual machines (VMs) deliver undeniable benefits, such as flexibility, cost efficiency, and scalability.

Yet this very abstraction introduces unique security challenges that differ fundamentally from those of traditional bare metal systems. Protecting virtual machines within an enterprise environment can be a difficult task, as cybersecurity teams and IT workers have to ensure nothing is overlooked in the deployment process.

Risks unique to virtualization that enterprises face

One of the biggest risks in virtualized environments lies not within the guest VMs themselves but in the hosts that power them. “Unlike a physical server running Windows, Linux, or even Mac, there are very few, if any, endpoint protection/EDR solutions for the VM host itself,” explains Paddy Harrington, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “For most environments, the best they can do is harden the host deployment through configuration and restricted administrative access, and utilize network-based solutions to monitor for threats targeting the host.”

The problem extends into the VMs, too. Many organizations opt not to install local security agents on guest servers to conserve resources or because of the perceived lack of user activity.

Harrington notes that test environments are particularly problematic: “Virtualization has always had a use case with testing; desktops, servers, apps, etc., spinning up virtual workloads to test apps, configs, conflicts, and so forth is easiest done in the virtual space because once the tests are done, you delete the VM and you’re back to where you started.

“The issue is that test environments are rarely built with security in mind, and sometimes, the test servers are left running unprotected. If a malicious actor is looking for a place to take up residence in the short term, they will target test environments as they go looking for more lucrative soft targets within the infrastructure.”

How configuration errors can expose VMs to attacks

One of the most pressing risks with VMs is that of configuration errors, which can introduce vulnerabilities into otherwise secure environments.

Jim McGann, CMO at Index Engines, tells ITPro that this is not a risk that should be overlooked:

"Configuration errors in virtualized environments are particularly dangerous because they often involve foundational security controls.

“Properly managing multiple VMs is essential to avoid misconfigurations, and unauthorized access to virtual infrastructure poses a significant threat. Common misconfigurations include inadequate network segmentation between VMs, overprivileged service accounts, and weak access controls to the hypervisor management layer.”

These issues are magnified by the scale at which virtualization operates in enterprises, McGann explains, with even a single error in an automation script carrying the potential to spread vulnerabilities across tens of thousands of VM instances.

Endpoint security in virtual environments

In many respects, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and endpoint protection platforms (EPP) operate within VMs the same way they do on physical machines. But virtualization does bring performance considerations. Harrington notes that “the biggest issue is resource utilization.

“The biggest issue is resource utilization,” Harrington notes. “Some vendors can keep the resources low by offloading any sort of scans that could spike resources to a secondary server within the infrastructure. This is helpful for VDI environments, especially where enterprises will have thousands of VMs spread out across many hosts.”

For enterprises embracing virtualization, one of the most frequent errors is treating VM security as an afterthought. McGann says organizations can overlook security processes in the rush to deploy virtualized infrastructure, sacrificing defense for operational efficiency.

VM sprawl is another problematic issue. Since VMs are so easy to deploy, IT teams often lose visibility into what’s running, leading to unmanaged shadow workloads. Backup and recovery planning can also be neglected, with traditional backup approaches failing to account for the interdependencies and rapid change rates of VM environments.

Virtualization features can be turned into attack vectors

Features inherent to virtualization such as snapshots, cloning, and live migration, can also open doors for attackers.

Roy Charman, CTO infrastructure platforms at Espria, warns that in the hands of hackers, snapshots can act as “time machines” to resurrect patched vulnerabilities. “If attackers get control, they can roll back to an old, vulnerable state or quietly clone a VM and walk off with your data,” Charman says. “Live migration is another vector; if it’s not encrypted or segmented, attackers can sniff traffic and capture entire workloads as they’re being moved.”

McGann tells ITPro that these operational features create unique challenges: “Snapshots can preserve malware in a dormant state that evades detection, then be restored later to reactivate compromises.

“Attackers can also use cloning to rapidly propagate their presence across multiple VMs, weaponizing the very efficiency features that make virtualization attractive. Live migration presents particularly sophisticated opportunities for attackers. During migration, there are brief windows where security controls may be inconsistent between source and destination hosts. Advanced persistent threat actors have learned to time their activities around these operational windows."

The dangers of VM sprawl and shadow VMs

Unchecked VM sprawl directly increases the attack surface. Unlike physical servers, which require procurement and rack space, VMs can be created instantly by anyone with access. Shadow VMs, unmanaged workloads running outside of IT’s visibility, pose an especially high risk. “They can represent unknown attack vectors that security teams can’t defend against because they may not know they exist,” said McGann.

Charman likens them to “forgotten laptops lying around your office, all still plugged into the network”, adding: “Shadow VMs often come from developers or admins spinning up test workloads and never cleaning them up. Each of those is another potential attack path.” He stressed that enterprises need effective tooling.

“The only real way to get control is through tooling,” he says. “Microsoft’s Hyper-V integrates nicely with System Center and Azure for inventory. Without that, you’re relying on people’s memory, which is a recipe for trouble.”

New technologies are starting to strengthen the security foundations of virtualization. Confidential computing and hardware-assisted isolation aim to address architectural weaknesses by reducing the reliance on hypervisors and software-only controls and Harrington points out that encryption and isolation “provide a more secure platform to start the environment with, although they don’t remove the need for best practices such as least-privileged access for VM admins and secure practices while setting up the VMs”.

McGann highlights the broader impact, explaining that these new technologies get to the heart of the fundamental weaknesses in the architecture of virtualization approaches up to now.

“Confidential computing changes the game by ensuring that even the hypervisor or cloud provider cannot access VM memory and processing in plaintext,” he says. “This reduces the impact of successful hypervisor compromises. Hardware-assisted isolation technologies provide stronger boundaries between VMs than software-only approaches.”

Virtualization delivers agility, scalability, and cost savings and also reshapes the threat landscape. Misconfigurations, VM sprawl, and overlooked test environments all create opportunities for attackers, while powerful features like snapshots and live migration can be weaponized if not secured properly. To stay ahead, enterprises must treat VM security as a core design principle rather than an afterthought. With disciplined governance, careful configuration, and emerging safeguards such as confidential computing and hardware-assisted isolation, organizations can harness the full value of virtualization without leaving themselves exposed.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has extended its Morpheus Software and VM Essentials offering in a move that it claims can significantly reduce costs for businesses across their IT estate.

The first of the updates from the company is the availability of HPE Morpheus VM Essentials on Private Cloud Business Edition.

According to the company, this can significantly reduce VM license costs versus the market average at a time when VMware’s pricing continues to come under scrutiny.

Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP and chief product officer for private cloud and flex solutions at HPE, said: “Take a server, single server with one socket, with 48 cores. Today, if you price it on a per core basis on one side, and you look at our pricing, which is on a per socket basis, you will see a 90% saving on licensing costs just on a server.

“And now you can extend that server across your entire cloud, and you can see these benefits, kind of multiply.”

Bhardwaj also claimed that the orchestration platform the company provides, Morpheus Software, is offered at 5% lower cost than comparable products in the market. He added that through lower licensing costs and centralized management, customers could expect savings of around 45%.

In addition to making Morpheus VM Essentials available on Private Cloud Business Edition, the company is also now offering HPE Morpheus Enterprise and VM Essentials as standalone software that can run on competitor hardware.

“When we look at our virtualization platform, we recognize, you know, it sits in heterogeneous environments,” said Bhardwaj.

“With that in mind … looking at the hardware today, the underlying infrastructure, we support the HPE servers and storage, and we've added Dell servers and NetApp storage to the portfolio.”

Specifically, these are Dell PowerEdge servers and NetApp AFF arrays, as well as HPE ProLiant Compute Gen 11 and Gen 12 servers.

All of the above is available immediately, as is Morpheus Software integration for Alletra Storage MP. New Private Cloud Business Edition systems with SimpliVity will be available in the third quarter of 2025, after the company’s annual HPE Discover conference.

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Virtualization is the answer to rising hardware costs coming alongside a Windows 11 refresh, according to Citrix.

The firm is pushing a virtualization tool from Unicon following its acquisition of the endpoint operating system (OS) maker in January.

Writing in the Citrix blog, Philipp Benkler — former CEO of Unicon and now the vice president of product at Citrix — suggested the transition to Windows 11 meant companies were facing a hardware refresh at a time of increasing costs thanks to US tariffs.

"IT hardware prices are climbing fast — and they’re likely to stay high," Benkler wrote. "The April 2025 tariffs are already driving cost hikes, and experts suggest further increases could follow as supply chain pressures and upgrade demands mount."

The post adds to the growing pile of tech companies openly admitting that the Trump administration is having a negative impact on the American-led industry.

While Microsoft increased the price of its Xbox gaming consoles, it only vaguely pinned the blame on "market conditions and rising development costs”. Similarly, Amazon backed down from listing the specific cost of tariffs on every item it lists.

Others have been bolder, however. Last week, Apple said that tariffs will add $900 million to its costs in the next quarter while Nvidia has said it will incur a $5.5bn loss because of tightened export rules.

Solution to tariffs?

Regardless of who is to blame for rising prices, Benkler said tariffs are leading to "tough choices", with enterprises considering delaying upgrades, reducing headcounts, or finding novel ways to absorb rising costs.

Benkler said Unicon's eLux is an OS that uses whatever existing hardware a company has and transforms it into endpoints for virtualized environments, helping companies avoid "the hardware trap".

"With eLux, you don’t need to rip and replace your IT hardware to stay compliant or ready for Windows 11," he wrote. "Instead, you can extend the life of your existing endpoints and unlock modern features through our hardened OS."

On the networking front, Benkler points to Citrix NetScaler, which doesn't require a physical appliance as the software can be deployed in the cloud or existing data center infrastructure.

"By running NetScaler as software, organizations can expand or optimize network capabilities without the added cost and procurement delays associated with tariff-inflated hardware," he said.

Whether or not virtualization is the answer, companies face serious implications from Trump's tariffs, with experts predicting it could cut global IT spending in half over the next six months.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled Virtual Machine Essentials (VME) this week at its annual European conference, HPE Discover Barcelona 2024.

The company’s virtual machine plans were teased in June at its flagship conference but are now finally starting to be made available to customers outside of just its private cloud offering.

VME is available both as an embedded software in Private Cloud and as a standalone piece of software that can be used both on HPE ProLiant and Alletra servers and on third-party hardware.

It’s built on the back technology created by Morpheus, which the company made in August 2024, and as CEO Antonio Neri said during his keynote: “[It] provides a unified VM management experience, which means you can manage existing VMware workloads or the new HP VM Essentials hypervisor with a simplified experience across both stacks.”

HPE executives walked a tight line between mentioning the controversial pricing changes that have happened with VMware software since its acquisition by Broadcom, without pitching VME as a direct competitor.

Hang Tan, COO for hybrid cloud at HPE, told a press conference: “This notion that you can get, you can streamline IT operations and achieve efficiencies by embracing a single ecosystem … is obsolete now. That no longer flies. CIOs are finally rethinking their IT strategies and because embracing a single ecosystem, the cost associated with that is no longer sustainable.”

“They're looking for flexibility and this is where virtualization comes in. This is where HPE, VM essentials, our virtualization software comes in,” he continued. “What's great about it is it's very self-contained, so customers can really take advantage of this capability, lower their virtualization costs and not have to pay for services that they don't need.”

This was the core argument from all members of the HPE leadership team who spoke to ITPro. VME doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that VMware’s products do, but that’s because not everyone needs them all the time.

As Ulrich Seibold, VP global of HPE GreenLake partner and service provider sales, told the channel press in attendance: “VM Essentials we do not position as a competitive tool or software to Broadcom. In all of our products, Broadcom services are included, and we have a strong partnership with them. But there might be areas or environments where partners or customers have a budget constraint or they do not want to get the full speed – for them, a virtual machine is good enough.”

Nevertheless, the undertone of the message was clear: If VMware’s new pricing strategy – which Neri said in his keynote had caused some customers’ costs to increase 300%-500% – was too expensive, here is an alternative.

NetApp has launched its own VMware audit and migration service amid ongoing customer concern over spiraling licensing costs and uncertainty over services.

Unveiled at its annual conference, the storage firm also expanded its cross-functionality with VMware, including deeper integrations with its new ASA A-Series block storage line, indicating it has no plans of abandoning its ties to the virtualization pioneer, but is cognizant of wider customer disrest.

NetApp’s new capabilities to improve hybrid cloud functionality and the expansion of its auditing and migration options follow a wave of similar moves from its competitors such as Pure Storage and Oracle.

But as other firms rush to build their relationships with hypervisor alternatives including Nutanix and Hyper-V, many businesses are wondering where NetApp stands on the ongoing VMware disarray.

NetApp CEO George Kurian tried to clear up this confusion during a media briefing at its annual conference.

“I would say we are the best friend of the customers of VMware, and we follow what customers want. I think what we see in the customer environments is four different positions that customers look at. The first is that they want to optimize the cost of their VMware estate. We have fantastic solutions for them to do that,” he said.

“Our ASA products, for example, can reduce the cost of storage in a VMware environment by 25% or more, and so we want to start that conversation,” Kurian added.

“The second [point] is there are some clients that say, ‘Listen, I want to look at public cloud as a way to replatform my applications, or as a way to manage my expenses with VMware.’ We have worked with VMware and with the public cloud vendors to give you very cost-effective options.”

Kurian gave the example of clients who are looking to move non-production environments (test and development) or disaster protection to the public cloud, noting NetApp has strong solutions for these use-cases too, which he claimed are more cost-effective than on premises.

NetApp CEO: “We have always believed in multi-vendor platforms”

For clients looking to modernize their IT estate, Kurian claimed NetApp has the “richest functionality” with Red Hat than any other player in the industry, stating there is work between the two to enable Kubernetes applications. This is in addition to ongoing collaborations with Google Distributed Cloud and Anthos in similar areas.

Kurian insisted the firm has always been a champion of multi-vendor platforms, citing how the company provides a distinct advantage for customers looking to move to new hypervisor solutions.

“We have always believed in multi-vendor platforms… [One of] the unique benefits that we see there is for clients that have storage on NetApp, they can move to a new hypervisor or a new container model without disruption because of the metadata conversion techniques that are available at NetApp.”

Kurian gave the example of one of the largest hedge funds in North America, who NetApp helped transition over to Hyper-V, stating its belief in the multi-vendor strategy is a differentiator from the competition.

“I think our approach is a lot more consultative than some of the other vendors. It’s, ‘go listen to the customers and see what options [they want], we have as a broad range of support as anybody else.”

Kurian called out some of NetApp’s competitors’ recent moves aligning themselves to where they see mid-sized enterprises turning to, as skyrocketing costs push them away from VMware, arguing that storage providers need to be transparent with customers and not leave them high and dry after having invested heavily in a particular ecosystem.

“I simply point out that it is irresponsible for someone who claims to be a partner of a customer to say, ‘Today I am positioning VMware and VXrail to you’, and then tomorrow turn around say, ‘go to Nutanix’. Where does that leave the customer?”

The word ‘disruption’ has been co-opted in the technology sector recently to mean positive change. We know, for example, that AI is creating a wave of opportunity to automate content creation and accelerate decision-making and time to insight. 

That sort of wave can provide companies with tremendous opportunities for those that spy them early and act accordingly. But disruptive change can lead to uncertainty too, as we are witnessing with Broadcom’s deal to acquire VMware that closed in November.

What’s happening?

After a long period of speculation, it appears that many of the concerns we heard among channel partners at the time Broadcom first said it had reached an agreement with VMware were well founded.  As Krish Prasad, SVP and GM of the VMware Cloud Foundation Division, stated in December 2023, many standalone products are being discontinued and licensing is moving to a subscription-based model in a “dramatic simplification” of the previous portfolio. 

Some observers are spotting a pattern familiar from previous big Broadcom deals to buy CA and Symantec. As Forrester principal analyst Tracy Woo has noted, those purchases led to “stunted” innovation and reduced customer support.

The effects of these changes for the channel are varied, and none of them are good. Partners may have deployed VMware products that will no longer be offered or will be sold to another company. That could mean unwanted and unnecessary change for those partners and their customers.

