IBM resells Virtual Bridges VDI powered by KVM
Virtual Bridges is a company founded at the end of 2006, that always offered commercial flavors of QEMU for Linux, BSD and Solaris platforms.
After KVM made its appearance Virtual Bridges started to implement support for it on its products for Linux. Where KVM is not available KQEUM is automatically used.
In August it significantly extended its scope by releasing its first VDI connection broker for KVM: Win4VDI.
Compared to other products in this space, Win4VDI doesn’t connect the user to the actual guest OS, but rather to the underlying host. From there the user session is started.
In this way Virtual Bridges can leverage the authentication methods and profiles that the host is using.
The choice has been courageous.
Even if KVM is part of the Linux kernel and even if its maintainer, Qumranet, has been acquired by Red Hat, the spread of a new virtualization platform must surpass a huge obstacle: the ISVs support.
And at this point no ISV formally supported its applications inside KVM virtual machines.
Despite that, Virtual Bridges has been rewarded as IBM just closed an agreement with them to resell a bundle made by:
- Canonical Ubuntu Linux (which is adopting KVM in place of Xen since February)
- Virtual Bridges VERDE (a subset of WIN4VDI that only supports Linux guest OSes)
- IBM Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes and the other Lotus applications (dubbed Open Collaboration Client Solution)
The whole package is available at $49 per concurrent user.
So the move is remarkable because IBM is the first big player supporting (and actively selling) KVM-based virtual infrastructures. But it’s also remarkable considering how heavily IBM invested in Xen in the past.
After the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, a number of entities behind the open source hypervisor development were reportedly unhappy and decided to shift to KVM. And this seems the first concrete step that demonstrate how unhappy IBM is about Xen.
True or not, looking at what IBM just did, we can have an idea of what Red Hat could do.
The difference between the two vendors is that Red Hat is in a much better position to sell an out of the box VDI package: it controls the operating system, it (indirectly) controls the virtualization platform, it controls the connection broker, and its role in the industry as OS provider certainly gives much influence on what ISV applications will be supported on top.
Now, considering that, besides Qumranet, Virtual Bridges is currently the only other vendor offering a connection broker for KVM and that its experience has to be somewhat limited, the real question is: why IBM didn’t do this with Red Hat instead of Ubuntu and Virtual Bridges?
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
May 14th, 2012
Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…
May 10th, 2012
On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…
May 9th, 2012
On April 26 VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1, previously introduced as a part of vCenter Operations Management Suite.
VIN automatically detects, discovers and…
May 8th, 2012
On May 3 VMware released a security update, that the company itself define as “accelerated“, with the purpose to patch five “critical” security issues across VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor…
May 7th, 2012
On May 3 VMware announced it has joined the Facebook Open Compute Project, an initiative launched in 2011, with the objective of increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impact…
May 7th, 2012
On April 24 VMware published a technical paper titled: The VMware Reference Architecture for Stateless Virtual Desktops on Local Solid-State Storage with VMware View 5 which introduce the use of…
May 4th, 2012
On May 2 Liquidware Lab, the company founded in 2008 by David Bieneman, announced a new product called FlexApp and version 5.0 of its Stratusphere FIT, Stratusphere UX and…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress