Earlier this week the US startup Virtual Computer announced the availability of NxTop 3.0. Like Neocleus ( just acquired by Intel ), Virtual Computer pioneered the use of a client hypervisor to enhance the enterprise desktop management. While Neocleus focused on platform security, Virtual Computer focused on virtual machines software and user management. The solution includes two tiers: NxTop Center and the actual client hypervisor, NxTop Client. The marketing investment made by Citrix to promote the upcoming XenClient , and the now-postpostoned launch of VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) , helped to increase a lot the attention for NxTop. So Virtual Computer recently decided to offer a scaled down free version of its platform . Such free version of NxTop still required the centralized management component, but the interest for a client hypervisor from system administrators pushed the startup to release the NxTop Client as a stand-alone, completely free product: NxTop Workstation . So the biggest part of NxTop 3.0 is the first, free, general purpose client hypervisor on the market. And quite remarkably, it doesn’t require the Intel vPro technology at all. NxTop Workstation has a notable support for industry standard hardware, including all Intel and AMD CPUs that feature VT-X and AMD-V, GPUs from Intel, NVIDIA and AMD, 3G/4G USB modems, USB peripherals like webcams, and even serial ports. Best of all, the client hypervisor supports both 32 and 64bit versions of Windows as guest operating systems. As already said, the platform is completely stand-alone, and this means that users can create new virtual machines from the local control panel.  The GUI that glues together the different VMs is well done, even if there’s still a lot of room for improvement in the user experience: the biggest challenge in the area is to intercept and block the users attempts to interact with the Windows control panel inside the VMs. Another area of improvement for NxTop Workstation is the backup and restore of VMs. Without the NxTop Center component this task may become fairly complex to accomplish.  Virtual Computer is already working to address this challenge: in future releases uses will be able to plug an external hard drive in the USB port and seamlessly backup their VMs. Of course NxTop 3.0 also introduces major features on the server side of the suite: A new hierarchical architecture, where large organizations can deploy a secondary copy of NxTop Center in each of their branch offices The capability for system administrators to remotely control end-user virtual desktops A new policy-based bandwidth throttling to control traffic between NxTop Center and NxTop Workstation Virtual Computer has reshaped its offering in three editions: Enterprise, Business and Express. The Express edition is free of charge, capped to 5 users. The Business one is capped to 500 users, while the Enterprise edition is unlimited. Virtual Computer also announced a strategic alliance with Quest . The agreement basically implies that the Quest vWorkspace connector will be shipped out-of-the-box as part of NxTop Workstation starting this October. The Quest connector improves the Microsoft RDP performance thanks to the Experience Optimized Protocol (EOP) developed by Provision Networks. The client is installed in the small footprint virtual appliance that Virtual Computer uses to host the platform management tools (like the control panel) and a bunch of utilities: NxTop Connect. NxTop Connect is a customized Linux distribution, that Virtual Computer turned into a lightweight operating system with essential programs for the users that don’t want to power on their bulky Windows virtual machines. It currently includes Chrome, Skype, and the Linux implementation of the RDP client. Any additional software partnership that Virtual Computer will be able to close, will probably translate in a new component inside Connect. The idea of a speedy, lightweight and extensible virtual machine that can be used for quick operations, is pretty much the same approach that Phoenix Technologies tried to bring to the market with their now defunct HyperCore. HP acquired that asset from Phoenix in June for $12M , and it’s not clear what it plans to do with it. The idea of a minimal operating system, with just browsing, remote access and communication capabilities is also shared with Google which is expected to launch its Chorme OS before the end of the year. It’s entirely possible that Virtual Computer will drop the currently used Linux distro to adopt and extend the Google platform to further reduce the NxTop Connect footprint. Virtual Computer released NxTop 2.0 in March . Despite its size and the limited resources available, the company managed to deliver a remarkable product, beating on time all major players in the space. virtualization.info had the opportunity to try NxTop Workstation 3.0 and had a very positive impression. Virtual Computer has been rated as “Worth Watching” on the Virtualization Industry Radar . Labels: Releases , VDI , Virtual Computer

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Despite the acquisition of Qumranet happened in September 2008 , Red Hat remained silent for long time. But a few months after the launch of its new, KVM-based virtualization platform ( just updated to version 2.2 ) the company started to push pretty hard the marketing message, and VMware is its main target. The company’s CEO Jim Whitehurst is becoming increasingly aggressive: in March he said that VMware customers look at Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) as a parallel hypervisor to have . Now he’s promising that RHEV will leapfrog the the vSphere platform just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) leapfrogged Sun Solaris for SPARC. The change in tune may depend on the massive criticism that VMware expressed on the RHEV platform. Apparently, the Red Hat goal for 2010 is to have at least 500 customers in North America. But more interesting than that is the claim that RHEV already beats the VMware infrastructure on scalability and performance, suggesting that ESX is an old technology that doesn’t adapt well to cloud computing architectures .

