virtualization.info is a publication about technology. On these pages you’ll find information just about vendors and products.
Today I’ll make an exception for a person that has made a piece of the virtualization history. Today I’d like to honor Alex Vasilevsky, who died yesterday of cancer.
Alex Vasilevsky co-founded Katana Technology in 2003, with Scott Davis, who now is the CTO of the Desktop Virtualization business unit at VMware.
Alex Vasilevsky was the Chief Scientist of Katana Technology, which was rebranded as Virtual Iron in January 2005, and officially launched one month later.
Virtual Iron has been acquired by Oracle in May 2009.
After Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky founded another virtualization company in December 2007: Old Road Computing.
The stealth startup was rebranded as Virtual Computer in September 2008 and officially launched three months later.
Virtual Computer launched one of the first client hypervisors in the market. As a very promising company, it attracted the interest of many investors, including Citrix.
With both his companies, Alex Vasilevsky greatly contributed to the development of the open source hypervisor Xen, which now is a leading virtualization engine, powering virtual infrastructures and public cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon EC2.
I wrote about Katana for the first time in December 2004, quoting an article from ARNnet.
I’ve met Alex for the first time in June 2007: we were both speaking at the same virtualization conference in NYC.
In the early days of virtualization, the biggest competitor of Virtual Iron was XenSource.
Simon Crosby, founder and former CTO at XenSource and now CTO at Citrix, just published some words about Alex Vasilevsky.
Update: Alex Vasilevsky’s company, Virtual Computer, where he was the CTO, published some words about him.