In December 2007 the founder of Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May 2009), Alex Vasilevsky, left his company to form a new venture with Dan McCall, former board advisor at Reflex Security (now Reflex Systems).
The new startup, fueled by Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners funds, came out the stealth mode in September 2008 and released the first semi-public beta of his flagship product, NxTop, in July 2009.
NxTop is one of the first client hypervisors to hit the market and one of the few that doesn’t require Intel vPro as mandatory hardware feature (both VMware and Citrix client hypervisors seems to need it to work).
Based on Xen, NxTop is sold as a new and more efficient platform to manage the PC lifecycle, so it’s not in direct competition with the upcoming VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) and the Citrix XenClient, which are meant to offer offline VDI capabilities.
Fast forward to mid-December 2009: Virtual Computer releases NxTop 1.2.
With this releases the company claims that guest OSes score a performance of 90% of physical platforms, and of 98% of native networks (both measured with “standard PC benchmarks that simulate corporate workloads”).
NxTop 1.2 also introduces full support for multi-core processors and a 3-seconds suspend/resume.
Too bad there’s no way to try this client hypervisor for general purpose virtualization on desktop (it would be less practical than using a typical hosted virtualization solution, but an enjoyable way to try it).