VMworld 2010 is at its last day and VMware decided to place the second keynote today. The second keynote is usually more technical than the first one, but as virtualization.info readers know, the first keynote already was a split between vision/strategy and technology/roadmap, with both Paul Maritz, CEO, and Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP of R&D on stage. 
So today it will be interesting to see what will be presented.

Rick Jackson, CMO, is on stage to introduce the day. The theme is “innovation”. Apparently, VMware wants to use today to reinforce its image as leading innovator. To do so it invited three guest speakers to show some cutting-edge technologies.

The first one is Pranav Mistry, inventor of SixthSense.
SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that leverages a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant to augment reality on any object around users. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and other physical objects.
A video of the prototype in use is shown. It’s almost exactly the futuristic interface seen in the Minority Report movie and even more than that. A lot of companies are working to bring to the market that interface, but Mistry’s project seems well beyond that.

The second guest is Natan Liner, Intel Fellow and part of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.
He introduces project LuminAR, a robotic lamp that combines a pico-projector, camera, and wireless computer in a compact form factor. This self-contained system enables users with just-in-time projected information and a gestural user interface, and it can be screwed into standard light fixtures everywhere.
The long-term idea is to provide augmented reality through a new computer form fact that can fits into any standard lamp arm providing 120V AC.

The third guest is Tan Le, Cofounder of Emotiv Systems.
The company is working on a direct interface for the brain called Emotiv.
Dr. Stephen Herrod is invited on stage to demonstrate how the interface, which only costs a few hundred dollars, works.

Now the guests are on a very short panel with Jackson about the way we could rethink computing.
Jackson closes the keynote with a simple message: innovators think out of the box and VMware adopters have been innovators.
This is a rather subtle way to leverage the human emotions: VMware first inspired the audience with futuristic projects, then it suggested that virtualization has been and still is similarly innovative, and finally implied that anybody can be an innovator believing in its products and adopting them.

Overall,  this has been one of the most interesting VMworld ever in the last few years, and VMware deserves some credit for the incredible improvement shown in messaging. Execution is an entirely different story that can’t be proven on stage but will be seen on the field in the next few months.

Starting tomorrow, virtualization.info (and cloudcomputing.info) will restart usual coverage of the industry. There are more than 100 announcements that have been released during this week, so expect a lot of information to come.

Here we go again. As usual virtualization.info is at the VMworld conference to live cover the keynotes and any other major announcement released by VMware during the event.

Paul Maritz, CEO, is today’s keynote speaker. He will speak in front of 17,000 attendees, as Rick Jackson, CMO, confirmed on stage. Is VMworld on track to compete against the Oracle OpenWorld in terms of audience?

Before Maritz performance, VMware starts with a funny video that tries to describe what cloud computing is without using any technical jargon. The choice demonstrates how early-stage this market still is considered.

Martiz on stage.
He reports that in 2010 the number of virtual machines surpasses for the first time the number of physical servers deployed (more than 10M).
He also reports that VMware has over 25,000 partners and over 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) worldwide.

Maritz says that VMware is committed to innovate on automation and management to decrease OpEx. Seeing that the primary focus is on automation is very positive: datacenter orchestration has been overlooked for too much time.
He also says that innovation should also focus on the way infrastructure resources should be purchased.

Now Maritz is making a case for the SpringSource acquisition (and all the others related to that): are legacy apps on new infrastructure enough?
VMware believes that the world embracing cloud computing would move on more sophisticated, next generation web applications , and this implies the need for a new application platform, made of management tools (Hyperic), open frameworks (Spring) and common services (APIs).

In this new world the challenge is to grant end user access though a number of different new devices, while managing them as part of the enterprise infrastructure.
So VMware sees the need for a new stack, made of three pieces: a new infrastructure, a new application platform and a new end user access.

The message this year is extremely mature, and it definitively presents an articulated new mission. VMware is working to go well beyond its role as a virtualization player, and it’s doing a good job at communicating it during this keynote.

Martiz leaves the stage to Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D at VMware.
He starts with a recap of the innovations introduced in vSphere 4.1, with a first focus on policy driven SLAs through Storage and Network I/O Controls.