The multi-vendor future

Are these just teething troubles? No, Broadcom has made big calls early and it can’t fix the subsequent concerns with anything short of a (highly unlikely) massive U-turn, and the changes are unlikely to stop making an impact. For example, going back to the point made by Forrester, it’s still too early to say how fears over the depth of Broadcom’s commitment to research and development and dynamic innovation across the VMware portfolio will play out. Certainly, Broadcom’s track record in this regard is inauspicious.

Yet another concern among channel partners pertains to churn. Channel partners may worry that they will see a carousel of changing reps that will undermine the relationships that let them go to market and win over customers and prospects, and then support them when challenges and opportunities arise. 

But partners still have options and those that haven’t already done so will now look urgently for solutions that offer freedom and open choice with strong support options and reliable roadmaps, rather than lock in and pricing penalties for being loyal customers of pre-acquisition VMware. A multi-vendor approach is pragmatic and helps to de-risk any post-merger environment. More than ever, partners require a safe harbor and a plan B as they navigate through the uncharted, post-Broadcom VMware future.

The channel needs to look both forward and back. As AI continues to reconfigure the IT landscape, partners need confidence that new workloads in Kubernetes containers are protected but also that critical legacy apps and workloads will still run anywhere that customers prefer. The job of the channel is to advise and support, not dictate, so it’s important to cover all bases and offer a range of deployment platforms, whether that’s on-premises, in the public cloud or at the network edge – and with full license portability to support future change.

M&A has become a critical aspect of how large technology companies pursue growth and, over the years, what was once a strategy with a poor track record has become refined and improved as vendors have learned the tricks of the merger trade. But channel partners can still get caught up in the crossfire when changes are as profound and sudden as in the case of Broadcom-VMware.

VMware was a pioneer of modern IT. It reshaped the data centers, changed perceptions of server utilization, running costs, and more. VMware created an ecosystem of enormous value but that value is today under threat because nobody – not customers, systems integrators, or developers – want wholesale change. The changes outlined so far by Broadcom may help Broadcom’s bottom line but partners need to take notice and act now.

A European cloud trade body has called for an investigation into Broadcom amid concerns over changes it has made to VMware licensing structures.

The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium called on regulatory and legislative bodies across Europe to investigate the changes Broadcom has made to the VMware operating model, which it says will “decimate” the region’s cloud infrastructure. 

“CISPE calls upon regulators, legislators and courts across Europe to swiftly scrutinize the actions of Broadcom in unilaterally canceling license terms for essential virtualisation software,” the trade body said in a statement.

Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of software licensing at the firm, which has drawn widespread criticism from customers. 

The move was described as a ‘simplification’ of the VMware product portfolio by Broadcom CEO Hock Tan as the firm looks to shepherd customers from perpetual software licensing to a subscription only model.

Broadcom stated it would continue to support customers under a perpetual licensing agreement for the period defined in the contract, but following this customers would need to exchange any remaining licenses for subscription-based products.

This has left both cloud service vendors and customers in limbo, according to CISPE, without any solid information on how, when, or if they will be able to license VMware products essential for their operations from April 2024.

Moreover, even if they are able to relicense the VMware software, a number of customers reported dramatic price hikes of as much as 12 times.

Tan recently acknowledged the move had elicited ‘unease’ among customers and partners in a blog reflecting on the first 100 days since the Broadcom acquisition, but argued the changes were motivated by innovating faster and serving customers more effectively.

Broadcom accused of “holding the sector to ransom”

CISPE’s characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware’s market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. 

Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech.

Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. 

In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves.

Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice.

“At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware’s dominance of the virtualisation sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers,” Mingorance said.

CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. 

As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on 7 March 2024.

Mingorance argued Broadcom’s moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region’s digital ecosystems .

“As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe’s independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers,” he explained.

“Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualisation, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe’s digital ecosystems”.

Google's cloud division has announced its first Arm-based virtual machine (VM) that's set to feature within its Tau VM portfolio.

The move follows rivals AWS and Microsoft, which recently launched similar services with Graviton and Azure VMs, respectively.

Google Cloud's new VMs are now in preview with Arm-silicon set to replace the AMD Milan processors currently being used on the Tau line. The aim is to offer a better price-to-performance ratio.

"We are excited to extend the rich choices we already offer with Intel and AMD and enter the Arm ecosystem to provide our customers with even more choice and flexibility. We have support for a broad ecosystem of operating systems, databases, programming languages and other tools," Sachin Gupta, Google Cloud's VP and GM for infrastructure.

The chips will ship with pre-defined Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) with up to 48 vCPUs and each will have up to 4GB of memory. The VMs they power will offer up to 32 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as support for a range of storage options within the Google Cloud ecosystem.

With these CPU specs, Google says the machines will be available for a wide range of workloads, such as web servers, containerised microservices, data-intensive applications, and much more.

"In recent years, we have come to rely on Arm-based servers to power our engineering activity at lower cost and higher performance compared to legacy environments," said Mark Galbraith, VP of productivity engineering at Arm. "The introduction of the Arm Neoverse N1-based T2A instance allows us to diversify our use of cloud compute on Arm-based hardware and leverage the Google Compute Engine to build the exact virtual machine types we need, with the convenience of Google Kubernetes Engine for containerised workloads."

In addition to the new VMs, Google will also support their use as part of its Kubernetes Engine, Dataflow Stream and batch processing service.

VMWare has announced details of vSphere+ and vSAN+, which have been designed to seamlessly provide organisations with the benefits of the cloud to on-premises infrastructure.

First revealed at the software firm’s VMworld 2021 event as a preview dubbed ‘Project Arctic’, the offerings are now expected to be available by the end of Q2 2023.

VMWare says the solutions will help customers enhance their infrastructure by providing centralised cloud-based infrastructure management, integrated Kubernetes, as well as access to new hybrid cloud services, all via a flexible subscription model.

“VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ represent the next major evolution of those foundational solutions that customers know and trust,” explained Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Platform Business.

“Wherever customers are on their digital transformation journey and in executing their cloud strategy, vSphere+ and vSAN+ will help accelerate their transformation by bringing the benefits of cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure and workloads, along with simplified consumption via a flexible subscription model.”

vSphere+ and SAN+ provide a unified infrastructure management experience for distributed environments via the VMware Cloud Console, which features global inventory, configuration, alerts, administration, and security status for on-premises deployments.

Admins will be able to perform certain operation tasks directly from the console – such as managing configurations and policies across deployments.

vSphere+ also provides a single workload platform for running VMs and containers orchestrated by Kubernetes to help transform on-premises infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform. VMWare says it is extending the capabilities of VMware Tanzu Standard Runtime to help developers run and manage Kubernetes at scale with consistency and efficiency across on-premises, public clouds, and edge.

The pair have also been designed to enable customers to add on hybrid cloud services for business-critical applications running on-premises – including disaster recovery and ransomware protection.

Gary Chen, Research Director for IDC’s Software-Defined Compute section, said the transformation of on-premises infrastructure with cloud services is an emerging modernisation trend drawing “significant interest from enterprises.”

“By enabling the ubiquitous datacenter hypervisor with cloud services, users will be able to onboard innovative capabilities that can be delivered immediately and fully managed from the cloud to address a broad range of pain points such as management efficiency, scale-out Kubernetes operations, and DR,” he said.

“The future possibilities of this delivery model, such as with vSphere+ and vSAN+, are endless and can be a key tool for enterprises to modernise existing infrastructure quickly with minimal burden.”

Perhaps you’ve heard some talk about network virtualisation, and wondered what it was all about. How can something physical, like network hardware, become something entirely existing in software? And how does it change the way networks operate and IT professionals do their jobs?

In this guide, you will learn why network virtualisation is such a hot topic, how you can get started, and steps you can take to optimise cost savings. You will also hear about the basics of network virtualisation and how it can transform a company's network to become:

• Agile and configurable enough to move as fast as the business itself
• Smarter and faster than the cyber criminals who are always looking for a way in
• Flexible enough to enable users to run applications and access data from anywhere in the world

Provided by

Provided by

Modernise and accelerate application delivery by migrating your traditional virtualised workloads directly into container-based workflows within Red Hat OpenShift.

With Red Hat OpenShift, teams can achieve greater resilience and high performance for virtual machine-based workloads. Supporting this virtualisation will require persistent storage solutions, however, which provide data resilience, live migration, and more.

Download this resource to see how Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage compares to a competitive storage alternative.

While the darkest days of lockdown are hopefully behind us, many businesses plan to continue supporting work from home. The ad-hoc approach won’t do as a long-term solution, though; virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) services provide a secure and manageable alternative.

It’s a market with plenty of mature products to choose from, but Parallels Remote Application Server 18 (RAS) stands out with a wealth of features aimed at improving life for both workers and administrators. The platform takes care of all VDI and application delivery services, with support for FSLogix Profile Containers for easier user configuration, and the whole thing integrates with Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), so it can be managed from a single console.

Even better, users can keep the benefit of working on their preferred hardware: Parallels provides clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and Chrome OS, and there’s even an HTML5 client for accessing services using a compliant browser.

If you want to test-drive RAS, it’s available as a free 30-day trial, and can be hosted either locally or on AWS or Azure. We tested using Azure and found deployment admirably swift: the setup procedure created a new Windows Server 2019 VM in the cloud for us, and pre-loaded all necessary components and services, such as Azure Active Directory (AD) for role-based access control.

The desktop console app provides access to management services; here you’ll find wizards for adding Windows Remote Desktop session hosts to your site, publishing applications and sending email invitations to users, which include client download and login instructions. Parallels is developing a web-based portal too – it’s a work in progress right now, but as more features are migrated across, it’s intended to eventually become the primary management tool.

Publishing apps is simple. You just need to choose which servers to publish from, then pick the desired apps from the list presented. RAS defaults to permitting app access to everyone, but a filtering option lets you lock this down to specific AD groups or users.

From the Farm tab you can view all sites, deploy Azure WVD providers and add other VDI hosts, with support for all popular hypervisors. You can keep close tabs on site performance too, with graphs showing server CPU, memory and storage utilisation. To help further optimise performance, the new UX Evaluator and Advanced Session Details features provide over 25 metrics for monitoring user experience, including time between a user loading a resource and the response, connection quality and latency. You can set alerts and thresholds to warn of any issues, and export data for further analysis.

From the user’s point of view, getting started with RAS is almost effortless. Once they’ve installed the client they just need to authenticate: RAS supports multifactor, SAML SSO or smart card authentication, and policies with custom settings can be pushed to users and groups. The RAS Windows client integrates with the standard WVD client, so users can run Windows virtual desktop sessions and access published apps from the same console. We found we could start apps directly from the client or pin shortcuts conveniently to our local desktop, and open them by either double-clicking or dropping local or remote files onto them.

We also appreciated that during Windows virtual desktop sessions our local drives were redirected for easy access from within the session, and we could create remote shared folders for everyone to use. This latest release of RAS includes a new accelerated file retrieval feature for Windows and macOS, which uses caching on redirected drives to improve copy performance.

Parallels RAS 18 is a great choice for businesses transitioning to hybrid working. It’s easy to set up, with fully centralised management and strong access security. Workers, meanwhile, get seamless access to the apps they need on the devices of their choosing – and costs can be easily managed, as pricing is based solely on the number of concurrent users.

Red Hat has launched the latest in a series of migration toolkits to help customers move their infrastructure onto its OpenShift cloud environment.

The latest is a virtualization migration toolkit that helps transport virtual machines to its platform at scale, providing customers with an easy way to transfer their virtualized infrastructure.

Customers begin by entering the access credentials for their source and destination environments into the tool and mapping the source and destination infrastructure. The tool lets them filter the virtual machines on the source infrastructure by criteria, including names and folders, to find those serving specific applications. Customers then define a migration plan for the virtual machines.

Before setting the scripted migration in motion, customers can use a built-in migration analytics tool that spots potential migration issues with specific virtual machines and offers recommendations to solve migration problems.

OpenShift is the IBM-owned company's container orchestration system. It offers a layer of extra functionality over the commonly used Kubernetes container management platform, including more graphical user interface and security features.

Containers are an evolution of virtual machine technology that uses a single virtual server operating system to host a range of pared-down containers that share a single kernel. This makes containers smaller and more agile than virtual machines.

Although OpenShift targets containers, Red Hat launched OpenShift Virtualization technology in August 2020 to cover virtual machines. Based on the open source KubeVirt project, OpenShift Virtualization allows companies to run virtual machines, containers, and serverless applications alongside each other on the same platform.

This new migration toolkit joins several others from Red Hat, including its migration toolkit for applications, which handles large-scale application modernization and migration and handles platform upgrades and cloud deployments.

Red Hat also offers a migration toolkit for containers that migrates applications between container clusters, allowing customers to move container applications between OpenShift platforms.

When meeting the needs of your infrastructure and your business, don’t get locked-in with a virtualisation solution that forces you to make compromises.

Download this e-book and learn about the ways Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops can benefit your hybrid environment, such as:

• Managing complexity while supporting productivity and bullet-proof cloud security
• Delivering a more consistent, flexible employee experience across all devices
• Streamlining the management of your IT ecosystem

Business desktops have come a long way over the decades. Once clunky boxes that took up three-quarters of your desk, these business necessities are now a fraction of their former bulky selves, especially when dealing with small-form-factor computers.

However, despite their advancements, desktop computers are last-generation technology, especially with the raging COVID-19 pandemic forcing most people home to work remotely.

About 50% of workers in the US are now working from their home offices, coffee shops, libraries, and other places, as the COVID-19 outbreak has pushed them out of their traditional offices and into the wild, a figure that's expected to increase to 70% by 2025. In the technology and IT space, remote hiring has been a relative norm for some time, and now the sales and marketing industries are joining the march out of the cubical.

This makes one thing very clear: Remote working is the way of the future.

More and more employees are busting free from their cubicles, placing pressure on IT professionals to enable anywhere, anytime working. The right tool for the job is desktop virtualization via virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop as a service (DaaS).

What are VDI and DaaS, and which is right for your business? We'll help you figure that out below.

Virtual desktop hosting: What, why and how?

Desktop virtualization, also known as client virtualization, is a technology that moves end-user computing from employee workstations to a centralized server. Essentially, employees can access work files and applications from any location at any time.

From a technical standpoint, this is possible because archives from virtualized desktops are stored on a managed data center as opposed to hard drives in personal computers.

The right virtualization solution will allow an administrator to customize and manage desktops through a single interface, freeing IT staff from the daunting task of configuring individual desktops. Reduced maintenance cost is another benefit of virtualization, as the organization needs fewer employees to supervise the hosted desktops.

Is enabling virtualization safe?

Absolutely. Since enterprise data is stored inside a data center rather than on the actual machine, the risk of a data breach through a lost or stolen device is virtually zero. Virtualization also allows IT admins to set accessibility rules so data remains in the right hands at all times.

At the same time, when a device is decommissioned or defective, users can conveniently log in from another device and continue working. In effect, every component of a desktop is virtualized to enable quick access while also preventing unauthorized data tampering.

Finally, when the employee calls it a day and logs off from the computer, data is backed up centrally, taking confidential data away from prying eyes. If need be, IT admins can reset the desktop to wipe out data, software or any other potentially risky document as a safety measure.

Choosing the right virtualization tool

Organizations can achieve desktop virtualization in a variety of ways, but the most popular options include virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop as a service (DaaS).

VDI and DaaS operate on similar technologies and are highly expandable and reliable as a service. So, how do they differ? Is one better than the other?

Here is a complete breakdown of the differences between the two:

Set up

VDI, as you’d expect, helps enable virtual desktops through a server and implementation requires you to manage all areas of the infrastructure yourself. This includes the hardware, operating systems, applications and associated software. Any issues that may arise, from software patches to hardware replacement, are your responsibility.

DaaS offers all the benefits of VDI, minus the hassle. It’s a cloud-based service under which third-party service providers supply and administer VDI-based virtual desktops. Organizations don’t need a server and data center to access a virtual desktop using DaaS. A trusted provider configures, manages and checks on the platform as required.