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Sparxent today announced the launch of Tech Preview of Sparxent VirtualOffice in the UK. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Parallels today announced the launch of Parallels Server for Mac 4, increasing the speed and reliability of virtual environments for small businesses. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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At the past Synergy 2010 conference, in mid May, Citrix and McAfee announced a partnership to deliver new security products for XenDesktop, XenServer and XenClient. Part of this partnership involves the launch of a new, optimized version of the McAfee antivirus that reduces the security endpoints’ footprint and schedules its scanning and signature update activities in a way that the hypervisor is not overloaded by too many concurrent I/O activities. Just last week Trend Micro announced an upcoming release of its own antivirus, OfficeScan 10.5, that should offer similar optimizations. OfficeScan 10.5 will support Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View VDI platforms and will be available in July, at the price of $20 per user and $8 per user for VDI-aware capability (for 1,000 seats).

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VMware has just released the first minor update for all its hosted virtualization platforms: Workstation / Player and Fusion. Workstation, Player and ACE 7.1 (build 261024) include the following new features: Support for 8 vCPUs / VM Support for up to 2TB virtual hard drives Support for OpenGL 2.1 (Windows Vista and 7 guest OSes) Support for OVF 1.1 specifications Support for Intel Advanced Encryption Standard instruction set (AES-NI) to speed up encryption/decryption performance Autologon for Windows guest OSes Guest OS applications direct launch from host OS (through Unity mode) Support for multiple new Linux distributions (RHEL 5.5, Ubuntu 8.04.4 and 10.04, Fedora 12, OpenSUSE 11.2, Debian 5.0.4 and Mandriva 2009.1) As evident, there’s not a single new feature related to ACE, the security wrapper that VMware offers since December 2004 . The last time VMware seriously updated ACE was in May 2007, with the 2.0 release . At this point it’s easy to guess that VMware may soon discontinue the product, possibly along with Server , and the two will join Stage Manger . Fusion 3.1 (build 261058) shares some of the new capabilities with Workstation 7.1, like the support for 8 vCPU and 2TB virtual hard drives or the support for OpenGL 2.1, plus some specific ones: Support for overlapping Unity windows in Exposé and Dock Exposé Import and export OVF packaged virtual machines and upload to vSphere with bundled OVF Tool 2 Interestingly, Fusion 3.1 doesn’t share the same list of newly supported guest OSes with Workstation 7.1: Red Hat Enteprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5, Fedora 12, Debian 5.0.4 and Mandriva 2009.1 are not in the list.

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NComputing, provider of low-cost virtual desktops for Windows, Linux, VMware and Citrix, with over 20 million daily users, today announced the launch and immediate availability of the L300 access device based on the NComputing Numo family chip, a highly integrated and multimedia enhancing System-on-Chip (SoC). The L300, in combination with NComputing vSpace virtualization technology delivers… This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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Born as a as a spin-out of Credit Suisse, the US startup DynamicOps launched almost two years ago , introducing a very interesting multi-hypervisor management console, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), which merges together VM lifecycle management and virtual lab automation capabilities. After a great start in 2008, when it hired away a couple of key executives from PlateSpin ( now part of Novell ) and Dunes Technologies ( now part of VMware ), the company remained under the radar for a very long time, releasing just one minor update in June 2009 . In December 2009 the company announced integration with BMC BladeLogic Ops Manager , in February 2010 it announced integration with NetApp FlexClone technology , and last week they announced integration with HP Server Automation . Besides that, it’s not clear how much the product evolved in these two years: the company marketing renamed version 1.0 in version 3.0 right after the launch in 2008, one year later VRM just reached version 3.2, and this month Redmond Magazine mentions a version 3.3 , which should be the current one. At the end of December 2008 the company even promised support for VMware View 3 to arrive in early 2009, but the announcement never came. While the support for NetApp FlexClone and the marketing literature let us assume that it’s there, it’s not even clear if VRM supports new version 4.0 or not.

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After exactly a year since its public launch , the startup HyTrust releases today version 2.0 of its access control and change management appliance for VMware virtual infrastructures. It’s worth to remember that HyTrust sits between the VMware management interfaces (vCenter Client, ESX SSH and web management interfaces, vCenter and ESX APIs) as a transparent proxy that enforces authentication, authorization and corporate policy. Every time a vSphere administrator tries to issue a command, his request is intercepted by the HyTrust appliance that sits in the network: the engine checks authentication credentials first, it verifies that the administrator is in a user group allowed to interact with the virtual infrastructure entities that he’s trying to manipulate, and then it verifies if the desired action is allowed on those entities. If not, HyTrust doesn’t move forward the command and returns to the vSphere management interfaces a customizable warning, saying that the desired action is denied. Version 2.0 introduces some remarkable new features: Federation While a single appliance can already protect multiple vCenter Servers and ESX hosts, this new version ensures that the same security policy, defined in a single appliance, is automatically replicated to all the others in the infrastructure. This guarantees a consistent set of rules across geographically-wide virtual infrastructures. Object Policy Labels Administrators can assign to every element of the virtual infrastructure a security label. A HyTrust policy can be created to only permit the interaction between elements that have the same label. Depending on how these labels are assigned, the feature allows to define virtual segmentations and block operations between elements that have different security levels. Root Password Vault HyTrust can map the ESX root user privileges to another account for a limited amount of time. This allows administrator to never expose the root username and password.

NComputing today announced the launch and immediate availability of its Numo family of chips. Numo is anambidextrous chip that will power consumer applications, such as accessing Google from a smart TV, as well as enterprise applications, such as using Microsoft Windows-based virtual desktops in bank branch offices. This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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