Herrod announces on stage the VMware’s acquisition of a company called Integrien.
Integrien flagship product, Alive, is a real-time performance analytics solution that analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure.

It will be interesting to see how Alive will integrate with the (many) other monitoring solutions VMware is offering today (including the SpringSource Hyperic).

Herrod also announces the availability of vCloud Director 1.0 (formerly vCloud Service Director).
Interestingly, VMware places this new product side by side with vSphere and vCenter as key tiers of the new infrastructure described by Maritz at the beginning of the keynote.

VMware has another three new products to announce, all about security and all available today: vShield Endpoint 1.0, vShield App 1.0 and vShield Edge 1.0.
vShield has been placed inside the new infrastructure as its fourth and last tier.

Another interesting aspect of this keynote is that there’s no mention of “virtual machines”. The entire discussion is focused on “applications”.

Now Herrod announces a thing called vFabric, the cloud application platform made with SpringSource, GemStone and other technologies acquired in the last year by VMware.
vFabric offers application management, data management, messaging, dynamic load balancing and app server.

Last but not least, Herrod announces the (expected) availability of VMware View 4.5.
It introduces support for Microsoft Windows 7, the offline VDI capability (through a type-2 VMM), a client for Apple Mac OS X and support for vSphere 4.1.

Herrod has a couple of “one more thing” surprise: Project Horizon, a single sign-on (SSO) portal for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, powered by the TriCipher technology, which VMware just acquired.

That’s all for today. Overall this has been one of the best, and more complex, keynotes ever delivered by VMware.
Stay tuned for the second keynote that is scheduled for Sep. 1.

Just before the VMworld 2010 opening keynote, cloudcomputing.info received a couple of confirmations that VMware is about to rename its not-yet-launched vCloud Service Director (vCSD) in just vCloud Director. This would explain why the VMworld content catalog doesn’t show anymore the breakout sessions about vCSD.

On top of that, the company may be preparing a special bundle to launch version 1.0, including vCenter Chargeback and the new vShield Edge with it.
Our source reports that the bundle will feature the new per-VM licensing, starting with a 25 VMs pack.

The platform should be available on Sep. 1st.

In the attempt to distract the audience just before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix announced last week the imminent availability of XenClient 1.0.

The Xen-based client hypervisor (see virtualization.info report about it) is expected to ship at the end of September as part of the XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2.
The platform will be free only for XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum editions customers with current Subscription Advantage agreements.

It’s not clear if consumers will be able to download and use the product in some way but it seems that Citrix is primarily targeting enterprise customers with this first release.
But no fear: Virtual Computer is expected to release NxTop 3.0 later today, which will introduce a free downloadable client hypervisor that doesn’t require the enterprise management component.

Update: Those ones that don’t have XenDesktop can still use the product. Citrix will release a XenClient Express edition you can be used on up to 10 devices free of charge, with full functionality, and no expiry.

Just one day before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix managed to distract the audience with a major announcement: the acquisition of VMLogix for an undisclosed sum.

VMLogix entered the virtual lab automation (VLA) market in October 2006, in competition with a really short number of companies.
In February 2009 the company signed a deal with Citrix to OEM its flagship product in the Essentials management package, which is available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
As Citrix has to enrich its virtual infrastructure to better compete against VMware, this acquisition was largely expected.

The acquisition is expected to complete during the Q3 2010. The VMLogix technology will be fully integrated in the next version of XenServer (6.0?) as well as in the just announced OpenCloud platform.

With VMware owning Akimbi (June 2006), Quest owning Surgient (July 2010) and StackSafe out of business (March 2009?), there are no more virtual lab automation startups out there, except Skytap and the just born CloudShare. But both companies only offers a hosted business model, and this restricts the range of potential bidders.
According to this, in the attempt to become more desirable acquisition targets, both Skytap and CloudShare may want to offer soon a version of its platform for on-premises deployment.

Earlier this week Symantec announced two new products for VMware virtual infrastructures dubbed ApplicationHA and VirtualStore.