Cost

VDI platforms have a high deployment cost, as an organization must find space for a data center, purchase or lease hardware and accessories and manage a host of other associated costs. There is also the cost of the ongoing support the VDI will need.

DaaS providers take on tall the virtual desktop setup costs, and organizations need little or no expertise to manage the infrastructure. This might seem cost-effective, but the expenses not only include a base fee, but there will be ongoing subscription fees that’ll increase relative to the number of users you have.

Accessibility

No matter what platform you use, you should be able to use just about any device to access files from anywhere. This could, however, be impacted by a lack of internet. Internet connectivity is never an issue for VDI platforms as files are stored on a local server. This means employees can access them, with or without being connected to the internet.

However, a stable internet connection is required for DaaS to access a virtual desktop, since it’s hosted on a remote server.

Data back up

To ensure business continuity, it’s undeniably vital that you back up your data. When faced with a cyber attack, the ability to retrieve data copies is paramount. A backup server comes at an additional price with VDI.

To ensure prompt data recovery, many DaaS providers back up data on redundant or reserved servers. Backup servers can also help recover files that were accidentally deleted. Registered members on the DaaS subscription list will also be able to access file additions or updates once they are synched.

The way forward

Virtual desktop deployment has become increasingly important, especially as remote working has rapidly evolved from a nice-to-have perk to a necessity. It is substantially less challenging with virtual desktops to concentrate on core business operations instead of IT issues.

Moreover, large technology organisations now offer VDI and DaaS solutions, like IT giants Microsoft, HP, Citrix, and VMware. As more companies adopt cloud computing for data management, the offering will only improve.

VDI is also a natural fit for enterprise-level file storage and sharing, thanks to its ability to keep everything in-house. The duration of service, type of business, and size of the company, however, play a role too.

For small and medium-sized businesses or startups with a lighter workforce, DaaS can be exceedingly beneficial.

VDI and DaaS systems look, interestingly, one and the same from an end user’s perspective. Selecting one of the platforms is a tradeoff between return on investment and manageability.

Virtualisation giant VMware has today announced a range of product updates across its portfolio as part of its annual conference, VMworld 2020.

The news included a number of announcements regarding its security offerings - including the first products from its purchase of Carbon Black, teased at last year’s show - as well as an early look at what the company is calling ‘Project Monterey’.

“Organizations are introducing increasingly sophisticated applications from cloud-native to machine learning to streaming apps that are distributed and data intensive,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, VMware’s COO of products and cloud services.

“We’re announcing Project Monterey to help customers address the shifting requirements of next-gen apps. By re-imagining the architecture of the data center, cloud and edge, we expect to offer customers the freedom to run these apps in the best environment.”

There were also announcements concerning the company’s Tanzu container management platform, which celebrates its first birthday after its launch at VMworld 2019, as well as its software-defined networking portfolio.

Ironically for a company that was built on virtualisation, VMworld 2020 marks the company’s first fully virtual conference, after the ongoing COVID-19 crisis made its usual physical event impossible. CEO Pat Gelsinger is set to take the stage tomorrow for the general session keynote, and together with other members of the VMware executive team will share details of the company’s response to the pandemic and give an insight into its overall strategy.

The biggest announcement from VMworld 2020 concerned Project Monterey, a new feature for its VMware Cloud Foundation platform which will add support for SmartNICs in order to maximise application performance.

Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) are plug-in server modules that assume control of certain functions such as storage and networking I/O, freeing the server up from managing them and leaving it more processing power to put into applications.

The company is aiming to roll support for SmartNIC cards to VMware Cloud Foundation - its pre-rolled hybrid cloud package vSphere, vSAN and NSX designed to run on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware - but is starting by enabling its ESXi bare-metal hypervisor to run on SmartNICs.

In addition to this, the company is rearchitecting Cloud Foundation to increase support for server disaggregation and bare-metal infrastructure, enabling multiple servers to share hardware resources dynamically on a software-defined basis.

Security is another key focus of the project; because each SmartNIC will be able to run security software and firewall services directly on the device, customers will be able to deploy “up to thousands of tiny firewalls” to protect each individual service within an application, as well as isolate core infrastructure when used to deliver a multi-tenant environment.

The company says that because storage, networking and security is decoupled from the main server infrastructure, each component can be individually patched without affecting application performance or availability. The company’s NSX software defined networking product will be enabled to run on certain SmartNIC products, providing enhanced security, firewalls and air-gapping.

“Organizations are introducing increasingly sophisticated applications from cloud-native to machine learning to streaming apps that are distributed and data intensive,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, VMware's COO of products and cloud services.

“We’re announcing Project Monterey to help customers address the shifting requirements of next-gen apps. By re-imagining the architecture of the data center, cloud and edge, we expect to offer customers the freedom to run these apps in the best environment.”

Project Monterey is a technical preview, and as such has no confirmed data for general availability or wider preview. VMware aims to leverage a broad ecosystem of hardware partners to support the project, and is working with Nvidia, Intel and Pensando to support their respecting SmartNIC products, as well as working directly with hardware manufacturers Dell Technologies, Lenovo and HPE to create integrated HCI systems based on Project Monterey.

“At Equinix, our investments in SmartNIC and related proximity networking technology form an important part of our global, interconnected infrastructure strategy,” said Equinix’s managing director of Bare Metal Zachary Smith.

“We’re excited about the potential of VMware’s Project Monterey to deliver security and performance for next-generation applications while simultaneously unifying infrastructure and operations for our customers.”

VMware’s newly-unveiled Project Monterey may promise additional security, but SmartNICs aren’t the only way that the company is pledging to protect its customers at this year’s VMworld.

In the first major product update since the company’s acquisition of Carbon Black last year, it has today announced VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload, a new product that integrates Carbon Black’s AI-driven automatic detection and response capabilities with vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation to deliver agentless protection for workloads in virtualised, private or hybrid cloud environments.

The new service includes prioritisation tools built into vSphere Client which combine factors like CVSS scores, real-world attack frequency and exploitability. Risk visibility is also built into vCenter, mirroring what security operations teams would see in their Carbon Black Cloud console for increased visibility and a ‘single source of truth’. Workloads are protected via antivirus tools, workload behaviour monitoring and Carbon Blacks existing EDR capabilities.

VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload Essentials will be offered as an ‘unlimited’ six-month free trial for all existing vSphere 6.5 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 customers. The company has not confirmed any pricing beyond that, but expects the new service to be available in November, with a Kubernetes security module due the following month - likely integrated with Tanzu.

“Amid global disruption, the key to survival for many companies has meant an accelerated shift to the cloud and ultimately, bolting on security products in their data centers,” said VMware’s COO of Customer Operations, Sanjay Poonen.

“But legacy security systems are no longer sufficient for organizations that are using the cloud as part of their computing infrastructure. It’s time to rethink security for the cloud, organizations need protection at the workload level, not just at the endpoint. The future of cloud must be met with a better way to secure data and applications.”

VMware also announced that it is working on an ‘extended detection and response’ (XDR) platform which will include integrations across its Carbon Black Cloud, vSphere, Workspace ONE and NSX products. The project is described as a “multi-year effort”, meaning a preview release is unlikely to arrive sooner than next year’s VMworld event at the earliest.

Another of the company’s unified security efforts is its new secure access secure edge (SASE) platform, which wraps up a number of existing tools into a cloud-first package designed to appeal to enterprises who are struggling with the pivot to remote working.

The VMware SASE Platform includes a number of products within its SD-WAN portfolio, as well as VMware Secure Access, a new offering which combines its SD-WAN service with its Workspace ONE VDI platform to create a single package. In addition, its NSX Firewall product will be available through the platform on an as-a-service basis for both single and multi-tenant environments.

“As we quickly transitioned to a fully distributed workforce, it was critical for our security posture to align with the prominence of this moment and the critical role Zoom played in business continuity for our customers,” said Aparna Bawa, chief operating officer of Zoom.

“The collaboration with VMware delivers a more secure digital workspace and enables endpoints in our organization to be better safeguarded and compliant with IT security policies.”

VMware Workspace Security received some updates as well, with a new Workspace Security Remote tool for enhanced remote endpoint management, and a Workspace Security VDI offering which integrates VMware Horizon with Carbon Black Cloud, integrating it directly into the vSphere Hypervisor and VMtools for agentless protection.

A further new offering is the VMware Cloud Web Security service, which includes tools such as DLP, sandboxing, secure web gateway and cloud access service broker services - from Menlo Security, integrated at the back end and presented via single-pane-of-glass management. This is accompanied by a new partnership with Zscaler, which will integrate VMware’s SD-WAN and Secure Access products with Zscaler Internet Access.

VMware’s annual conference has today seen the announcement of a number of updates to its Tanzu Kubernetes management portfolio, which was officially launched at VMworld 2019 after being previewed as Project Pacific.

According to VMware, more than one million containers are being run in production via Tanzu, and the company is hoping to increase this with additional support from public cloud providers.

VMware Cloud on AWS now supports Tanzu, with preview support also introduced for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The company also added that working closely with Microsoft to bring a similar preview to market for Azure users. Finally, a new integration has been introduced with DevOps platform GitLab - dubbed GitLab with Tanzu - to make it easier for developers to get Tanzu-enabled workloads into production.

Additional work has been done on internal integrations; VMware Tanzu Service Mesh has been hooked up to VMware’s Virtual Cloud network through its NSX software and the open source Kubernetes network tool Project Antrea, and includes new resilience and security capabilities.

For commercial customers, the company has also introduced VMware Container Networking with Antrea, which includes full support for Antrea, with all the signed images and binaries needed to run it with maximum peace of mind. It will be included by default with vSphere 7 with Tanzu and NSX-T.

VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network products, meanwhile, benefit from updates across security, networking and automation; the launch of VMware NSX-T 3.1 brings automated deployments at an increased global scale as well as improvements for disaster recovery, while its NSF Federation multi-site management platform has doubled in scale, with new API-based routing and multicast, and Terraform Provider support. vRealize Network Insight 6.0 is also being launched, which brings better visibility of deployments of VMware’s SD-WAN product in addition to new verification capabilities.

“Customers tell us they want the same level of automation they have in the public cloud across their entire environment. But while they can automate some parts of their network, other parts such as firewalls and load balancers still require manual tickets for provisioning. That’s why partial automation is an oxymoron; it’s a half-built bridge that does nothing to get customers to where they want to be,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, for products and cloud services at VMware.

“The VMware Virtual Cloud Network delivers the automation and economics of the public cloud across every element of the network and spanning the entire distributed enterprise at a time when agility and cost matter more than ever.”

New tools are being introduced too. Based on its acquisition of UK AI company Nyansa earlier this year, the company has unveiled VMware Edge Network Intelligence, a new AIOps product to monitor the performance of endpoints and IoT devices.

On the security side, VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention combines Lastline’s AI-based network traffic analysis capabilities with malware sandboxing and NSX Distributed IDS/IPS, which will give customers the ability to apply virtual patches at the workload rather than perimeter level.

“Our hardware-defined network architecture posed significant challenges to our aspirations to lead India’s digitized, mobile future,” said Manish Singh, general manager of Cloud Operations for Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest mobile operator.

"It could take weeks or months to complete global changes to switches, routers, firewalls or other network elements which could impact new service delivery or current performance. By moving to an automated and more secure VMware Virtual Cloud Network built on NSX, we have improved our agility by orders of magnitude, redefined our developer experience, and made security an intrinsic part of our infrastructure.”

Tanzu Service mesh and Container Networking with Antrea are all available now, while other products and services are expected to be available within the next month.

Cloud computing has swept the world, but it wouldn't be possible without virtualisation and virtual machines (VMs). They've revolutionised both server computing and some desktop computing, too. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to create a virtual machine in the cloud.

VMs evolved because of a problem that sysadmins faced in server environments: They didn't want to run too many apps alongside each other on a single server because these can interfere with each other, causing security issues or performance problems. In the worst case, an app that crashes a server could bring down the other apps sharing the box.

So admins would run one or two apps on a single physical box. That involved them paying for resources they didn't need, including the space and power taken up by each server. A single app rarely used all that server's memory or CPU power, so they sat idle a lot. Managing lots of physical boxes is also cumbersome.

VMs solved many of those problems. They recreate regular hardware machines in software, presenting CPU power, RAM, and other hardware assets as an operating system (OS) would normally see them, but filtered through another piece of software called a hypervisor.

When you install an OS in a VM, you're actually installing it on the hypervisor, which also supports many other VMs running separate OSs. When an OS accesses computing power, disk, or memory, it accesses the real, physical hardware assets but via the hypervisor. The hypervisor coordinates everything so that every OS running in a VM gets its own bit of that resource. The VMs also don't clash with each other when running on the same physical box.

There are two different kinds of hypervisors. A type one hypervisor runs directly on the underlying physical box, replacing the operating system. This is commonly used in server configurations. There are also type two hypervisors, which you install on top of an existing OS. These are common on desktop machines. Examples include Parallels and VMware Workstation, which let you install extra operating systems on top of macOS, Windows, and Linux.

You can run a VM on your own server, but admins are increasingly running them on cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure instead. That way you don't even need your own server hardware. Let's set one up on Azure.

You can set up a VM via the web interface, but doing it via the command line gives you more flexibility. You can access the command line via the cloud shell, which is a browser-based command line interface in your Azure account. Access the cursor icon just to the right of the search bar on your Azure dashboard. That will serve most use cases, but you can also access it from PowerShell, which is what we'll do here because this allows us to access the VM using Remote Desktop Services later.

You'll need a copy of PowerShell installed, along with an Azure account that includes a storage account - this is a sub-account needed to store your data in Azure.

To control Azure from PowerShell, you'll need to install the Azure module for the current user. Run PowerShell as administrator, and type:

Then, we'll log into Azure from PowerShell:

When run in PowerShell on Windows, this will open a login box for you to sign in using your Azure account. After that, you'll see PowerShell list your account in PowerShell, including your Tenant ID.

In Azure, virtual machines exist in a resource group. This is a group of assets that you can grant access to. You might set these up on a per-project or a per-department basis.

We'll begin by creating one:

It'll tell you that it's succeeded (type get-AZResource to find out more about it), but the resource group doesn't have anything in it yet. Let's change that by creating a VM.

We'll start by creating administrative login credentials for the VM. We'll assign these to a variable called $tempcredentials:

Enter that to get a credentials prompt and enter the login details you'll use for that machine.

Now, here's the code to copy and paste:

We're assigning the configuration parameters for the VM to the $vmDetails variable. The first few properties, ResourceGroupName, Name, and Location are self-explanatory.

The virtual network (VNet) is a software-defined network that the VM will use to communicate with other VMs and services in that Azure subscription. VNets have subnets to help separate resource traffic, so that your sales department's VMs can't snoop on your technical development team's traffic, for example. Network security groups provide an extra layer of security by letting you block or allow inbound or outbound traffic from a resource.

Credential gives the VM the temporary credentials that we created, while the PublicIPAddress name maps the VM to an IP address in Azure. OpenPorts lets you expose network ports to other resources on that subnet so that they can access services running on your VM.

Now you've created its parameters, you can create a VM and assign it to a variable called $testVM using this code:

Once this has finished, you can wave hello at your VM by typing get-azvm to list your virtual machines. Pipe this into the format list command (fl) to get more information about those machines using get-azvm | fl.

Because you put this into a variable when you created it, you can easily list the VM's properties by just typing the variable:

This doesn't tell you what the virtual machine's IP address is, though. Get that by typing:

Copy the IP address this returns, and we'll use it to access the machine. This is something that you can do from your local PowerShell instance but not from the Cloud Shell, because it invokes Remote Desktop Services on your local machine. Type this into PowerShell, replacing <IP> with the IP address you copied:

The VM takes a minute or two to go through its setup process, and then you're logged in.

