Year: 2008

A new startup launches today in the already crowded application virtualization market: InstallFree.

InstallFree is an Israeli company (with the official HQ in US) founded in 2006 by Yori Gabay, CEO, and Netzer Shlomai, CTO, both previously at Gteko which was acquired by Microsoft.
Other key members of the management team are David Karofsky, Vice President of Marketing, which comes from EMC, and Yuval Neeman, Board Advisor, which is a former Vice President at Microsoft (16 years at the company) who completed a couple of successful acquisitions (Secured Dimensions and M-System) in the last years.

The company is funded with $1.7 million from several angel investors and VC firms.

Despite the incredible number of competitors, including Microsoft with Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) and VMware with Thinstall, InstallFree has some interesting capabilities to market.

The first company product, Bridge, is able to create autonomous (agent-less) virtual applications which can be updated or incrementally patched without the need to re-virtualize them.
The customizations that users may decide to apply to a virtualized app are saved in dedicated encrypted files, which can be saved and redistributed, and which are not impacted when the application is updated.

Additionally, InstallFree offers a centralized management console, which fully integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, and uses it to distribute the virtual apps to corporate users.
From there the administrators can pack applications and patches, apply them to users and groups for delivery, and even manage the available software licenses accordingly.

The virtual applications can be prepared to run on multiple versions of Windows (both 32bit and 64bit) with a single package and InstallFree supports out-of-the-box VDI and Terminal Services environments.

The company doesn’t just virtualize the access to Windows file system and registry anyway.
It creates a complete virtual environment for the application where most OS components are emulated. This includes the security access system, which allows to distribute the virtual apps on OSes where the user has no high-level permissions (like Internet kiosks).
Additionally, different virtualized applications can communicate with each other, even if they are not in the same package.

InstallFree technology also includes streaming capabilities: the applications (and the users data files) are seamlessly streamed in a bi-directional way between the app repository and the client machine. Anyway, to avoid the network dependency Bridge allows to locally cache the apps.

InstallFree is also working on an additional product called Desktop, which will allow the company to compete on the corporate virtual desktop market against Microsoft (with Kidaro Workspaces), VMware (with ACE), Sentillion (with vThere) and MokaFive (with the new Virtual Desktop Solution), despite the solution is the only one not using hardware virtualization technologies.

It’s yet to be seen if Bridge features and Desktop in roadmap will be enough to give InstallFree a good chance to emerge.

No trial of InstallFree Bridge 1.0 is available at the moment.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

Moka5 is a US startup launched two years ago with the ambitious mission to revolutionize the desktop virtualization market.

The company product, LivePC, targeted the consumer market with some interesting features like an online library for virtual machines downloading and the capability to update the VMs without redistributing them entirely.

But in two years LivePC, which is a feature-rich wrapper around VMware Player, could never reach the 1.0 milestone and its diffusion remained limited.
Additionally, the company radically changed its management team over time, replacing the CEO, the VP of Engineering and the VP of Marketing.

Now the company also replaces its go to market strategy, changing the name (from moka5 to MokaFive), the corporate image (including both the logo and the website) and the target audience: the priority is now the SMB market.

The new offering is based on the Virtual Desktop Solution, which basically is a console to centralize the management of multiple LivePCs.

While the underlying engine didn’t change, this new product introduces some security capabilities (virtual machines encryption, expiration, signing) that companies like VMware (with ACE), Sentillion (with vThere) and Kidaro (with Workspaces, now acquired by Microsoft) use to offer since some years.

And even if the company is now fully committed to the corporate market, the consumer one wasn’t left behind: the original LivePC solution, now called MokaFive Express Solution, is now a free of charge product with the same popular capabilities offered in the last two years.

Both products aren’t ready anyway: customers will have to wait somewhere in this Q2 2008 to have them. Meanwhile a preview is available here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

A couple of weeks after the release of Hyper-V 1.0 Release Candidate 0, Microsoft is ready to distribute the drivers needed to optimize the Linux guest OSes.

This drivers allow supported Linux guests (only Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 at today) to access the Hyper-V VMbus, as detailed in this architecture diagram provided by Microsoft in July 2007.

Called Integration Component for Linux, they can be downloaded from the beta site Microsoft Connect.