ApplicationHA, powered by Veritas Cluster Server technology, monitors applications and virtual machines health. It can restart both: applications by direct intervention, and VMs by coordinating with vCenter Server.
Plus, the product can be fully operated from the vCenter Client and supports VMware HA and DRS.

VirtualStore instead is powered by Veritas Storage Foundation and is a virtual NAS that has a couple of specific capabilities for VDI environments.
The first one, called FileSnap, allows to rapidly clone and provision thousands of virtual machines in minutes through vCenter.
The second is a page caching system that Symantec claims able to eliminate the performance bottlenecks when multiple users concurrently power their virtual desktops.

ApplicationHA will be available in September, at $350 per VM.
VirtualStore instead will be released in November with a per-server pricing model.

Yesterday CA announced the release of a new version of IT Client Manager (ITCM), its systems management software.

ITCM integrates multiple other CA products, including Asset Management, Software Delivery, Remote Control. Patch Management Desktop DNA and Asset Intelligence.
As result, it offers asset discovery, OS migration, patching, remote control, and software delivery capabilities.

Version r12.5 becomes much more virtualization-friendly with the support for hardware virtualization platforms VMware ESX (both 3.5 and 4.0) and Oracle Solaris Containers (aka Zones, for both SPARC and Intel architectures) as well as application virtualization platforms Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp.

For hardware virtualization, ITCM r12.5 provides full virtual assets inventory capability, while for application virtualization the product integrates virtualized packages in the software delivery lifecycle.

CA plans to further extend virtualization support in ITCM r13, scheduled somewhere in 2011, by adding presentation virtualization profile management capabilities and a full set of capacity planning tools for VDI deployments.

A couple of weeks ago Veeam silently released a free edition of its reporting solution Reporter.

Reporter 4.0 was released in May, introducing a web GUI, change management reports and capacity planning reports.
The free edition lacks a few things:

• the capacity planning report pack
• the historical data for change management reports (it can only track the last 24 hours)
• the automatic generation and delivery of reports
• the access through Microsoft PowerShell
• the capability to access raw data through Microsoft Excel
• the capability to export full details about the virtual infrastructure through Microsoft Visio
• the capability to view data on multiple dashboards (only one is supported)
• the capability to publish data on multiple 3rd party dashboards (only one is supported)

Despite that, the free version still offers rich reports about the virtual infrastructure inventory, events, user access, storage capacity and configuration changes.

Vizioncore has recently lost its Vice President of EMEA region, virtualization.info has learned.

Roger Baskerville was the EMEA Sales Director at XenSource before the Citrix acquisition. He then covered the role of Regional Director for Northern Europe at Citrix.
Vizioncore hired him in November 2008 and now it lost him just before the integration with Quest is completed.

No words on where he’s landing.

For years Google has been pretty adamant that it doesn’t need hardware virtualization.
Everything started in 2007 when a Google engineer, Luiz André Barroso, said at the Usenix conference:

I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.

In April 2009 Google even (indirectly) responded to VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz about the idea that virtualization is the only viable way to do cloud computing.

But now, apparently, something changed at the search giant.

The KVM Forum 2010 just ended and the speakers slide decks are now available online. They are full of extremely interesting details about the KVM project and its roadmap.
And one of them is especially interesting: Ganeti as a KVM cluster management interface.

Ganeti is a cluster management solution for Xen and KVM that supports live migration, para-virtualized and fully virtualized guest operating systems.

The solution is released under the GPL (v2) open source license and maintained by a number of Google employees.
This doesn’t imply that Google itself is using it, but one of the last slides in the slide deck above seem to confirm so:

The presenter, Guido Trotter, is a Systems Administrator at Google, responsible for the corporate infrastructure, and the maintenance of the corporate services.

Now, maybe Google only runs on the “Corporate Computing Infrastructure” internal facilities like CRM, Accounting or other technologies, while keeping its core services on bare-metal.
But at least now there’s a confirmation that Google is not totally against hardware virtualization and instead is using KVM internally.

Despite its position in the VDI market is not exactly comfortable at the moment, VMware is taking interesting steps. The company just signed agreements with a couple of VDI vendors, Liquidware Labs and Lakeside Software, to use their capacity planning products in assessments conducted by its Professional Services Organization (PSO).