We can manipulate the VM by stopping it:

After a few seconds (the cloud is scalable and flexible but it isn't instant), the VM will stop. Once it's reported success, try starting it again:

Now let's tidy up after ourselves. Removing virtual machines themselves is easy enough but it's more difficult to remove all the other assets that are created along with them. For our purposes, the easiest way is to just delete the whole resource group. Type:

This can take a while to delete, but you can check on its status by typing:

There are many things you can do with VMs, such as moving them between resource groups, resizing them to fit your operating requirements, and querying their runtime conditions, all of which you can do via PowerShell. They're a great resource for everyone from enterprises to enthusiasts who want to set up simple projects without investing in a server.

Today, every industry is being reshaped by technology. This new reality is exciting, and it has major implications for the network. As IT teams attempt to manage, secure, connect, and maintain compliance wherever applications live, they can't do it without a fully virtualised infrastructure.

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VMware has announced the launch of a number of new Kubernetes-focused products, including the latest version of its vSphere platform.

Most of the new products fall under the company’s Tanzu portfolio, unveiled at last year’s VMworld.

Tanzu represents VMware’s efforts to integrate Kubernetes container management - which the company is betting big on as the next significant step in enterprise applications - with its existing VM management tools.

Three new Tanzu products are being introduced; first up, Tanzu Mission Control, a tool previewed as part of last year’s announcement which is designed to help enterprises manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across a range of environments, while centralising key functions like security, configuration management and data protection. It also allows businesses to hook VMware’s other management and monitoring tools (such as its Wavefront and CloudHealth products) into its Kubernetes workloads.

Following on from this is VMware’s new Tanzu Application Catalogue, which represents a way for customers to integrate open source components and tools from Bitnami's catalogue into their applications in a safe and secure way, by providing a curated repository of open source products that have been verified as stable and vulnerability-free.

For organisations at the start of their container projects, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is being introduced as a ubiquitous container runtime, combining open source Kubernetes tooling, container images and registry and lifecycle management. Described by VMware as an evolution of its strategy with Enterprise PKS (which will remain as a separate offering), the aim is to make it easier to quickly start using Kubernetes in a consistent way across multiple environments, alongside existing VMware deployments.

Speaking of which, a new version of VMware’s flagship vSphere suite is also being introduced, and it includes a range of Kubernetes-friendly features. Previously teased as Project Pacific, vSphere 7 has been ‘fundamentally modernised’, according to VMware, and re-architected to put Kubernetes management at its heart.

VMs are not being forgotten about, of course - the goal is to enable VMware admins to easily run containers and VMs concurrently. vSphere 7 has also been optimised for simplified lifecycle management, allowing enterprises to manage hundreds or thousands of instances in less time, with fewer tools, including introducing REST and JSON-based APIs for automating lifecycle management tasks.

vSphere 7 also introduces greater security through remote attestation, where a trusted host is used to verify the integrity of other hosts within the network. Elsewhere, vMotion has been improved to allow for easier migration of large VMs with minimal disruption and the Distributed Resource Scheduler now runs every minute as opposed to every five minutes.

GPU virtualisation is now on offer too, thanks to the company’s recent acquisition Bitfusion, which is being touted as a particular benefit for those looking to run workloads using machine learning.

The aforementioned tools are also being rolled into VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu, which includes vSAN 7 for managing virtualised storage.

“Kubernetes is still hard,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said. “We're democratising Kubernetes into the industry, with the most powerful platform, the most powerful infrastructure community across multiple clouds; This for us is an important day, not just for us, but for our customers, and for the industry.”

VMware Tanzu Application Catalog, Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid are available now, while VMware Cloud Foundation 4 and VMware vSphere 7 are scheduled to be available by the start of May.

VMware vSphere and Promox have dominated the virtualization space for many years. The two companies are often the first choice for businesses that want to start digital journeys with open-source technology. 

Virtualization is the process of making the physical, digital; taking your desktop and making it virtual, for example. It is a key strategy within digital transformation, where hardware is often usurped for a digital version.

There are other providers – a larger selection of, in fact – which offer products and services for virtualization and also containerization. This can make choosing the right product a little difficult, particularly as you'll need to pit services against one another to see which is best suited to your operational needs.

There are other providers – a larger selection of, in fact – which offer products and services for virtualization and also containerization. This can make choosing the right product a little difficult, particularly as you'll need to pit services against one another to see which is best suited to your operational needs.

What is VMware vSphere?

VMware's vSphere is the cloud giant's most popular virtualisation service and it comes in two versions - Standard and Enterprise Plus. Enterprise Plus has more features, such as resource management and intrinsic security, whereas Standard is more of an entry-level option.

vSphere is a good choice for companies that have high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, such as artificial intelligence models or big data applications. It's also good for managing remote offices with little IT resources.

vSphere is a type of hypervisor software and management platform and it is now in its seventh generation. The Type 1 hypervisor is a bare-metal version that is known as 'ESXi'. This includes the OS kernel and a vCentre server management system.

The hypervisor works in a similar fashion to the average operating system as it is directly installed into a device. This allows users to create multiple virtual machines (VMs) for systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris and more, all on a single machine, with the virtualisation handling a layer of storage.

Another bonus of ESXi is it can run on Intel processors (Xeon and up) and AMD Opteron and Epyc processors – this crosses both 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems, although 32-bit processors aren’t supported. ESXi uses a 64-bit VMkernel.

The hypervisor, which can be installed on a hard disk, USB device, or SD card, can support the following resources per host: 4,096 virtual processors, 512 VMs, 4TB of RAM and 320 logical CPUs.

VMware’s ESXi is available as a free download or as part of a paid package. Naturally, the free version provides only limited functionality and can’t be managed by Center (see below). vSphere is currently on its 7th iteration, first announced in March 2020, and is the first version to feature vSphere with Kubernetes, formerly known as Project Pacific.

VMware vCenter is a software suite that manages the whole of the VMware virtualisation infrastructure, acting as a single window. From here, the assignment of VMs to hosts is managed, as well as the assignment of resources to tasks, based on policies set by the administrator. A single instance of vCenter can manage up to 1,000 hosts at a time, across up to 10,000 active VMs or 15,000 registered VMs

It also enables the use of features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere vMotion, and vSphere Storage vMotion. It also provides the API for vSphere and manages ESXi.

It can be installed on a supported version of Windows or used as a preconfigured Linux version known as vCenter Server Appliance. vCenter Server also permits Host Profiles, allowing users to define rules for specific ESXi hosts.

With the latest version of its virtualisation software - vSphere 7 - VMware has added full integration with Kubernetes, which it's touting as the "biggest vSphere innovation since the launch of the ESXi hypervisor". This means administrators can provision, run, and manage Kubernetes clusters on top of vSphere via the Kubernetes interface. Supporting both containers and VMs on a single platform allows vSphere 7 to run Kubernetes pods on VMs using the vSphere POD Service. VMware vSphere PODs can be managed like existing VMs.

What is Proxmox?

Proxmox is a complete open source server management platform for enterprise virtualisation. It was developed by Proxmox Server Solutions in Austria under the Internet Foundation of Austria and is released under the GNU General Public License.

It's a Debian-based Linux distribution with a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel. It enables the deployment and management of VMs and containers, such as KVM (Kernel-based VM) for VMs and Linux Containers (LXC) for containers, an OS-level virtualisation tool that has been included in Proxmox VE since version 4.0.

The software also includes a bare-metal installer, web-based management interface and many command-line tools. There is also a REST API to support third-party tools.

Admins can carry out all management tasks with the integrated graphical user interface (GUI). This interface is based on the ExtJS JavaScript framework and works with any modern browser.

Proxmox can be clustered across multiple server nodes for high availability. When deployed, the resource manager called Proxmox VE HA Manager monitors all VMs and containers on the whole cluster and automatically gets into action if one of them fails.

There is also an integrated live/online migration feature, this enables the movement of VMs from one Proxmox VE cluster node to another without any downtime. The process can be initiated by administrators with either scripts or the web interface.

The Proxmox Virtual Environment supports a maximum of 12TB of RAM and 768 logical CPUs per host. It also supports Intel EMT64 or AMD64 with Intel VT/AMD-V CPU flag.

It also features a built-in firewall that is customisable allowing configurations via GUI or CLI. Firewall rules can be set up for all hosts inside a cluster or define rules for VMs and containers only.

vSphere vs Proxmox

So, which one of these would be the optimal virtualisation tool for your company? It mostly depends on what features you are looking for and how much you are willing to spend.

For instance, business users might find ESXi to be quite limited when it comes to the variety of tools it offers in its free version, and is known to use proprietary technology to support virtualisation (VT-x for Intel processors and AMD-V for AMD processors). The closed off, proprietary product might not be the best match for organisations that are looking for more advanced offerings.

This is why larger companies might want to consider VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus, which is the new version of the programme following VMware’s decision to sunset the original vSphere Enterprise in 2019, with support for Enterprise licensing having ended in 2020. VMware vSphere is also more often used for business-critical applications and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). However, it does come at a higher price than other virtualisation tools, with costs depending on quantity as well as the level and duration of support, with customers being able to choose between one and three years.

For those looking for a more affordable tool, Proxmox might be a better option to consider. As a free, open source product based on other free, open source products (KVM, LXC, etc), it has all of its features enabled. As opposed to the other two tools, which are most often used in cloud computing and server consolidation, Proxmox is more suited to virtualised server isolation and software development.

Although it might not have the same scope of available tools as VMware vSphere, users tend to find the features it does have more useful. The tool can also be automatically configured to allow nodes to use the same shared storage when added to a cluster, which many will find more helpful than ESXi’s insistence that users do this manually.

FAQs

Using 'virtual' versions of physical things has become more and more popular in recent years, but what is virtualization, exactly?

In essence, it's the process of turning hardware into a software equivalent without sacrificing functionality, the most common deployment being virtual servers instead of physical servers. It's largely used as a way of saving space, cutting costs, and improving functionality and security.

There's also the added benefit of creating extra capabilities on top of existing hardware. For example, virtualization can be used to take the machine's storage or some of its capabilities and divide them across a number of virtual machines.

What is virtualization?

The best way to think of virtualization is to imagine five physical computers, each running their own isolated operating systems and software services. Each device can work separately on different tasks, but through virtualization, you’re able to unlink each operating system (OS) and its software from each terminal and combine them into one single entity, or ‘host computer’. This can maintain separate software packages and run individual devices if it has to.

Separate virtual software instances are known as virtual machines (VMs) and are managed and coordinated by a single physical machine. This central computer utilizes a ‘hypervisor’, which is a software platform the computer can use to manage resource allocation across each VM. Through this hypervisor, it can share important elements like network bandwidth, memory usage, CPU cycles, as well as other computing resources.

These five computers we've imagined can, through virtualization, be merged into a single combined machine while at the same time preserving their individuality, allowing workers to use them separately.

VMs are particularly handy for testing new operating systems, accessing legacy software and operating systems, creating and testing applications in a separate computing environment, and much more.

VMware is one of the leading providers of virtualization software and technologies, offering Workstation Pro for Windows and Linux users and Fusion Pro for Mac users. Microsoft is another big player in this space, with Hyper-V and Azure Virtual Desktop. Other top VM platforms include Citrix Hypervisor, VirtualBox, and Parallels Desktop.

We have a handy guide on configuring Hyper-V on Windows 10 and 11 if you want to have a go yourself.

Virtualization terminology

Virtual machines (VMs)

Virtual machines are one of the elementary units of virtualization. This is best imagined as an independently functioning computer, except that it lacks a normally expected physical presence. A virtual machine, when deployed, can open an additional operating system on a single device, and that's including its own software.

The VM's working is independent of the host, meaning that it won't be affected if something goes wrong with the hardware used to access it. At the same time, since it's separate, the virtual machine can't influence the running of the 'host' computer.

Virtual memory

To ensure VMs work as smoothly as possible, it's pretty vital there's a high level of virtual memory available on the host computer.

This helps applications to improve overall performance and store and receive data. It's enabled by small additions to a machine's hardware, called segments or pages, that store the extra data a physical machine cannot.

Virtual desktop infrastructure

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), is where an organization purchases virtual desktops hosted by a third-party vendor and therefore don't have to deploy the technology on its on-premises infrastructure, lowering its costs and simplifying deployments.

According to Nick McQuire, VP of enterprise research at CCS Insight, the development of Desktop as a Service, or DaaS, has proved very popular.

"Virtual desktops and applications have been trending within enterprise IT for over a decade, ever since the growth in remote working has increased the need for mobile workstations, strongly encouraging many organizations to implement the technology," he says.

"As virtual desktops aren't hosted locally on the users' devices, an organization can distribute stripped-down machines, known as thin clients, with access to company applications and data in the data centre to cut down on hardware costs and simplify management."

Virtual applications

Many of the merits of virtual desktops also apply to app virtualization, which allows users to access apps without storing them locally and businesses to have more control over their usage.

"New uses of the technology have opened up the virtualization of third-party specific applications such as Microsoft's Skype for Business or browsing," McQuire says. "Security requirements and compliance changes such as GDPR have also helped as more firms look for more control and visibility of the apps their employees use."

"As more organizations look to upgrade the 300 million or more PCs in enterprises that are over five years old, they are embracing newer PC platforms. The likes of Google Chromebooks and Microsoft's Windows 10 are growing heavily in the public sector in the US."

What are the benefits of virtualization?

Investing in virtualization technologies offers a wide range of benefits for businesses of all sizes and industries.

Resources

For starters, it can help companies reduce their overall IT spending and reallocate funds to other areas of the business. That’s because you can run all manner of IT resources — such as operating systems, applications, storage devices, and network devices — virtually from a single host computer, rather than purchasing several non-virtualized servers or pieces of hardware.

Resilience

Virtualization is an excellent way of improving the operational resilience of your business. If a virtual machine is damaged or faulty, you can clone it and get it back up and running within minutes. When a physical server experiences issues, you’ll need to get it fixed or replaced. These things will take a significant amount of time and money, eating into valuable business resources and causing downtime.

Security

Virtual machines can also contribute to the provision of robust enterprise cyber security. VMs are isolated by design, providing a safe environment in which to analyze potentially malicious files and processes. This also makes it very difficult for attackers to move laterally across an environment, should a VM become compromised.

Elasticity

Because new virtual machines can be installed, updated, and maintained easily and quickly, businesses can scale up or scale down their IT resources as their needs and requirements change over time. Virtualization technologies are an excellent option for enterprises embarking on a digital or cloud transformation journey.

Centralization

With virtualization, IT departments don’t need to waste valuable time maintaining numerous physical servers. Instead, they can maintain every virtual machine from one virtualized environment and, consequently, experience productivity gains that benefit the entire business.

Sustainability

Owning several physical servers is not only expensive and time-consuming but also bad for the environment because of the amount of power they consume. Migrating to a virtualized computing environment will help businesses consume less energy and ultimately meet their net-zero goals.

I think it's fairly safe to say that I picked a good year to visit VMworld US for the first time. While I've been to its European equivalent, this was the first year I went to the main event and it was something of a doozy.

Not only did we get a nice bit of pre-conference sizzle with the news that VMware is acquiring Carbon Black and Pivotal, but the entire show was also a festival of product updates and previews. More than anything else, it felt like a statement of intent from Gelsinger and his comrades, setting out the company's stall for the future.

The big focus of the show and of VMware's main announcements was Kubernetes. The company is betting big on the container technology as the future of application development, with plans to weave it into vSphere with Project Pacific, and use Pivotal and Bitnami's technology to make VMware even more attractive to Kubernetes developers. Virtually every main-stage announcement featured Kubernetes in some capacity, and VMware veteran Ray O'Farrell is being put in charge of getting that side of the business (including the forthcoming Pivotal integrations) running smoothly.

All the new Kubernetes-based products Project Pacific, Tanzu and the like are still in tech preview with no release date in sight and, honestly, that's probably a good thing. I'm really not sure how many of VMware's customers are ready to start deploying containers at scale. Mind you, making Kubernetes management a core part of VMware's capabilities may well go a long way towards encouraging adoption.

