In September a new virtualization startup surfaced the crowded market: Virtual Computer.
Founded by the same man that created Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky, the young company didn’t reveal much about its strategy so far.
But this week Virtual Computer moves its first product, NxTop, in private beta and it’s worth a check.
Like a small number of brave companies (for example Phoenix Technologies or Neocleus), Virtual Computer enhanced the open-source Xen hypervisor to fit a client hardware (like a laptop).
At the same time the company took the Microsoft hypervisor, Hyper-V, and put it on a central server.
On server-side, Hyper-V is used to serve a master virtual machine for VDI.
On client side, the modified Xen is used to serve a branch of the the master virtual machine.
Basically, every time the administrator decides to change the master VM on the server (for example to patch it), the modified bits are saved in a delta disk (like for any snapshot) that is compressed and streamed to the client where NxTop merges it with the main virtual disk.
On top of that the product wraps the virtual machine in a security layer, like Kidaro (now acquired by Microsoft), Sentillion or MokaFive do, applying the corporate policy of choice.
In this way Virtual Computer merged together several approaches, offering VDI and offline VDI in an interesting way.
Enroll the private beta here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.