The two vendors announced their agreements pretty much at the same time:

• Liquidware Labs signs Desktop Assessment Agreement with VMware Consulting
• Lakeside Software to Accelerate VMware Desktop Virtualization Assessments

So basically, VMware will use both Stratusphere and SysTrack in its VDI assessments. But why using two different tools to achieve the same task?

Update: Another good question, raised by VMware’s competitor in the capacity planning space Lanamark, is: why VMware needs 3rd party products when it has its hosted Capacity Planner solution which is completely free for the PSO and partners?

If it’s true that Capacity Planner is not good enough for VDI assessment, as Lanamark suggests, then this means that VMware may want to acquire one of the two companies above to fill the gap. And maybe this deal is just a testbed to see what solution performs better on the field before the acquisition.

HP has recently published a reference architecture for VDI environments based on Citrix XenDesktop 4, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

The 24-pages report describes a platform powered by BladeSystems c7000 blade servers, ProLiant BL460c G6 blades, StorageWorks P4800 G2 SANs and HP Thin Clients.

The document includes the bill of materials (BOM) and a performance analysis. Quite interestingly HP used the tool Virtual Sessions Indexer (VSI), developed by the Dutch solution provider Login Consultants and used in the popular independent benchmark Virtual Reality Check (VRC) Project.  
The VRC Project has been already validated by Citrix and somehow recognized by VMware too.

According to the benchmark, this system can serve approximately 800 concurrent users using Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer applications.

In May Microsoft finally unveiled an upcoming, revamped version of its patch management solution for virtual infrastructures: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0

VMST is not a patching tool per se, but rather a connector that allows seamless integration between Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Hyper-V.

The first beta introduced much wanted features like the ability to patch offline VMs and templates in the SCVMM library, or the support for Live Migration.
The second beta, appeared less than a month after, just fixed an issue with the template VHD update feature.
The third beta, which was announced last week, seems just for additional bug fixing.

VMware continues to release new technical papers about vSphere 4.1. 
After Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX 4.1, Enhanced VMware ESX 4.1 CPU Scheduler and Host Profiles: Technical Overview, today virtualization.info recommends VMware vCenter Server 4.1 Performance and Best Practices.

The 46-pages document describes the performance improvements introduced with vSphere 4.1, provides capacity planning guidelines for vCenter Server and best practices for performance monitoring and tuning of advanced features like HA, FT and DRS.

A new US startup recently left the stealth mode and officially entered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market: Cloupia.
The company is focused on cloud computing platform management with its flagship product Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC).

Cloupia was found by five people: Raju Datla, Raju Penmetsa, Bhaskar Krishnamsetty, Murali Alapati and Kevin Lim.

Three of them come from Cisco: Datla (CEO) has been Senior Manager of Software Development at the networking giant for almost five years; Penmetsa (Vice President of Technology and Strategy) has been a Technical Marketing Engineer there for almost 4 years; Lim (Director of Engineering) has been the Technical Leader of network management software and service platform development for nine years.
The two that don’t come from Cisco are Krishnamsetty (Vice President of Engineering), who has been a Director at Fidelity Investments for more than two years, and Alapati, who has worked as business development consultant for PG&E and Morgan Stanley in the last ten years.

The company doesn’t disclose if it’s privately funded or not, but looking at its management team it may easily be a Cisco spin-off.
Cloupia executives worked at Cisco for a significant amount of time and at a particular time, so it’s worth to highlight that this company may have an understanding of the Unified Computing System (UCS) internals and strategy that is superior to most competitors.

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

VMware’s VMworld 2010 is just two weeks away and, like always, virtualization.info will publish a live report from the keynote stage. 
From his Twitter account, Steve Herrod, CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, hinted that this year there will be more announcements than ever, so there will be a lot to cover.

But the keynotes are not the only must-see presentations to watch this year. The VMworld’s agenda offers a higher than ever number of interesting break out sessions, and, surprisingly, many of them are about the VMware’s products roadmaps. 
In mid July virtualization.info published an early recommendation list but a number of key sessions were published only after the article. So here’s the updated, definitive list of 22 sessions (23 if you are a partner) that readers are encouraged to attend (roadmap sessions have an asterisk):

Platform sessions:

• SS1001 Introducing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware

Storage sessions:

• *TA8218 VMware Storage Vision
• *TA7805 Tech Preview: Storage DRS
• PC8051 Infrastructure Technologies to Long Distance VMotion – What Is “VM Teleportation”?