It feels like a future-proofing measure more than anything else. Gelsinger is a sharp guy and when he says that containers are the future, he's not wrong. It may not have reached mass adoption yet, but it's growing fast, which isn't surprising given the technology's proven benefits. This isn't a pivot though; VMs aren't going anywhere, as Gelsinger himself has been quick to point out. He notes that all the companies operating Kubernetes at scale Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera operate them inside VMs. More to the point, it'll be a long time yet before Kubernetes gets anywhere close to rivalling VMs in terms of the number of production workloads.

Between the new possibilities promised by Project Pacific, the increasing focus on multi-cloud infrastructures and the forthcoming integration of Carbon Black's technology into the product line, VMware looks like a company at the absolute top of its game, cementing its dominance of the virtualisation market and paving the way for that dominance to continue long into the future. If Gelsinger, O'Farrell and the rest of the team can pull off everything they've promised, then customers and admins have a lot to look forward to.

Time, as the saying goes, makes fools of us all. When I first sat down to write this column on Wednesday afternoon, it had been less than a week since VMware announced its intention to purchase fellow Dell Technologies brand Pivotal. While the news would doubtless be on everyone's mind, I assumed we wouldn't actually hear anything about it at this year's VMworld, and I structured my predictions accordingly. After all, I thought, surely they're not likely to close such a big acquisition in less than a fortnight.

Well, you know what they say about assumptions.

In what I suspect is a move designed specifically to make my life more difficult, CEO Pat Gelsinger has just confirmed that not only is VMware purchasing Pivotal (for the princely sum of $2.7 billion, no less) it's also snapping up security firm Carbon Black.

In light of these developments, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the big themes of this year's show are going to be. While we probably won't learn too much specifically about how Gelsinger intends to integrate his new toys into the company the deals won't close until the end of January next year expect an update on VMware's strategy and roadmap with security and cloud at the centre.

In terms of specific product updates, public cloud is probably going to feature heavily. Last year's VMworld events (both European and US variants) saw the company announce deeper and more powerful integrations with Amazon Web Services across multiple products and use-cases, which is likely to continue this year.

Dell Technologies World in April also saw VMware and Microsoft surprise delegates by jointly announcing native VMware support on Azure. Expect more news on that front too, as the two companies deepen their partnership. If I had to guess, we'd bet that part of this will be an integration of some kind between Azure Networking and VMware NSX a product that will probably be the focus of a significant portion of VMware's show.

To round out the 'Big Three' public cloud providers, I wouldn't be surprised to hear more news about support for VMware on Google Cloud Platform, either. First announced late last month, the combination of VMware Cloud Foundation with GCP gives VMware pretty much comprehensive coverage of the public cloud landscape.

Moving on from public cloud, the general availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC the company's subscription-based on-premise data centre as a service offering is likely to be announced at the event, too. Also announced at Dell Technologies World this year, the service is scheduled for the second half of this year, but has yet to be formally rolled out to customers.

Regardless, the stage is set for a packed-to-bursting show. VMware has gone from strength to strength in recent years, cementing itself as the go-to virtualisation provider and proving its technical nous through smart investments in areas like software-defined networking and containerisation. With two more substantial companies being brought into the fold, we're interested to see where the company goes from here.

Server virtualization is a technology that has gained in popularity thanks to both the possibility to increase compute capacity in an unchanged physical space and the changing demands of business.

Where in the past additional physical servers might have been added to cope with the workload, businesses are taking advantage of the compute capacity of modern hardware to virtualize more than one server on a single physical device.

Server virtualization is the process of creating a virtual version of a physical entity. In the case of server virtualization, the physical server is virtually split into multiple servers. Each virtual server is isolated but shares the physical hardware and can perform all the tasks associated with a traditional server.

Also known as virtual machines (VMs), the technology is becoming more widely used as businesses better understand how the technology can increase the efficiency of their servers while keeping costs down and avoiding over-capacity in hardware.

Additionally, VMs offer IT teams a greater degree of flexibility. Staff can be allotted additional compute or storage capacity without dealing with physical infrastructure. VMs can also be called upon at very short notice without requiring time-consuming hardware set-up and configuration, or even finding space in a rack.

The importance of this flexibility was made abundantly clear throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations were forced to make significant changes to their IT infrastructure at very short notice.

As digital transformation continues around the globe, server virtualization will continue to become more important to the modern economy.

What is server virtualization?

Server virtualization is essentially the process of creating a computer within a computer. A host machine simulates another self-contained device within it, attaching virtual core components such as the CPU, memory and storage, and operating systems. These processes, or applications, running on the VM don’t affect the host machine nor other VMs, beyond leaning on its storage and compute resources.

The technology has many applications; for example, Linux-based operating systems can create a Windows VM to run programs only compatible with Windows. The isolated nature of VMs means that cyber security researchers can test malware in a controlled environment without risking the contamination of essential services.

For server applications, however, the primary benefit is that of efficiency. By using a single server to host multiple VMs, multiple different programmes can be run in tandem, with different operating systems and resource allocations if necessary. This gives IT departments increased flexibility, as well as greater control over cost.

Using a virtual server also means that IT staff have much more transparency, using a single dashboard for viewing all operations and workloads, identifying consumptions and tweaking workloads where necessary for totally seamless performance.

What is a hypervisor?

Even if you're not familiar with server virtualization technology, you're almost certainly familiar with the biggest provider of it: industry stalwarts VMware. The company offers various flavours of virtualization management technologies, with its best-known offering being the ESXi hypervisor.

Hypervisors are the systems that manage the guest machines running as a VM, and sit on the host machine to oversee these operations. Bare-metal (also known as native) hypervisors sit directly on a server with no underlying OS and are exemplified by the aforementioned ESXi, as well as Microsoft's Hyper-V software and Oracle VM Server.

Hosted hypervisors are a separate kind of system, which sit on top of a standard operating system and run VMs with a layer of abstraction between the host OS and the guest machine. These are generally chosen for desktop machines as pre-packaged applications, used for running incompatible software, as they are more user-friendly and present less of a learning curve than bare-metal hypervisors.

The benefits of server virtualization

The main benefit of server virtualization is efficiency, both in terms of physical hardware usage and team productivity.

Hardware and infrastructure costs can be reduced by running multiple servers on a single appliance. Different applications can also be run in tandem and isolation, with different operating systems and resource allocations if necessary.

Server virtualization allows for considerably more versatility than physical servers from a resource standpoint. Depending on resource availability, memory, compute, and storage can be scaled up and down based on the current business need without requiring lengthy and expensive hardware reconfiguration.

Although many physical servers can boast powerful processors and substantial memory, these aren’t always correctly utilized. They can be seen as almost wasteful unless constantly tasked with appropriate workloads.

However, dividing the resources between virtual servers means it can be spread between multiple environments and help the physical device run more efficiently. In this way, it's possible to use the same amount of processing power to run multiple workloads simultaneously without negatively impacting performance.

Moreover, by investing in virtual servers, organizations can also free up physical space as well as limit the number of separate pieces of hardware which need to be managed by the IT department, allowing the team to focus on more important tasks, such as protecting the business against new cyber security threats.

Virtual servers also make it easier to manage data backup and recovery since everything required to run a given application is held in the virtualized image, down to the operating system.

Lastly, server virtualization is more financially efficient: if a business wants to significantly overhaul its legacy infrastructure by moving towards digital transformation, a virtualized environment offers a quick way to quickly upscale or downscale resources. It avoids the need to invest heavily upfront, meaning expenses can be re-assigned to other parts of the business, or even eradicated in some cases.

What effect can server virtualization have on a business?

Server virtualization can have benefits for the entire organization. Rather than needing to permanently onboard new employees to deal with enhanced IT resources, contractors can be used to establish VMs on a project-by-project basis. Upon completion, these VMs can be taken back down in order to not consume any more resources or budget.

Furthermore, if a company wants to explore new applications or services, these can be installed on virtual servers rather than taking up space on physical hardware. If it's decided that an application is not suitable for the business need, it can be uninstalled, and the virtual server can quickly be deleted.

Providers and vendors are now supplying the tools businesses need to set up their own virtualized resources. VMware's virtual servers, Dell's blade servers, and Citrix's virtual software and desktop tools are all making it easier for companies to move towards a virtualized infrastructure and freeing themselves from the legacy server chains.

Finally, it is no surprise that the major cloud vendors - such as AWS or Azure - have virtual servers in their product line-up. While some applications require a dedicated bare-metal server, simply selecting compute, memory, and storage needs to create a virtualized server in a private or public cloud is a clear demonstration of the flexibility possible through a virtual server approach.

"Enterprise software sucks today, and we've really failed our employees"; these are the words of Sapho co-founder Fouad ElNaggar, parroted by Citrix's CEO David Henshall during the company's main keynote address on day one of Synergy 2019.

When Citrix bought out the six-year-old micro-apps platform for $200 million in 2018, the significance hadn't been fully realised. But in Atlanta, we learned more than anything that ElNaggar's vision for a massively heightened 'employee experience' has been injected directly into the heart of the virtualisation company.

The previous 12 months for Citrix have been at times uncertain and at worst torrid. The spectre of a monster 6TB data breach hung over the company throughout Synergy 2019 because executives left it unaddressed. A blog was published the day before but added little to what we already knew. It was only through conversations with the firm's chief digital risk officer Peter Lefkowitz Cloud Pro was able to gain a sense for how Citrix has tried to learn and move on.

While Citrix didn't so much dazzle, the company did put forward a defined vision that borrows from elements of its past while, by-and-large, feeling fresh enough from its executives' perspective, to get excited about.

A major problem business faces today is that the majority of workers are disengaged. Henshall cited research claiming this figure is as high as 85% The reason? Well, enterprise software 'sucks'. It can be functional but frankly looks like it should belong in a CRT monitor.

The company has pivoted towards improving the user experience (UX) for employees and slashing the time they spend on tasks like filling out expense claims. This chiefly manifests as a host of 'intelligent experience' improvements to its flagship Workspace platform, with the ultimate goal being to return one day per week to workers.

To get there, Citrix is stealing user interface (UI) ideas from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which the firm concedes is pulling well ahead of the enterprise space. Never-ending newsfeeds, notifications that demand your attention, and single-click buttons are making their way into business software to keep employees switched on in their work lives. This element of consumerisation, according to Chris Marsh, research director at 451 research, is not novel but a much-needed idea that hasn't yet caught on.

"Enterprise software has been woefully bad at engaging its users," Marsh told Cloud Pro. "What Citrix is trying to counter is the fragmentation of work across the multiple apps employees are using and all the context switching and productivity losses that result in.

"It's of course in its interest to have users spend more time in its Workspace but it has a decent rationale as to why a single plane centralising otherwise diffuse and siloed information is necessary and could provide a good experience."

But assuming there's truth to this "disengagement epidemic", to what extent would revitalising clunky UIs make up for other workplace bugbears? I'm thinking along the lines of bad colleague relations, a nasty commute, or the nature of the work itself? Even on the software front, this model can't solve everything.

"Lightweight, task-based actions it's pitching its micro-apps as solving are just a fragment of the kinds of work the typical employee has to do," Marsh continued. "It might be problematic if that's all Workspace natively enables, i.e. you'd be having to go to its micro-apps for some things, yet everything else still happens within other apps.

"I suspect however that through partners and it's micro-app builder strategy it'll widen out what can be intelligently surfaced from other apps into the cards."

Citrix has shifted through several guises in previous years, and ironically even pitched itself as a "new breed of security company" just two years ago. But, with a great dose of inspiration from the startup it acquired last year, the Citrix of 2019 appears to have finally stumbled upon what it believes is a roadmap for building the 'future of work'. Time will tell whether it gets lost on the way.

Microsoft has developed an AI-powered web design tool that can turn sketches of websites into functional HTML code, called Sketch2Code.

How and why it has been developed was explained in a YouTube video by Tara Shankar Jana, senior product manager, Microsoft AI, who said that Microsoft's AI tool aims to "empower every developer and every organisation to do more with AI".

Drag-and-drop website building apps are nothing new, as lots of companies offer a service to move custom designs into a digital workspace, but this is the first to use artificial intelligence to complete the design.

Sktech2Code was born out of the "intrinsic" problem, as Shankar Jana puts it, of sending pictures of wireframe web or app designs from whiteboards or paper to a designer to create an HTML prototype.

To break this process Microsoft developed a web-based application which cuts out the extra human element (in this case the designer) and instead, images taken of sketches are sent to AI servers based on Redmond's Azure cloud infrastructure.

These AI servers then run those images against a pre-built AI model and then creates an HTML code base followed by a resulting app. At the centre of this system is something called a "custom vision object prediction model" which is basically a tool of image recognition, which has been specifically trained with datasets of hand-drawn images.

The model identifies the basic HTML elements such as buttons, labels and text boxes, which allows it to predict when any of those elements are present in any given image. It also can recognise handwritten text within the boxes to create a fully formed app or a webpage.

The tool is available for developers on GitHub and its code is independent of HTML, according to Shankar Jana, and can be extracted with XAML and Universal Windows Platform.

Digital twinning was once thought of as revolutionary technology, exclusively used for high-value projects and products. Now, it's being used to tackle more everyday manufacturing problems and is poised to become more commonplace across numerous other sectors.

Digital twinning involves taking a physical asset and creating an exact copy of that asset in the digital world. Using data from sensors attached to the physical asset, organisations can analyse its efficiency, errors or anomalies, to improve and optimise performance, and understand the condition of the asset in real-time.

With a model that is both digital and dynamic, businesses can accurately conduct tests on how the physical version will perform in the real world, across the duration of its lifecycle. The clear advantage of digital twinning for businesses is the ability to experiment in the digital world much less destructively, at large scale.

Organisations have already adopted digital twinning in the "make" industry for product design and machine design but also in the building industry. In the building industry, for example, it's particularly useful for architects, contractors, operators and owners to model and emulate the entire lifecycle of a building before it is even starting to be built.

Having a digital twin of building projects is becoming increasingly prevalent. For instance, the new £15-billion Crossrail project -- the construction of a new high frequency, high capacity railway for London and the South East of England - has its own digital twin. You can use a computer model and computer generated tests to learn about the behaviour, optimize designs and minimize waste.

As computing power has become ubiquitous, the number of scenarios and alternatives you can analyse are endless. This type of synthetic learning will result in a better-built environment.

Historically, design components did not have any machine intelligence of their own. Businesses had no means of establishing how changes to different elements or environmental factors impacted overall behaviours within a design. Digital twinning relies on mountains of analytics and open federated data, and continuously learns and updates itself from multiple sources, to represent its near real-time status, working condition or position.

A digital twin can also be used for monitoring diagnostics and prognostics to optimise asset performance and utilisation. Here, sensor data can be combined with historical data, human expertise and fleet and simulation learning, to improve the outcome of prognostics. The goal is to gain insights into the behaviour and performance of physical objects, by exploring them in more detail via a digital representation.

As part of what has been dubbed "the fourth industrial revolution" (or Industry 4.0), this form of machine learning will hugely impact the manufacturing landscape, with 85% of Internet -of-Things-enabled platforms having digital twin functionality within the next five years, according to a recent global report conducted by Research and Markets.

Teams put in place to manually maintain these assets in the past will now be less vulnerable to an unplanned failure or crisis and will, instead, have more time to make changes rather than conducting checks on the asset in person.

Channel partners with a value-added sales approach understand what it takes to work with IT or IP- based technology across many industries, thus, digital twinning represents an enormous opportunity for 2018 and beyond.

It pushes out the technology envelope and embodies a far more sophisticated way to understand behaviours of the physical world. Those who understand how to connect the virtual and the physical worlds are perfectly placed to exploit a growing demand for this tech going forward.

Abel Smit is IoT consulting and customer success director at Tech Data Europe

Containerisation is fast becoming one of the most popular methods of deploying applications in a virtual environment, and is widely considered to be making 'virtual machines' a thing of the past.

Yet what exactly are containers and why should you bother moving from a tried and trusted VM?

Containers? You mean like boxes for moving our computer gear?

Not exactly we're not talking about packaging up physical appliances here. But in the IT operational sense, containers are pretty much the same idea, only for applications. Docker, which is the best-known proponent of the technology, defines a container as a "lightweight, standalone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings".

Is 'container' just a fashionable term for VM?

