Phoenix Technologies has announced that it has completed the sale of the assets related to its HyperSpace, HyperCore and Phoenix Flip instant-on and client virtualization products to HP. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news that the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies was working to enter the virtualization space with its own hypervisor. The bare-metal virtual machine monitor (VMM), based on Xen and dubbed HyperCore, was officially confirmed one month later but it took more than one year to reach version 1.0 . The vision of Phoenix for that platform has been partially shared by a number of vendors that are offering their client hypervisors (or that are working to do so) at today. The idea was to provide a very low footprint client hypervisor, centrally managed (Virtual Computer approach) and secured out-of-band (Neocleus and Citrix approach), that could serve personal and corporate virtual machines side by side (Citrix and VMware approach). Despite remarkable partnerships ( with SupportSoft , with NEC , with Asus ) the product failed to impact the market in a significant way. Its failure depended on many factors: in part because the adoption of the hypervisor required the adoption of new hardware with a new BIOS, in part because the first release took too much time to hit the market, in part because Phoenix Technologies hasn’t be able to consistently appear as a serious virtualization player. So Phoenix eventually decided to refocus its business development effort elsewhere and dropped the project a couple of months ago, as reported by SeekingAlpha . The HyperCore assets will be bought by HP, for $12M, as Phoenix itself announced . The interesting question is why HP is interested in a Xen-based hypervisor. In November 2009 virtualization.info highlighted how the HP R&D department was already working on a Xen-based hypervisor . And that work was exactly focused on the development of a secure desktop virtualization platform. At this point the HP’s ambition to deliver its own VDI platform is hard to hide, and the acquisition of HyperCore intellectual property and engineers may further accelerate the go-to-market plans. All considered, HP still has its connection broker, its remote desktop protocol and its thin clients to leverage. What if the company would release a new generation of thin clients and laptops sporting a client hypervisor out-of-the-box that supports VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors for online and offline VDI scenarios?

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Yesterday, during its Synergy 2010 conference in San Francisco ( see virtualisation.info coverage ), Citrix announced the availability of XenClient: the free client hypervisor formerly known as project Independence. As published yesterday, the XenClient build released yesterday is Release Candidate. A lot has been said about the huge delay that both Citrix and VMware accumulated to launch their client hypervisors, and the reasons behind it. Despite that, Citrix managed to release a pretty stable version of the platform before VMware could do the same with it Client virtualisation Platform (CVP), and managed to support nine average laptops ( three from HP, three from Lenovo and five from Dell ). After the keynote, virtualisation.info sit with Peter Blum , Director Product Management and Marketing for this new platform, who detailed a lot of aspects never published before on XenClient. The first and most important information to know about XenClient is that it doesn’t require Intel vPro . A lot has been said about this topic too, and both Citrix and VMware have been criticized for the choice to have vPro as a mandatory requirement to run their client hypervisors, when much smaller competitors like Virtual Computer and Neocleus don’t need it. Well, at least for XenClient, Intel vPro is highly recommended but not a mandatory requirement. At today vPro is an umbrella for multiple Intel technology: VT-x, VT-d, Active Management Technology (AMT) and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). In its current form, XenClient only requires VT-x and VT-d. The reason why Citrix is highly recommending to have a laptop certified for all Intel vPro technologies, is that in future XenClient may leverage the other two, like TXT to encrypt virtual desktop images. To guarantee remarkable guest OS performance, Citrix is not just leveraging VT-d. The company is using para-virtualized drivers for the top three Windows guest OSes: XP, Vista and 7. At the moment, there’s no official support for Linux guest OSes, but the company reports that it works. There will be several editions of XenClient. The current one is called Express and integrates the Citrix Receiver and another, new component called Synchronizer, which is needed to remotely provision virtual desktops and security policies on the hypervisor. While Synchronizer takes care of virtual desktop provisioning, there’s not a specific solution to provision the XenClient platform itself on bare metal laptops. Anyway the product features a PXE subsystem and thus it can be used with any third party enterprise distribution product, including the Citrix Provisioning Server. Citrix tentatively expects to release the GA of XenClient in Q3 2010. The product is and will remain free and (mostly) open source. Source code is available already now but, like it happens for XenServer , it doesn’t include some proprietary components, like the user interface to switch from one virtual desktop to another. As already said in our previous articles, XenClient is based on the same virtualisation engine of XenServer, which is based on Xen. At the moment XenClient is built on top of Xen 3.x. The new Xen 4.0 engine will be implemented as soon as it matures a little in versions 4.x. Contrary to what the press reported on the reasons behind such delay (XenClient was originally expected for the end of 2009), the biggest technical challenge is not to support the myriad of laptop configurations on the market.

Phoenix Technologies today announced the appointment of Robert Andersen as Interim Chief Financial Officer, effective March 5, 2010. Mr. Andersen replaces Mr. Richard Arnold, who resigned from Phoenix to pursue other opportunities. [[ This is a content summary only

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