Networking sessions:

• *TA8361 Future Direction of Networking Virtualization

Management sessions:

• MA8030 Saving Time with vCenter Orchestrator
• MA8181 Optimizing Capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ

Business Continuity sessions:

• *BC8432 SRM Futures: Host Based Replication
• *BC8537 VMware Data Protection Roadmap

Desktop Virtualization sessions:

• *DV7281 Virtual Desktop Cloud – The Future Vision of End-User Computing
• *DV6946 The Future of VMware Workstation and Cloud Development
• *DV7180 ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision

Private cloud computing sessions:

• *PC7303 Bridging Application Management Between Public & Private Clouds: A Technology Preview of VMware’s Next Generation Solution
• MA8940 Self-Service and Workflow Automation for the Private Cloud
• MA7140 vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Pattern
• SP9721 How to Use Virtual I/O to Provision and Manage Networks and Storage Resources in a Private Cloud
• SE7813 vShield Edge & Application Protection – Architecture and Use Cases
• *SE9600 How to Attest Host Platform Security for Cloud Deployments: A Technology Preview from VMware, Intel, and RSA
• SE7835 Securing Your Cloud
• MA8649 VMware vCenter Configuration Manager: Our Foundation for Compliance in the Private Cloud
• SP8262 Cisco Nexus 1000V Update: Preparing the Virtual Machine Networking for the Cloud
• MA8027 Provisioning Cloud Computing on Vblock using VMware vCloud Service Director
• (for partners only) PA9444 VMware Service Provider Cloud Licensing Programs

While we already know that session TA8361 (Future Direction of Networking Virtualization) will cover a new technology that will be announced on stage, a few additional sessions in the list above are especially interesting.

The first one is SS1001 (Introducing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware): this is an extended session (aka Super Session) that will cover VMware plans to leverage SLES as its guest OS of choice for all virtual appliances.  
It features a key speaker: Raghu Raghuram, General Manager and Vice President, Server Business Unit at VMware. Raghuram was in the 10-people team that launched VMware and his visibility into the company is really deep. He’s a top executive definitively worth to listen to.

Another one is TA7805 (Tech Preview: Storage DRS) for obvious reasons: here VMware is expected to clarify the implementation of the Distributed Resource Scheduling technology to storage arrays.

A third one is MA8940 (Self-Service and Workflow Automation for the Private Cloud). This session features an unexpected speaker: John MacLean, Director of Products, VMware Service Manager.
Service Manager is the configuration management database (CMDB) product that VMware acquired from EMC as part of Ionix management portfolio. It’s a key component of the strategy if VMware really plans to become a physical and virtual infrastructure management vendor (and in fact this is the only product that is not included in the “vCenter” porfolio). So it’s significant that the person in charge for this piece is also talking about provisioning and orchestration in the private cloud.

Note: If any reader feels generous and wants to submit a complete report about one or more sessions above for the community, it will be published online on virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info (where applicable), with proper credit.

Submit them to vmworld2010@virtualization.info, including the session code, title, and your full name in the email subject.

Update: Some readers report that, for mysterious reasons, the sessions about vCloud Service Director (vCSD), like the MA8027 above, don’t appear anymore in the VMworld’s content catalog. 
VMware doesn’t allow seat registration, so this can’t be because those sessions are already full. Hopefully it’s just a technical glitch.

As every virtualization professional on the planet knows, Citrix develops a commercial version of the Xen open source hypervisor called XenServer. On top of that, the company also offers management and VDI solutions for Microsoft competing hypervisor: Hyper-V.

While Citrix reiterated for years now that it’s fully committed to continue XenServer development, and its newest releases definitively confirm this trend, a number of people believes that at a point in the future the company will drop its own platform to support only Hyper-V.