Containers and virtual machines do share some similarities, particularly to do with resource isolation. But they're not the same thing. A virtual machine is primarily an abstraction of a hardware platform an approach that makes it easy to turn one physical server into lots of independent virtual ones. In a setup like this, each VM runs its own operating system and application stack.

Containers, by contrast, focus on virtualising an operating environment. Multiple containers can run concurrently under a single OS, just like regular applications. It's a more efficient technology, and much more portable.

And we need this why, exactly?

Containers are tremendously useful when it comes to moving software between different computing environments for example, moving an application from testing into production, or from physical hardware into the cloud.

You can be confident that things will continue to work as expected, even if the supporting software environment has a completely different network topology, security policy or hardware configuration. And since containers don't require a complete OS installation, you can fit more containerised apps than VMs onto a single server.

So containers are only good for porting applications?

Containers are also very useful for development. They're a great fit for the microservices, modular way of doing things. The key is that you don't need to run everything within a single container: you can connect together multiple containers to build an application out of known quantities.

This is a huge help when it comes to management and development, as individual modules can be updated individually - and it's efficient too, as each container is only initiated (in an almost instant, "just in time" fashion) when it's needed.

That sounds good. But do we have to tie ourselves to Docker?

Not at all containers have been built directly into Linux for years now, under the umbrella of the LXC user space interface for kernel containment features (you can read more on this here). Another free, open source container system is Kubernetes. However, if flexibility and support are priorities, Docker is probably the biggest and best-known cross-platform container technology vendor.

Will we be locking ourselves into the framework we choose?

You're right to raise the question: app container images can be proprietary. For example, Docker and CoreOS have had differing specifications in the past. However, since 2015 the Linux Foundation's Open Container Initiative (OCI) has been working on a standard container format. Both Docker and CoreOS are sponsors, along with the likes of AWS, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. So things are only going to get easier.

So are containers more secure than VMs?

One aspect of container technology that seems to cause endless debate is security. The concern is that, because multiple containers can run on one host platform, a single compromise could affect a whole stack of containers. That's less of a concern with virtual machines, since each one is completely isolated from the other VMs running on the same hardware. What's more, hypervisors don't expose the entire functionality of the Linux kernel, so the attack surface of a VM is smaller, which again reduces the risk.

But containers have security strengths too. The model allows for a microservices approach, which modularises an application into a well-defined interface and limited package services making it hard for anything to slip through the cracks.

Containers can also be scanned on access, and network segmentation can be used to isolate application clusters. In all, a well configured, properly deployed container should be just as secure as a virtual machine; the only catch is that you need to ensure that your containers meet those standards.

So, the big question: how do we get management to buy in?

As we've mentioned, containers can save money versus virtual machines, as the hardware demands are lesser. There's also the potential for quicker deployment: when you need to roll out application updates, it's much easier to replace a few containers than to update an entire virtual machine.

Containers also bring flexibility to the party: your developers can write in almost any language, and deploy painlessly to both Windows and Linux, so they're not wasting time adapting to the idiosyncrasies of your environment. And, of course, since test, staging and deployment environments are identical, bugs are much less likely to make it into the final production code.

Should we just ditch our VMs and switch entirely to containers?

If you need to run a big stack of apps on a modest allocation of resources then containers probably make more sense than VMs. But even the container vendors admit that virtualisation and containers work best when used together.

One option is to run your containers within VMs: this provides even better isolation and better security, as well as allowing you to easily manage your virtual hardware infrastructure management so for many scenarios it's the best of both worlds.

Image: Shutterstock

University College London (UCL) has implemented Citrix's XenDesktop cloud-based virtualisation software to power a secure workspace its students and staff can use to access the apps and devices they need, wherever they may be.

UCL's students and staff previously had to rely on limited PCs on campus to access the software they needed to complete assignments, or risk using unlicensed applications. File sharing was also an issue because the university had no collaborative virtual space where they could store documents.

The university chose Citrix XenDesktop to provide 24/7 access to all the resources needed because of its ease of use. Students don't have to rely on a VPN and it's as simple as operating an on-site PC.

Additionally, the solution means UCL can react to spikes in demand. When assignments are due at various points throughout the year it doesn't matter if every course has deadlines because the university can set up temporary workspaces, even if the PCs don't have the required software installed on them.

"We now use a number of non-university buildings for teaching," Anthony Peacock, head of Windows infrastructure services, UCL said. "XenDesktop lets us provide those locations with the same applications and facilities that are available on campus.

"Universities have a different approach to IT governance than big business. IT can either say we only support our own stuff, or else help staff and students to do what they want in the right way. The UCL approach is to help people use their own devices in the most secure and effective way possible."

UCL has a rapidly growing student population and the resources required to service them all is growing too. Offering a solution that means anyone can access anything, anywhere, in a completely secure environment was key.

"The future of work is mobile and secure. In an environment as complex as UCL, Citrix allows the IT team to protect what matters, whilst encouraging flexibility and freedom amongst staff and students," Darren Fields, regional director of Citrix UK & Ireland, said. "UCL's decision to deploy Citrix technology is testament to its commitment to delivering the best possible service to the staff and students it supports."

Finding the right VMware certification to help you achieve your career aspirations is not an easy task. Being certified means that you are up to date with the latest cloud and virtualisation technologies.

A VMware certification is a must-have for any IT professional interested in virtualisation. So, let's look are what the options are.

The most current version of VMware certification is Version 6. VMware certifications can be divided up into four categories: Cloud Management and Automation, Data Centre Virtualisation, Desktop and Mobility, and Network Virtualisation.

Each of these categories offers several certification levels: VMware Certified Associate (VCA), VMware Certified Professional (VCP), VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP), VMware Certified Implementation Expert (VCIX), and VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX).

The VMware Certified Associate (VCA), is the newest of the certifications and is also the entry-level one for IT professionals.

This certificate is for those who are not particularly technical but need to demonstrate their understanding of VMware technology. This is not an exam to take if you need to prove technical skills, rather it will show a capacity for deploying the correct VMware technology in an organisation.

The VMware Certified Professional (VCP) is a mid-level certification that shows the IT professional is technically proficient with VMware VSphere and associated technology. As well as the base certification, there are also VCP certification tracks: VCP-DCV, VCP-NV, VCP-CMA and VCP-DTM.

VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP) is an upper-midlevel certification. It professionals must first be VCP certified. There are VCAP tracks: data centre virtualisation, end-user computing and cloud. Each of these has two certifications: advanced administrator and advanced designer.

VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest-level certificate for IT professionals.

With this certificate, holders can prove they have a deep understanding of VMware product design and deployment.

There are three tracks for this certificate: Data centre virtualisation, cloud and end-user computing. To hold this certificate, candidates need to have passed the enterprise administration and design exams.

Then a candidate must create and tender a plan for a large virtualised infrastructure environment this comprises architectural diagrams and support documents. If this is accepted, the candidate must go before a panel of VCDX holders and present the plan and also take questions on the plan from the panel.

How to get a certificate

Before you can get a VMware certificate, IT Professionals must take part in an official VMware training course. Courses can be found on sites such as mylearn.vmware.com.

It is a good idea to get certified as the technology here is still quite new and will stand out on a CV to any prospective employer and can improve your salary level.

Once the certificate has been obtained, however, there is a requirement to get re-certified every two years. It is important to re-certify before any deadlines as this may risk putting an employer out of compliance if certifications lapse.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used the company's annual European conference today to reaffirm his company's continued independence from its new parent company, Dell Technologies.

VMware became part of Dell Technologies when Dell acquired the EMC Federation, of which VMware was part, in 2016. There have since been regular questions over the company's independence, particularly its independence from the infrastructure arm of the new business, Dell EMC.

Addressing those questions again from delegates during his second day keynote, Gelsinger said: "I've described three words when we announced the ... acquisition by Dell of EMC: one is independence, second is ecosystem and third, acceleration.

"Independence: we're an independent company ... governed by the board and as Michael [Dell] has said, what's good for VMware is good for Dell Technologies."

He added: "Ecosystem: we will continue to have a vibrant, dynamic, diverse ecosystem, and I think there's nowhere more evident of that than at VMworld. Michael has some partnerships I'm not as comfortable with and I have some that he's not as comfortable with, but overall that's the purpose of having the independence; we can each go forward and thrive in the industry."

He concluded that the third word, acceleration, sees many products come out of these partnerships.

CTO Ray O'Farrell agreed, saying it's important the firm still gets to work with other partners.

"I personally spend a lot of time focused on particularly the technology interactions between the broader Dell Technologies organisation [and VMware]," said O'Farrell.

"It's very empowering [to work with] this enormously powerful IT infrastructure company, we're able to work with them day-to-day, understand how we can leverage some of the things they do and learn from their experience. But at the same time ... I equally get to sit with a broad ecosystem of partners HP, Lenovo and so on all of the players across the industry."

Sanjay Poonen, COO of customer relations, who was on stage with Gelsinger and O'Farrell, added: "We're optimised for [Dell EMC], not tethered to [it]. Dell EMC is a very powerful player now in IT, one of the largest in IT. When they sell servers, we want to attach to them."

He continued: "But not being tethered means that there are some accounts that use Dell servers and maybe NetApp storage, or HPE servers and EMC storage, or none of them ... so we will take advantage of the Dell ecosystem and go-to-market where we can, but never be tethered to it."

Main image credit: Jane McCallion/IT Pro

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, creators of the super-popular $35 micro-computer, is launching an Approved Reseller programme to recognise its best distribution partners.

The scheme is designed to both make purchasing Raspberry Pi units and accessories easier for customers, and to highlight those resellers that the charity feels represent the Raspberry Pi brand especially well.

From today, customers are able to access the online store pages of approved resellers directly from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's products page via the 'Buy now' button, with a 'Buy for business' option available for those who wish to purchase enterprise inventory from one of the foundation's two licensed partners for business distribution.

The Approved Reseller programme will initially launch in 11 countries - South Africa, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the UK - but the foundation plans to expand the programme to more than 50 countries in the coming weeks.

"Ever since the launch of the first Raspberry Pi back in 2012, one thing that has been critical to us is to make our products easy to buy in as many countries as possible," director of product management, Mike Buffham, wrote in a blog post. "Buying a Raspberry Pi is certainly much simpler nowadays than it was when we were just starting out. Nevertheless, we want to go even further".

In addition to this, the foundation is also unveiling six new resellers for the Raspberry Pi Zero, the smaller $5 variant of the Raspberry Pi. The new resellers will directly supply 13 countries that previously lacked access to the Raspberry Pi Zero, including Brazil and India.

UK resellers currently listed on RaspberryPi.org are CPC, The Pi Hut, Mod My Pi, Pi Supply, and RS.

Calor Gas has underpinned a virtualised desktop infrastructure (VDI) with hyperconverged infrastructure, in order to deal with bursts in activity.

The liquid petroleum gas supplier has 1,400 staff in 70 locations who rely on its IT systems, with the majority of those systems delivered through Citrix XenApp.

"Our use of XenApp goes back to the turn of the century, so we've been a longstanding Citrix customer," Andy Browne, infrastructure manager at Calor Gas, tells Cloud Pro.

The company initially turned to XenApp to avoid delivering a client server-based ERP application in a traditional PC and database set-up, then decided to simply deliver its entire desktop experience to users as VDI through the Citrix platform.

"It really has suited Calor's business and enabled us to have all of our compute power at the centre of the organisation - all the management benefits, where we've got a very small footprint now with our end users, who are mainly office workers," Browne says.

But when Calor started to hit the limits of its own storage capacity, it turned to infrastructure provider Atlantis Computing to improve the delivery of Citrix XenApp.

"We were starting to come to the maximum performance of our existing storage infrastructure and we wanted to boost the performance of our XenApp environment," explains Browne. "We implemented Atlantis's ILIO product ... which took that storage footprint and storage load off our existing storage platform and allowed us to isolate that and give a nice boost in performance."

But when Calor decided to implement a full VDI with Citrix XenDesktop 18 months ago, it realised it needed more storage capacity to cope with bursts in traffic.

"We wanted to implement a storage infrastructure to support a virtual desktop implementation, as well as refreshing some of the hardware that was running our Citrix XenApp environment," Brown explains.

"We needed to increase our storage performance to cope with the bursty traffic that is typical in a VDI environment, but expanding our existing storage wasn't cost effective at all," he says.

Inititally the VDI project was parked as a result.

"We went out to market and looked at various solutions, such as upgrading our existing storage infrastructure to take into account that additional workload ... or building a solution ourselves using off-the-shelf technology, as well as some of the converged and hyperconverged environments that are out there," Brown adds.

Ultimately, Calor decided to use HyperScale, Atlantis's all-flash hyperconverged appliance, finding it provides the consistent performance a VDI environment needs.

It also deployed the vendor's USX software-defined storage (SDS) tool, which provides a data recovery (DR) capability.

"It's allowed us to start to build and build out our Citrix XenDesktop VDI platform," Browne explains. "We've done a POC [proof of concept] of that and a pilot, so now we're starting to upgrade that and deliver some new platforms out to our end users."

Some obstacles remain, however, including cloud, and whether it will play a part in Calor's VDI environment.

Browne says: "We're finding more and more that applications that we're looking to implement are only available as cloud-based applications or it's only practical for us to implement them as such."

"Ten years ago, even five years ago, we were implementing a lot more on-premise applications into our data centre," he adds. "We're now seeing a landscape where in the next three years, rather than our storage requirements and our performance requirements on-premise going up, there's a chance they might go down as technology such as modern CRMs and the use of Google Docs and Office 365 are coming into play."

"What we then want to be able to take advantage of is that compute and storage power in the cloud, so our big unknown is what's going to happen with desktop in that environment and whether we're going to see more use of cloud-desktop to meet Calor's business needs," Browne explains.

"We're not seeing a major driver for it at the moment, but in the next three-to-five years, as the rest of our estate floats off into the cloud, we're going to be left with how we deliver our desktop to our own users and whether that's something we continue to deliver ourselves, or whether we choose to take advantage of another technology."

VMware has issued a security advisory for two flaws in its AirWatch enterprise mobility management suite, urging customers to update immediately.

The issues affect two of the company's Android apps: the AirWatch Agent for Android, and the AirWatch Inbox for Android.

The vulnerability in the AirWatch Agent app allows devices to bypass root detection on enrolment, potentially allowing rogue devices onto corporate networks with access to Airwatch security controls and data. The AirWatch Inbox flaw could expose confidential data to attackers.

VMware's advisory read: "Airwatch Agent for Android contains a vulnerability that may allow a device to bypass root detection during enrollment. Successful exploitation of this issue may result in an enrolled device having unrestricted access over local Airwatch security controls and data."

Both flaws have now been fixed, and updated versions are available via the Google Play store.

A VMware spokesperson said in a statement: "The issue has been remediated and the apps are available in the public app stores. VMware published this security advisory as part of our regular transparency with the market and the security ecosystem."

The news comes after VMware's 2016 financial results last week, when the company revealed it made more than $7 billion in annual revenue.

NSX was a key driver of this, with CEO Pat Gelsinger calling it a "land and expand" product, as customers purchase it for one task but end up using it more widely. NSX doubled its customer numbers, the virtualisation company said, and has now hit a run rate of $1 billion per year.

The company's acquisition by Dell as part of its merger with EMC has also spurred growth, according to Gelsinger, who said that the new ownership should add $1 billion to its revenue over time.

CFO Zane Rowe said: "This was a very good year for VMware demonstrated by strong revenue, earnings and cash flow growth".

Hyperconvergence is another one of 2016’s tech buzzwords.

A couple of years ago, hyperconvergence was synonymous with a wave of start-ups set on disrupting the stranglehold that a handful of storage giants have on the market. Now, those same incumbents are looking to grab their own slice of the pie, leading to an increasingly crowded arena.

But what is the reality of hyperconvergence to date, and how can the channel profit from it?

In a nutshell, hyperconvergence is software-centric architecture that merges storage, servers and virtualisation technologies into a single stack, providing operational and cost efficiencies in the datacentre.