While worldwide OEMs like HP, IBM and Dell are pushing hard to release virtualization-ready servers, Lenovo seems to prefer the desktop virtualization market.

The Chinese OEM in fact announced its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).

Such platform will use the Intel VT technology but it’s totally unclear how: nor the press release neither the official website provide any detail about which hypervisor or hosted VMM will be used and how it will be integrated in the hardware.

The incredibly vague description provided seems to suggest an approach similar to the one that Phoenix Technologies is adopting with its PC 3.0 and the HyperCore hypervisor, but there is no way to confirm at the moment.

More news about this story as soon as possible.

EE Times Asia is reporting that Freescale is adopting virtualization in upcoming dual-core CPUs:

…

Freescale is now sampling the first dual-core versions of its PowerQuicc processors, aimed at telecom OEMs. The chips are part of a family that will eventually scale to 32-core devices, said Dan Cronin, VP of R&D for Freescale’s networking division.

The processors will use a new on-chip interconnect fabric. They will also embed in hardware a hypervisor, a kind of low-level scheduling unit, co-developed with IBM according to specs set in the Power.org group. Freescale will release an open source reference design for companies that want to build virtualization software that taps into the hypervisor, Cronin said…

The VMware hypervisor ESX Server is no more called in this way.

Even without a formal announcement the company dropped the term Server from its product name so that now we have two product: VMware ESX and VMware ESXi (in place of formerly ESX Server 3i).

Most of the online documentation still reports the former “ESX Server” label so customers may be confused for a while. Probably VMware will complete the name make-over in time for the release of VI 3.5 Update 1, scheduled for April 10.

It’s interesting to consider why the company renamed its most popular, flagship product.

The first, most likely reason is that the large majority of customers usually refers to the hypervisor with just ESX, which is shorter and easier to say. But there may be other reasons behind the change.

The Server word inside ESX Server implied that the hypervisor is for back-end implementation, which may be limitating for VMware on the long run.
What if the company is preparing to port its hypervisor to other platforms, like embedded devices for example? Running a server product on a mobile device sounds confusing and prevents the marketing department from creating an edition called ESX Mobile or ESXm.

VMware also performed another substantial change in its naming convention: it dropped the sentence an EMC company from the corporate logo.

The company is still an EMC subsidiary but the tagline was probably disturbing EMC competitors like HP and IBM which are top VMware partners.

Finally VMware opens to a wide audience Workstation 6.5 and ACE 2.5 beta (build 84113) bits.

As virtualization.info readers know since a couple of weeks, the feature list of Workstation 6.5 introduces some interesting things like the seamless window technology that VMware calls Unity (a detailed list of its capabilities is available here) and the low level debugging engine VProbe.

ACE 2.5 instead doesn’t introduce any major feature besides the higher integration level with Workstation: as already reported, now every Workstation 6.5 copy can produce ACE VMs and customers only require a dedicate license for the Management Server or the ACE VMs installed where there is no Workstation available.

Enroll for the Workstation 6.5 beta program or the ACE 2.5 beta program.

TechCrunch just reported about a new project called Scalr which provides interesting high availability capabilities for Xen-based on-demand virtual datacenter Amazon EC2.

Basically Scalr monitors a virtual farm performance and when it drops under a customizable threshold, because an existing virtual machine crashes or because there is an increase in a certain application workload, it spawns a new VM, configuring it as part of the farm.

Despite the project is still in early stage it gives an idea of how corporate virtual datacenter will be in the coming years: autonomous infrastructures able to react to unplanned faults or increasing resources demand without manual intervention.

In May 2007 Gartner was predicting that the total numer of deployed virtual machines would reach 3 million by 2009, and that virtualization would be part of nearly every aspect of IT by 2015.

The popular analysis firm seems to think that virtualization adoption is accelerating more than expected and it’s adjusting its forecasts accordingly.

In details Gartner now expects 4 million VMs by 2009, 611 million virtualized PCs by 2011 and the IT infrastructure and operations deeply impacted by virtualization by 2012.

It’s not exactly clear what Gartner means by deployed VMs (we’d assume deployed in production) or virtualized PCs (installing virtualization products for different purposes?) but it’s evident that the firm drastically changed its mind in the last 12 months.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Springboard Research published a new report which forecasts the virtualization market cap in APAC: $1 billion for virtualization services and $350 million for virtualization products by 2010.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.