Maybe Citrix contemplated the idea in the past, but at this point it’s less likely than ever: Amazon EC2, currently powered by the Red Hat implementation of Xen, is leading the public cloud computing adoption effort, while the new OpenStack orchestration framework launched by Rackspace, which supports Xen out of the box, has good changes to become a key platform in the race for private cloud computing.

Two years ago Red Hat announced its intention to replace Xen with KVM and the plan is being executed as expected: the company released a new KVM-based virtual infrastructure (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or RHEV) and the upcoming Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 will be the first distribution to not include Xen.

So Amazon has two choices for EC2: it either develops its own Xen distribution, or it embraces the one of another vendor.
In the second scenario there is not much choice: Citrix, which leads the development of Xen since the early beginning, Oracle, or Novell, even if the company may be switching to KVM too.

The adoption of XenServer represents a huge opportunity to cash in for Citrix. It may sell the Platinum edition of the hypervisor, which has been recognized as an enterprise grade virtualization platform, licensing hundreds of thousands of virtual machines to Amazon.  
Additionally it’s worth to highlight that Amazon is recognized as a leading example in the hosting industry, so that hundreds of smaller hosting providers may mimic the company in the adoption of XenServer. And this translates into an exponential revenue increase for Citrix.

On the private cloud computing side, Citrix secured a key partnership with Rackspace for Openstack, and the two already announced that the product will support XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) going forward. 
It doesn’t really matter if OpenStack will support Xen, XenServer or XCP: in every case Citrix will have additional opportunites to win enterprise data centers.

In such scenario, it wouldn’t make much sense for Citrix to abandon Xen and just work to build value on top of Hyper-V. 
Despite that, the analysis firm Ovum reports something rather interesting about what Citrix believes about the future.

The summary of a report released in November 2009 in fact says (emphasis added):

…Xen’s prospects in the enterprise are limited by the squeeze it faces from VMware’s dominant ESX/ESXi hypervisor and Microsoft’s increasingly competitive Hyper-V hypervisor. Citrix has predicted that eventually its virtual server business will mostly be based on Hyper-V rather than Xen. Oracle is Xen’s best chance for a long-term enterprise future, but even Oracle faces a battle to build up its small virtualisation business. Novell also has only a small presence in server virtualisation, and, in any case, may split its attention between Xen and the KVM hypervisor…

Unfortunately, there’s no way to review the report, unless you want to pay £924 of course, and verify if Ovum included a source for verification in its analysis.

In a recent interview with Datamation, Chris Wright, Linux Kernel Developer at Red Hat, provided an interesting metric about KVM:

…KVM can now achieve 85 percent of bare-metal performance for its virtual guest operating systems, while adding that high-performance I/O is not coming at the expense of additional CPU overhead…

About the platform roadmap he adds:

…KVM is set to get support for what’s called “transparent huge pages,” enabling multi-megabyte memory pages that can be dynamically allocated from 4 kilobyte memory chunks. The addition, he said, will help improve the performance of virtual machines with memory-intensive workloads.

At the end of last week VMware updated its desktop virtualization platform Workstation and Player, as well as its platform wrapper ACE.

Workstation 7.1.1 (build 282343) only introduce support for ESX 4.1 as guest operating system. VMware introduced the capability to run its bare-metal hypervisor as a guest OS inside its hosted virtualization platform in Workstation 7.0, after the community requested the capability for a long, long time.

Player 3.1.1 and ACE 2.7.1 (build 282343) are for bug fixing only.

In October 2009 VMware released a fully featured capacity management solution called CapacityIQ.
Before this launch, VMware used to offer a hosted capacity planning solution called Capacity Planner (acquired from AOG in October 2005) and a scaled down version of the service available as part of VI 3.5, Guided Consolidation (formerly Server Consolidation Advisor).
While Capacity Planner is still available for free to VMware partners, the Guided Consolidation module is going to disappear from vSphere in the next release.

After almost one year VMware updated CapacityIQ last week.
The new 1.0.4 version (build 276824) only introduces support for vSphere 4.1.

The release notes document also clarifies that this version doesn’t enforce yet the new pay-per-VM licensing model that should take place starting September 1st. VMware already said that this product will be the last one to have this pricing, some time in Q4.