Looking beyond the hype, the technology is beginning to see mainstream adoption; ActualTech Media’s 2016 State of the Hyperconverged Infrastructure Market Report states that hyperconverged infrastructure adoption has exploded this year, with a 54 percent increase in companies adopting hyperconverged infrastructure worldwide.

Of specific interest to the channel, hyperconvergence is no longer the purview of the large enterprise. The survey found that adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure almost doubled in the midmarket, with an 80 percent increase in worldwide midmarket adoption year-over-year.

The report also found that organisations in EMEA are outpacing the rest of the world in adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure. Forty-six percent of EMEA respondents indicated that they have adopted hyperconverged infrastructure in some way, compared to 27 percent of EMEA respondents in the 2015 report, representing a seventy percent (70 percent) increase in adoption in the region year-over-year.

Moreover, hyperconvergence is moving beyond niche use cases to the mainstream. In just the last few years, VDI was the primary use case for hyperconvergence and, more recently, vendors have been making big pushes into remote office/branch office (ROBO) use cases. However, the data in the survey indicates that the technology is now enjoying broad use case and workload support.

Up until recently, one of its biggest hurdles for the channel was educating the market on the potential benefits of hyperconvergence. Now it seems the hyperconvergence train has arrived and many resellers and service providers are already on board – evidence of this is hyperconvergence pioneer Nutanix’s succesful IPO this year.

However, Nutanix co-founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey recently raised the point that many resellers are still put off selling hyperconvergence as they are “beholden to legacy vendors, and big box selling”. Pandey said it was a challenge to find partners who were willing to look beyond their established set-up selling three-tier architecture from the likes of EMC and NetApp.

There may also be some push back from individual budget holders such as network or storage managers who worry that technologies like hyperconvergence will render their jobs obsolete. This has happened elsewhere with cloud, but with any new technology, in-house IT roles continue to evolve and focus is directed elsewhere and onto different projects – its it’s rarely the disaster they fear.

Another challenge is that selling a hyperconvergence system essentially removes much of the service revenues around maintaining legacy on-premise hardware. For every £1 of a hyperconverged solution that they sell, a reseller may lose £3 in services revenue, as there’s little actual kit to install or maintain. There isn’t the complexity or anything to ‘manage’ with hyperconvergence; it’s a self-service model and managed all with a single interface.

But as we’re seeing across the IT industry, channel firms are being forced to adapt their business models in line with the changing ways that customers consume their IT, along with shrinking margins on hardware sales. The key to hyperconvergence sales will lie in developing a strong, software-driven professional services business to replace the ‘rack and stack’ model of days gone by.

In addition, the hyperconverged stack can account for 70-80 percent of the IT department, so resellers will get a bigger share of the budget than before, and have the potential to develop a closer relationship with the client.

Aside from that, channel companies should already be thinking about now to re-architect their businesses, and sales their compensation models, to accommodate customers that want to pay as they grow.

All these things could mean some potentially big changes to the traditional channel sales model. But the whole IT industry is in transition, and selling hyperconverged infrastructure epitomises the new software-driven, flexible consumption model that the channel must embrace if they are to continue to succeed in the future.

Windows 10 is set to get a suite of new business functionality, thanks to a renewed partnership between Microsoft and virtualisation firm Citrix.

Speaking at Citrix Synergy 2016 in Las Vegas, new CEO Kirill Tatarinov announced the company will enable XenDesktop VDI to deliver Windows 10 as-a-service from Microsoft's Azure Cloud.

Tatarinov said that the move is based both on the companies' existing 25-year partnership and the fact that businesses are increasingly moving or wanting to move to Windows 10.

"Today, I'm very excited that we're taking our longstanding, storied partnership with Microsoft to the next level," said Tatarinov.

"We're working together to enable XenDesktop powered VDI to help deliver Windows 10 desktop as a service from Azure cloud," he continued. "In my conversation with many customers, Windows 10 deployments are accelerating at an ever increasing pace and many of our customers tell me that they want to deploy Windows 10 on refurbished hardware in a virtualised fashion. And this partnership unleashes that opportunity and enables us to do it and get it to the next phase."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also hailed the renewed collaboration between the two companies.

Appearing via video, he said: "At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more and core to this mission is fostering a strong partnership with companies like Citrix."

"Citrix is helping our mutual customers accelerate the adoption of Office 365 and Windows 10, enabling them to easily collaborate from anywhere on the most secure and the most productive platform for business," he added. "I'm truly excited by the work that the two companies are doing together to bring these new innovations to market and help organisations of all sizes transform and seize the opportunities ahead."

BigTec UK has struck a distribution agreement with Nuage Networks from Nokia, a provider of software-defined networking (SDN) solutions for enterprise datacentres.

The deal was announced at the BigTec Live 2016 event in London, along with more details about the full BigTec UK reference architecture. Big Tec UK will distribute the full Nuage Networks portfolio, which today includes the Virtualised Services Platform (VSP), Virtualised Network Services (VNS) and Virtualised Services Assurance Platform (VSAP).

“The inconvenient truth about datacentre virtualisation is just how tough it becomes to manage multiple hypervisors, multiple clouds, and an explosion in the number of virtual endpoints,” says Jason Dance, managing director at BigTec UK.

“With Nuage Networks SDN technology, organisations no longer will find it prohibitively complicated to scale up and harness the true power of their underlying networks. Nuage Networks provides great opportunities for our reseller partners, and works in tandem with our other vendor technologies – particularly security and software defined WANs.”

The vendor says its SDN overlay helps large enterprises simplify network operations, deploy applications with more agility and adapt network services instantaneously to match changing IT demands.

“The UK is a growing market for Nuage Networks, as large enterprises continue to adopt cloud and virtualisation technology. To meet growing and rapidly changing IT needs, enterprises must make the network infrastructure as dynamic and easily consumable as the compute infrastructure,” says Charles Ferland, VP, business development, Nuage Networks. “With BigTec’s skills and relationships, we will build a committed cohort of local partners and help them succeed.”

BigTec says it will provide demand creation marketing activity, events as well as technical pre-sales and support.

See also:

Software Defined Networking: A quick guide

You’ve heard of server virtualisation. You’ve heard of network virtualisation. But have you considered virtualising your data yet? Although they were once concepts that seemed outlandish, server and network virtualisation brought about a number of benefits for the users who came around to adopting them, eventually going on to become commonplace in today’s enterprise IT departments. We’ll soon be seeing the same for data virtualisation.

Copy data virtualisation – freeing organisations’ data from their legacy physical infrastructure – is increasingly seen as the way to deal with the huge amounts of data that are produced within organisations by data copying. In practice, copy data virtualisation makes virtual copies of ‘production quality' data available immediately to everyone in the business that needs it.

While the benefits of adopting copy data virtualisation are far ranging, from increased data protection, to instant data access and mobility, perhaps the most attractive one is the amount of money it saves organisations. Enterprises adopting copy data virtualisation have been able to save upwards of $3m in some cases, dramatically transforming their businesses and the way they function.

Here are five ways copy data virtualisation could streamline your business, improve performance and save you millions in 2016:

Storage footprint is reduced

A recent IDC study revealed that enterprises have an average of 13 physical copies of critical databases and file systems within their organisation, all of which take up storage space in data centres. This data then needs to be managed internally too. By virtualising this data, businesses are able to eliminate the need to have multiple physical copies, reducing the necessary amount of copies to just two - one set of production data and one “golden master copy” that can be virtually provisioned as many times as needed, at any time, any place. With a smaller storage footprint comes a smaller storage bill.

The removal of redundant technologies

To adhere with compliance standards for data protection, IT departments adopt a number of overlapping technologies, such as software for backups, snapshots, disaster recovery, and more. Data virtualisation removes the need for all of these redundant technologies by creating virtual, on-demand data copies.

A significant reduction in downtime

According to figures from Gartner, businesses can lose an average of $5,600 per minute in an outage, adding up to more than $300,000 per hour. Dated backup and DR systems are slow to recover data in the event of an outage, taking days or even weeks to recover data. When data has been virtualised, recovery times drop to minutes or hours, all while ensuring delivery of aggressive RTOs and RPOs.

Manpower is reduced

As virtualised data requires less maintenance and time spent monitoring redundant systems, as well as the reduced downtime, there is no longer the necessity for a large IT team focussed on sheer data management. Alternatively, the amount of time freed up by data virtualisation adoption means the team can now get on with more important projects that move the business forward and improve efficiencies across the organisation.

Moving your business forward

Like the way data virtualisation slashes recovery time during an outage, it also slashes provisioning time for data required during test and development. With data virtualisation, provisioning a data copy can take less than a minute and can even be self serviced. With the dev team able to focus more on application development and less on the process waiting for ops to produce test data for them, organisations can enjoy faster-time-to-market and move their business forward – in 2016.

Ash Ashutosh is CEO of Actifio

Are your customers thinking of VDI? Maybe a physical migration? Perhaps a mix of both?

It’s always an interesting exercise to establish the drivers for the aforementioned projects.

Mostly, it’s about providing users with an enhanced, more flexible experience that also has a measure of future-proofing included. While there’s no doubting that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can provide users with some of the above, true future-proofing might be a bit of a stretch (at least for VDI in its purest form). VDI is also a more complex solution than customers might initially think and can take some time to get from pilot to production, and at a scale that can deliver a tangible ROI.

Regardless of which direction your customers choose: VDI, Physical, Published Apps, or a combination, there is a strong argument for getting user profiles and data under control in the first instance. By adopting a solution that goes beyond standard roaming profiles you will, by definition, be improving the user experience and making their time using their chosen device(s) more flexible.

By going a stage further and adopting a full user experience management solution (UEM) you will provide an even more flexible user experience and give users a true ‘follow me’ profile wherever they choose to work. Moreover, by ‘virtualising’ the user profile and data, you instantly make them portable, so irrespective of whether a customer decides to go VDI now or later, they have the option of moving the user profiles and data into the new environment whenever they choose to.

In so doing they are effectively adding a level of ‘future-proofing’ to the user environment whilst also giving their users an enhanced experience now. The same is true for moving users from physical OS to physical OS, such as a Windows 7 to Windows 10 migration. A UEM solution offers just this level of flexibility and, combined with user assessment to tell you precisely who is doing what, when and with what, you can start to rationalise their profiles and the applications they utilise.

You and your customers can then start to build and plan the user profiles based on these baseline metrics and using our departmental and user installed applications (DIA and UIA), they can start to deliver streamlined and managed profiles in a very short space of time. The ultimate goal of VDI is to have the smallest gold image, and minimum number of images as possible, and no one wants to virtualise applications that are never used. This process will really help scale down the amount of applications that are installed in the base image, which will also apply equally as well to physical users. So, again, getting the profiles managed properly now can only help further down the line if VDI is adopted.

There are so many factors in a VDI project, all of which could delay it, with no real guarantee of you securing the business. So, there is nothing to stop the VDI consultation going ahead, but by getting the user profiles under control now, this will enhance your customer’s experience in the first instance. This could help build trust with the customer and hopefully secure the VDI project further down the line – and certainly make the whole migration process to VDI a whole lot simpler (or indeed physical to physical should they so choose).

So, by offering a full initial user experience assessment and implementing a full UEM and application layering solution, customers can immediately start to streamline and harmonise user profiles and offer a much-improved experience. And of course, by providing this guidance to your customers, we are confident they will reap the rewards in the short and longer term and will help to reinforce your position as a trusted advisor.

Fraser Norman is UK and Ireland channel director, Liquidware Labs

Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) interim CEO Bob Calderoni has vowed to go back to basics following a turbulent 12 months.

Speaking at its global partner event, Citrix Summit, Calderoni (pictured) said the vendor was refocusing on its core strengths of secure delivery of apps and data.

“People are too often looking for what’s new…and ignore what’s been successful and never sticking with one thing long enough for it to be successful,” he said. “If we look at back at Citrix over the past couple of years I think we were guilty of that ourselves.”

He told partners: “From a product perspective we’re no longer spreading our limited resources across so many things, most of them were too small to ever make a difference.”

2015 saw the firm cede to activist investor pressure, highlighted by the exit of long-time CEO Mark Templeton, as well as plans to spin off its GoTo range of products and cut 1,000 jobs.

The only reference to the disruption at the event was made by Carlos Sartorius, Citrix’s worldwide sales and services chief, who thanked the firm’s partners, employees and customers for sticking with Citrix.

He said 2015 “wasn’t an easy start; we all thought we would be able to pick up and go quickly, but we had some hurdles, some disappointments, some low points in the first half. But then we got together and were able to focus and were able to come back.”

The exec admitted that Citrix’s broad portfolio has made it expensive for partners in the past, particularly with training employees. “We brought in a lot of new products, a lot of distractions,” he said.

While announcing yesterday that it was offloading its CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager product lines, Citrix announced it will refocus on its NetScaler application delivery controller (ADC), XenServer and Citrix Workspace Cloud.

“[NetScaler] will be core to the future growth of the company,” said Klaus Oestermann, Citrix’s SVP and general manager, delivery networks, to cheers from partners. “The NetScaler brand is very strong and you you’ll see us double down on our marketing efforts in 2016.”

Citrix channel chief Kimberly Martin also detailed a new campaign to grab midmarket share in 2016.

“We need to take all the good things that we did and make it better and be relevant moving forward,” Sartorius tells Channel Pro.

He revealed Citrix has been testing its new ‘back to basics’ message with partners over the past few months, who he claims “are pleased that we’re clear that these are our core products and this is our core messaging.”

By combining the powers of systems and storage, virtualisation, and networking technology into a single, optimised product, the emergence of converged infrastructure over the last five years or so has lifted much of the strategic IT burden: one design, one install, and no fussing over the precise configuration of three separate technologies.

Additionally, there’s plenty of scope to organise converged infrastructure to fit the client’s precise specifications: they aren’t paying for three separate technologies that are each wrong for the company’s needs in their own unique way, but one package that suits their objectives exactly.

Understanding the converged infrastructure skills shortage

Converged infrastructure’s popularity is not difficult to understand – but it is having a ripple effect across the channel, and the consequences are not entirely positive. The area is plagued by skills shortages and not for any simple reason like a lack of competency in virtualisation, networking technology, or systems and storage. All three do happen to be in shortage, because technology is effectively moving too quickly for everyone to keep their skillsets up to date, but it goes further than this.

The converged infrastructure skills shortage is as simple as this: in order to work effectively, it needs channel staff who are experts across all three technologies. This level of knowledge and skill was unnecessary before the emergence of the solution, and therefore very uncommon when it entered the IT mainstream.

Currently, those who do possess this knowledge are naturally highly prized in the market and seldom spend any serious length of time out of work – and because they’re consequently well-compensated, passive candidates are often difficult (and expensive) to prise out of their existing positions. They are nearly always working on huge projects for huge clients, using cutting-edge technology; career-wise, they believe themselves close to the summit, and are hard to persuade otherwise.

We can also attribute the skills shortage to a lack of training across the industry. Converged infrastructure may have been a great idea, but it was not a widely anticipated one – and certainly not by businesses. Most organisations implementing the solution will be doing so for the very first time, but won’t have thought to train their staff in its use; this makes the problem worse, and makes the need for specialist help far more pressing.

Finally, there’s the stratospheric ascent of cloud-based technological solutions, which has some clear parallels with the rise of converged infrastructure, especially in terms of rapid adoption (and the associated uncertainty).

As more companies migrate their data and applications to the cloud, it becomes necessary to converge infrastructure in order to cope with the increased demands on the system and to maintain efficiencies. But the cloud’s rise has arguably been too rapid: it’s being adopted before staff have the competencies necessary to support it.

Traversing the skill gap

These difficulties can discourage IT companies from adopting a converged infrastructure model, and understandably so: it can seem like the beneficial aspects of the solution aren’t worth jumping through all those hoops. Nonetheless, they shouldn’t be dissuaded: though it will take work, it will also be worth it in the long run, and the right talent is out there – if you know where to look.

Of course, you won’t know where to look at all. Your first step should be to use a staffing firm that specialises in technology and infrastructure recruitment. Typically, these organisations will have access to a wider network of potential hires, and experience of placing them elsewhere; they’ll understand their specific requirements, and how you can put together an employment package to tempt them away.

