VMware’s fourth quarter beat expectations as the company saw strong demand for its vSphere virtualization platform.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz said in a conference call that in the near future, the company was planning to focus resources on further growth in the data center automation and middleware management areas through both “organic development” and acquisitions.

“We plan to strengthen and widen our value proposition of what has been called ‘the private cloud,’” Maritz said. Besides enabling enterprises to increase the use of shared infrastructure by applications within their own data centers, VMware plans on further enabling them to leverage public cloud resources offered by the company’s partners “if and when they are ready to do so.”

More analysis…

• VMware Q4 Revenue Up On Maintenance, Services Fees –ChannelWeb
• Analyst Thoughts On VMware (VMW) After Strong Q4 Results -StreetInsider.com
• VMware Q4 revenues rise to US$608 million -Siliconrepublic.com
• VMware Revenue Lifted by Maintenance Fees -PC World
• RTT News -DatacenterDynamics

VMware has just announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo! Hmmm.. Didn’t I just hear that Oracle just switched to Zimbra?

Many are asking why? According to Zimbra:

"We believe that the shift toward cloud computing and virtualization will continue to change the industry landscape and revolutionize how the IT industry builds, deploys and uses software.   Zimbra is excited to be joining our open source friends at SpringSource, and becoming another cornerstone in an impressive suite of VMware products.  The VMware platform now integrates virtualization, middleware and applications – and enables the decoupling of applications from traditional concepts of linear hardware scaling.   Private and/or public cloud computing networks can work together and applications can be deployed and managed seamlessly across those clouds.  Zimbra products were designed from the ground up with virtualization and the cloud in mind, with a modular architecture and APIs to allow distributed access to data and storage.   Email and collaboration services have always been ubiquitous to organizations, but now the barriers to transitioning them to efficient virtualized environments will be much more seamless."

Check out the demo videos of Zimbra.

Here are more documents available to learn about this acquisition: this FAQ, the announcement press release, a blog post from VMware CTO Steve Herrod, and a blog post from Zimbra general manager Jim Morrisroe.

Here is a headline I did not expect to see in the news this morning: "Exclusive: VMware Likely to Buy Zimbra From Yahoo".

One of the divisions that’s been on Yahoo’s auction block since September is Zimbra, an open-source e-mail company Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350 million.

According to All Things Digital, Yahoo is about to finalize a sale to VMware. Yahoo had originally hoped that the Zimbra acquisition would help improve Yahoo Mail and give the company a foothold into the white-label e-mail business, but that synergy never really came about. What VMware wants with Zimbra is a good question.

One source noted that the reason that VMware was interested in nabbing Zimbra was that its execs want to expand “up the stack” from the software company’s position in virtualization.

What that means raises more questions than answers. There’s no word on the sale price yet, and until the deal is final, it’s still technically up in the air.

Some more context around this here…

Someone asked me what the impact would be if a VM is installed with the wrong OS type.

My first thought was that this probably would introduce some performance issues, but then it hit me that this would cause the incorrect VMware Tools to get installed in the VM, leading to all sorts of unintended behaviors. Even worse, if the correct MCA/MCE architecture is not presented to the guest during boot I don’t think it will start at all. We use guest OS type to get this info (it only matters during boot as far as I know).

How to fix it:

1. Power off the VM.
2. Modify via GUI option General of the properties of your VM.
3. Power on the VM.
4. Reinstall the correct VMware Tools.

Anybody know of any more gotchas associated with having the wrong OS type specified for your VM?

Who is affected:

Customers who are using VMware vSphere ESX 4.0 and are wanting to install update 1, via VMware Update Manager (VUM).

Problem description:

Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 using VUM fails or times out. Rebooting host results in a PSOD and the host has to be re-installed.

Workaround:

Please disable any 3rd party hardware monitoring agents running on the ESX 4.0.0 server before applying the update.

Customers that have already run into this issue and have installed the update but have not rebooted, need to contact Support.

The 3rd party agents can be enabled again after the upgrade is completed.

ESX 4.0 U1 is no longer available for download.

For additional details, see Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 using Update Manager fails or times out and rebooting the host results in a purple diagnostics screen (1016070).