Naturally, a recruiter can only do so much, and a candidate will only be tempted away if your company represents an attractive opportunity for them. Remember, these potential hires will be working at the very pinnacle of the industry; you need to be able to offer them better pay, more interesting (and accommodating) clients, better projects, and the prospect of further training and career development – after all, if they’re considering moving at all, it’s likely because they feel like they’ve stalled or plateaued somehow.

You also need to throw in some perks. Think about how you can create a working environment that might appeal to the very best in the business – and be prepared to budge if the candidate’s opinion differs. Obviously, you don’t want to bend too much: they can’t dictate the shape of the company, and if a demand is unreasonable you by no means have to fulfil it.

That said, if they make a request that will help them perform their roles more comfortably – i.e. remote working – you’d be well-advised to accommodate it. Mobility is less of a ‘perk’ than something the modern employee expects, and one of the advantages you’ll have over bigger companies in the eyes of a top-class candidate is that you can offer a more flexible approach.

There are no guarantees, of course, but by following the above steps you should be able to secure the talent you need to make your converged infrastructure solution work for your business – for the present moment, and in the immediate (and distant) future.

Cloud Distribution has launched a new appliance aimed at SMEs, effectively turning the distie into an OEM.

Dubbed hyperserV, the appliance is billed as “hyperconverged” and combines storage, compute, networking and virtualisation within its core and places enterprise technology directly into SME server rooms, according to the distie-turned OEM.

It says that the the benefits of hyperconvergence has previously been cost prohibitive for smaller organisations and the appliance would be one of the first plug-and-play systems available for smaller firms. It says this would offer channel partners a “huge opportunity to deliver new value for companies, organisations and departments, with a fully virtualised, enterprise class, easy to use and deploy, data centre solution”.

The appliance runs DataCore Software’s Virtual SAN solution and comes with a price tag aimed at SMEs that would be “highly attractive”. The appliance is also claimed to help reduce server room footprint by up to 90 percent. In turn this would directly decrease support and energy costs and allow resource constrained IT pros to redirect their effort away from potentially cumbersome storage management into innovation and delivering IT as-a-service for their organisations, the distie says.

The hyperserV appliance is technically validated by DataCore as part of the ‘DataCore Ready’ Programme, and combines high-availability and high-performance with capabilities such as automated tiering of data; caching to increase application performance and thin provisioning of existing storage.

“We are thrilled to see that hyperserV is powered by DataCore's Virtual SAN Software, and have worked closely with Cloud Distribution to validate this appealing solution. There is an increasing appetite from SMEs for hyperconvergence in the UK, simply because of the ability to dramatically optimise storage environments without the overhead of SAN management,” says Brett Denly, regional director of DataCore Software UK.

Bruce Hockin, director of storage solutions, Cloud Distribution (pictured) adds that hyperconvergence shouldn’t be for the exclusive use of the enterprise and channel partners simply don’t want the pain of putting together an ‘out of the box’ solution themselves.

“By bringing hyperserV direct to the channel, we are empowering our partners to make hyperconvergence accessible to the SME market and generate new revenue streams. We are now actively recruiting partners to embrace hyperserV, especially those who target education, local government, legal and not for profit organisations,” he says.

The appliance is available in four models with a choice of capacity points and hypervisors. They are shipping now and start with a recommended street price of £31,199 for the 8TB model and includes three years 24/7 support and next day onsite hardware engineer as standard.

RES Software says it has rounded out its two-tier channel strategy for the UK with the appointment of distributor Prianto.

The firm says Prianto’s focus on the virtualisation and application availability markets will provide its partners with access to new market opportunities, as well as growing the RES Software partner base.

Prianto will provide resellers with specialist support and technical expertise around RES Software solutions for workspace management and automation across virtual and physical IT environments. RES Software has stressed it wants Prianto to reduce the amount of time it takes for resellers to get trained up on its technology.

Explains Chris Hammans, regional VP Northern Europe for RES Software (pictured): “Working with Prianto, we expect to reduce the time needed for new partners to take our solutions out to market by 50 percent, as well as to assist existing partners with virtualisation sales opportunities. This appointment rounds out our distribution strategy for the UK extremely well.”

Prianto has a number of complementary technology vendors in its portfolio, and already works with RES Software technology partners such as Citrix and VMware.

“We are very pleased to add RES Software to our vendor portfolio, as the company’s technology sits alongside our other partnerships and extends our ability to deliver desktop management, virtualisation and IT automation solutions to our resellers and their customers,” says Yuri Pasea, MD at Prianto.

“Prianto’s focus is on identifying exciting vendors and providing resellers with new complementary products that will give them a commercial and technical edge in this highly competitive environment.”

AppSense is looking to bolster its channel by recruiting a number of new partners, particularly Citrix, VMware and Microsoft VARs.

The user virtualisation, workspace and desktop management technology vendor currently has around 100 partners in EMEA.

AppSense’s VP for Northern Europe, Atif Ahmed tells Channel Pro: “Ultimately we want to be a pure-play channel organisation and to achieve this we have to provide our partners with the tools, resources, support and investment required to make us a profitable proposition for the channel.

“Key to this will be finding partners are capable of integrating our solutions with Citrix and VMware to deliver an optimal user experience. Having key partners with a first-rate understanding of the solutions from each company, and how they integrate is a key focus for us.”

Ahmed adds that AppSense is aiming to be easier to work with, by simplifying processes and assisting with new business, to make its partners more successful.

The exec joined AppSense in November from Websense, where he was VP of sales for the UK, Ireland and Benelux.

The vendor also recently appointed Zoe Clark as its channel sales director for the region. Clark – who is responsible for delivering AppSense’s channel programme to partners in Northern Europe – also joins from Websense, where she was director of channel sales. She previously worked at Check Point, as did Ahmed and AppSense EMEA SVP, Nick Lowe.

Says Lowe: “Atif and Zoe bring a wealth of experience in building, executing and managing channel partners and will help us accelerate our channel strategy both in the short and long term. We are delighted that they have chosen to join us, as their expertise will be of huge benefit to AppSense and our partners.”

The firm recently announced Computacenter, Kelway and Ultima as its first UK Platinum partners since the accreditation was launched last year.

As well as the new platinum tier, AppSense has introduced several new features to its channel operations over the past 12 months, including the appointment of an internal sales development team to generate new business leads for partners, a technical and a commercial learning management system and accreditations, and a revised and extended MDF for new and existing partners, as well as a deal registration system.

Says Ahmed: “The channel is key to our business and we are committed to investing in developing strong relationships with our partners, helping them improve revenues and increase margins.”

Atos is to offer software-defined datacentre services, and claims to be the first outsourcer to do so.

The firm's new Digital Data Center service will offer customers networking, storage and management/automation all in a software-defined capacity.

VMware is providing Atos with the technologies behind the services, offering up its vCloud Suite, NSX networking product, Virtual SAN storage element and vRealize Suite to give Atos its software-defined capabilities.

These services will run alongside cloud services from Canopy, the joint venture co-owned by VMware, Atos and EMC, as the firms look to meet demand in the software-defined data centre area.

Eric Grall, head of managed services at Atos, said: "This is where the speed of IT finally meets the business demand in providing infrastructure resources just when our customers need them, ensuring they can gain a competitive advantage.

"The Digital Data Center services provide a step change in infrastructure and complement our Canopy solutions and services."

The software-defined data centre can be thought of as a way to deliver IT as a service.

Generally, elements of a datacentre's infrastructure such as networking, storage, security and compute - are virtualised and delivered as a service.

This sits in contrast to typical data entres, which contain legacy hardware systems and mainframes.

In the storage industry, software-defined can mean a user does not need to buy software that is compatible with their hardware, thus tackling the problem of vendor lock-in.

This makes it easier to switch suppliers and reduce costs, and update infrastructure.

"Through a software-defined datacentre architecture, organisations have the ability to realise greater scalability, flexibility and agility in their IT infrastructure," said Todd Surdey, VP of global strategic alliances and emerging partners at VMware.

"We congratulate Atos on the launch of its Digital Data Center services, which use a complete VMware software stack to empower customers to securely and quickly move at the speed of their business."

Atos's first Digital Data Center pilots are set to begin by March, with further functionality to be added throughout 2015.

Citrix’s (NASDAQ:CTXS) EMEA chief, Carlos Sartorius, has been named senior VP of the vendor’s worldwide sales and services.

He replaces Al Monserrat, a fifteen year Citrix veteran, who’s leaving the company. He has run sales and services since 2008, during which time he re-engineered the sales organisation and is credited with strengthening Citrix’s go-to-market model and growing revenues by nearly 90 percent.

Sartorius will report directly to Citrix president and CEO, Mark Templeton.

“I want to recognise the huge contribution and impact Al has had since joining our company 15 years ago,” says Templeton. “It has been an honour and a privilege to have had him on our team, and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks and best wishes to him as he takes the next step in his journey.”

Prior to Citrix, Sartorius held a range of senior industry leadership positions, most recently with HP, where he was VP and general manager of HP’s networking business unit in EMEA. Prior to that he served as CEO of Orange Business Services, was president for Avaya’s EMEA business and had a number of leadership roles at Motorola.

Adds Templeton: “Carlos has done a remarkable job getting our EMEA business back on track and has all of the right qualities to lead the ongoing development and growth of our global field organisations. He is well versed in our go-to-market, partner and channel models and has a deep understanding of our customers’ challenges and perspectives, making him the perfect executive for this role as we continue to drive toward our vision of a software-defined workplace.”

Sartorius’ promotion is effective immediately. He is moving to the US and will be based in the company’s Santa Clara, California HQ. Monserrat will remain with the company until April 1.

Sartorius’ replacement as chief of Citrix EMEA’s organisation is yet to be announced.

Citrix announced on Monday it has acquired software-defined storage vendor Sanbolic.

AppSense has announced Computacenter, Kelway and Ultima as its first UK Platinum partners since the accreditation was launched earlier this year.

The provider of User Environment Management (UEM) solutions says all three have developed their businesses using AppSense to deliver “the best possible user experience across all desktop deployments.”

The three are also Citrix Platinum Solutions Advisors, while Computacenter and Kelway are also VMware Premier Partners, with Ultima holding a silver level accreditation.

“Customers depend on AppSense to integrate with Citrix and VMware to deliver an optimal user experience. Having key partners with a first-rate understanding of the solutions from each company, and how they integrate is a key focus for AppSense,” says Remco Postma, AVP SI & channels EMEA.

“Computacenter, Kelway and Ultima are committed to deliver compelling value to their customers and as such see AppSense as a key differentiator across their desktop business. This has produced impressive results and deserves to be recognised and rewarded.”

“AppSense is a key element of the Ultima portfolio that also includes Microsoft, Citrix and VMware enabling us to offer a complete desktop virtualisation solution to major brands and organisations,” says Dave Rogers, services director at Ultima. “The AppSense product range has been key to our growth since 2011, both as a stand-alone product and optimising our Citrix and VMware implementations.”

“We are delighted to have been recognised by AppSense,” says Simon Ashall, vendor & alliances manager at Kelway. “AppSense’s User Environment Management software and the integration with our other key partners is critical to our success.”

“Our relationship with AppSense continues to strengthen our market differentiation and the value we offer our desktop customers. We are looking forward to seeing more growth as we move forward with our platinum partner status,” adds Darron Knibbs, technology leader at Computacenter.

AppSense also appointed an internal sales development team this year to generate new business leads for partners and revised and extended market development funds.

The demand for virtualised server load balancing (SLB) is coming on strong as it offers a cost-effective alternative to hardware appliances. Based in the UK, Loadbalancer.org shows this off perfectly as its latest Enterprise VA offers an impressive range of SLB features at a low price.

Costs start at 2,495 with a 3-year 24/7 premium support contract pushing this to 4,090. Barracuda's V540 for example, kicks off at 3,599 with a 3-year license taking this to over 9,000.

The Enterprise VA also has no restrictions on the number of supported CPU cores. You can start even lower as the R16 version is restricted to 4 virtual servers each with 4 physical servers and costs 995.

Versions for VMware, Hyper-V and KVM are available and for testing we went with VMware. We used a Dell PowerEdge R820 quad E5-4607 Xeon rack server with 96GB of DDR3 and running ESXi 5.0.

VMware deployment is simple and there are no restrictions on the number of CPU cores you can assign to the VM

Swift deployment

We deployed the OVF template to our server in less than a minute. After running a quick start wizard from the console to set the admin IP address we then swapped over to web interface for further configuration.

The Enterprise VA adheres to the common concepts for load balancing where you create server farms (or clusters as Loadbalancer.org calls them). These comprise multiple real servers (RIPs) which are assigned to virtual servers (VIPs) facing the public side of your network.

The web interface offers a wizard for creating L7 VIPs but L4 VIPs must be created manually. Still, it's easy enough to do as you create the VIP first and then enter the IP addresses of your RIPs.

The appliance supports both one-arm and two-arm modes with the latter allowing physical and virtual servers to be placed in different subnets. Along with standard NAT routing, it also supports DR (direct routing) and SNAT (source NAT) where cookie insertion is required for apps such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.

Virtual services are easy to set up and you can select various load balancing and persistence modes

Load balancing and persistence

The Enterprise VA offers three L4 load balancing options. The default weighted least connection mode distributes inbound requests based on the weighting value applied to each RIP and the number of connections each one is servicing.

Weighted round robin uses priorities assigned to each RIP to ensure better specified servers have more to do while destination hashing uses algorithms based on the destination IP addresses to assign traffic to servers. For L7 load balancing you have weighted least connections and weighted round robin modes.

L4 persistence uses the source IP address or SIP caller ID to ensure clients are always sent to the same physical servers. There's a heap of L7 persistence options including HTTP, application and RDP client cookies, source IP addresses and SSL session IDs.

Overall, we found VIPs easy to configure although it's slightly annoying that you must have separate entries for L4 and L7 VIPs. You need to do the same for SSL VIPs but encryption/decryption overheads will hit performance so it's recommended that you leave the physical servers to carry this out.

The web console provides a separate screen showing the HAProxy performance plus the status of all RIPs

Ixia and performance results

To test performance we assigned a couple of 10GbE ports to the appliance and linked it directly to the lab's Ixia XM2 chassis and its two Xcellon-Ultra NP blades. We created an IxLoad test with one HTTP client/server stream using 12 physical servers with the appliance in between.

With 2GB of RAM and one CPU core assigned to the VM, we saw L4 throughput for 512KB web pages kick off at 1.8Gb/sec. However, this faded after a couple of minutes and we could see from the vSphere client that the CPU was maxed out.

Upping the number of CPU cores to 4 produced far smoother results with an average 1.8Gb/sec throughput recorded for the entire test run. L7 HTTP throughput was good with IxLoad recording a steady 1.5Gb/sec for 512KB web pages.

Using 1 byte web pages we recorded a steady 20,000 TPS for an L4 VIP. Maximum concurrent connections with 2GB of RAM reached 4.5 million which increased to 7.8 million with 4GB of RAM.

IxLoad recorded 1.8Gb/sec of HTTP traffic throughput for an L4 virtual service

Monitoring features

The system overview page provides colour coded bars for VIP and RIP status along with graphs showing network throughput, appliance load and memory usage. Selecting a VIP brings up all the RIPs assigned to it and you can use the drain button next to each one to gracefully close client connections in readiness to taking it offline.

The reports section provides more performance details with tables showing L4 connections for each member RIP, traffic rates and connections. Selecting L7 fires up a separate HAProxy statistics report page with detailed information about each member RIP.

Conclusion

There are a few rough edges to the web console but generally we found the Enterprise VA easy enough to configure and capable of delivering good performance. Being headquartered in the UK allows Loadbalancer.org to provide quality first line support to its UK customers and there is nothing on the market that can match it for value.

Verdict

The Enterprise VA delivers an impressive range of virtualised server load balancing features and tops these off with good performance. It’s easy enough to deploy and knocks Barracuda into a cocked hat for value.

VMware, Hyper-V, KVM