Year: 2010

At the end of May virtualization.info reported that the application virtualization firm XenoCode changed its corporate identity and name in Spoon.

Yesterday the company officially confirmed the change and launched a new product simply called Server.

Server is a web server that allows customers to stream over HTTP application virtualization packages in the same way Spoon does on its online portal with popular open source and free 3rd party virtualized applications.
The web service can be customized of course to create any sort of branded portals.

The product supports 32 and 64bit applications and clients (only Windows is supported) can start running its applications after 5-10% of the payload has been cached locally thanks a technology that the company calls adaptive streaming.
Spoon claims that the product can scale up to 10,000 concurrent users per Server.

Spoon Server is offered in a per-seat license model for enterprises and a per-app license model for software publishers. Price starts at $1,395 for the Standard Edition with 5 End User Licenses.

In March Dell greatly boosted the popularity of the open source management console for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform based on KVM: Eucalyptus.
The product, part of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) Linux distribution maintained by Canonical, has been included in the OEM’s PowerEdge C Servers.

Now Eucalyptus Systems, the company that maintains the console, is leveraging the exposure window and releases the second version of the product, available in open source and commercial editions.

The major new feature is the support for Windows guest operating systems (2003, 2008 and 7) along with new accounting and user group management capabilities. All features that are only available in the Enterprise Edition of Eucalyptus.

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Some of our readers may have noted that the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been expanded recently, with the addition of several new companies in multiple areas, like Kaviza in the Hardware Virtualization | Connection Broker category, Unidesk in the Application Virtualization | Platforms category, C12G Labs and Eucalyptus Systems in the Hardware Virtualization | Platform Management category.

Today we add another market player: the Canadian startup VM6 Software.

The company was co-founded in 2004 by Claude Goudreault, CEO, and Eric Courville, COO.
Goudreault has a past as Senior IT Architect for large companies like General Electrics and Rogers, while Courville has been the Vice President of Sales & Business Development for PlateSpin first (from 2004 to 2007) and for Embotics then (from 2007 to 2009).
With them there’s at least another former member of the original PlateSpin team: Kirsten Foon, Director of Marketing. Foon was the Online Marketing Program Manager before Novell acquired PlateSpin.
On top of that, VM6 Software appointed Stephen Pollack, the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin, as a board advisor in November 2009.

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The open source virtualization platform KVM has been included in the Linux kernel since version 2.6.20, in February 2007, and slowly made its way into many popular Linux distributions, including Knoppix, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora, and very soon Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES).

Despite that, smaller ISVs have been shy so far to build on top of KVM and offer low cost virtual infrastructures that could rival with the only significant player in this space at the moment: Red Hat.

Things may be changing in the near future: now that Red Hat is investing in promoting its RHEV virtual infrastructure and there’s a growing awareness around KVM, new platforms may start to appear.

The first example is KaOS, a lightweight, open source KVM-based virtual machine monitor developed by Carbon Mountain.

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virtualization.info and its partner Kybernetika are extremely pleased to announce today that Cisco Systems (in cooperation with VMware) selected our on-demand data center Rent-A-Lab (RAL) to host all its European road shows and bootcamps for Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco already selected RAL in the past to run the first UCS Bootcamp in Switzerland, and now the partnership is expanding to serve the entire Europe. 
When customers sign up for an event like this one in UK or Ireland, or an event like this one in Netherlands, they now know that RAL is the backend infrastructure.

In March we announced the expansion of virtualization.info RAL to 40 enterprise-class servers, and the migration to a new, shiny facility in the Zurich downtown. But we did more than that in this timeframe:

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While VMware continues to morph its corporate mission by acquiring more companies in the SaaS and PaaS cloud computing markets and continues to change its leadership team, its stock performance continues to improve.

This is what happened in the last two years, starting mid June 2008, just two weeks before Paul Maritz replaced Diane Greene as CEO of the company and VMware started to expand in completely new markets:

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The Canadian startup Enomaly continues to collect remarkable recognitions: after being featured by Intel in a IaaS cloud computing blueprint in April, the company scored a deal with HP to include its Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) Service Provider Edition (SPE) in the OEM’s cloud computing solutions for providers.

The hardware configurations promoted by HP, and powered by Enomaly, include DL and SL servers, StorageWorks MSA2000i, P4000 or X9000 arrays and ProCurve 2900, 6600 and 5400/8200 networking switches.
Here’s an example:

Just yesterday Virtual Computer released a free version of its platform wrapper NxTop.
The product, capped to 5 managed computers, includes the Xen-based client hypervisor and the management console NxTop Center.

While free of charge, customers that look at it as a consumer technology may be disappointed: there’s no way in fact to create new virtual machines on the local console without installing and using NxTop Center.

But Virtual Computer’s Senior Director of Product Management & Marketing, Doug Lane, just informed virtualization.info that a stand-alone client hypervisor is in the work too:

…we have a stand-alone hypervisor option in the works that will allow users to create VMs directly on the client hypervisor in cases where they do not wish to stand up a Hyper-V server. We expect to have this out within the next couple of months. This will open up the NxTop free download to an even larger population of potential users.

The startup Trustware launched in August 2006, entering the application virtualization market with a consumer-oriented product called BufferZone.

BufferZone didn’t get much traction so far and the company updated it just four times in four years. And now there’s a chance that the company will shift its focus out of the x86 virtualization market.

A recent article appeared on TopNews.in titles Trustware develops the pioneering malware for Android:

The first of a kind of malware for Google’s Android smartphone OS has been designed by a group of researchers at Trustware.

The malware aids in easy access of private information, such as bank credentials, text messages, GPS coordinates and call logs from the smartphone, claims the researchers from Trustware.

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The last time virtualization.info covered the US startup MokaFive was in April, to report about a third round of funding equal to $21M, and in May to report about a new version of its flagship product called Suite.

MokaFive Suite 2.8, released almost one year since version 2.0, didn’t introduce any new feature but the support for an additional virtualization engine: Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Over the last four years the company changed its go-to-market strategy a couple of times, and the decision to support side-by-side VMware and Oracle hosted virtualization platforms is a demonstration that MokaFive is still trying to figure out how to position itself in the most effective way.

Now the strategy may change again as the startup just announced the development of a client hypervisor: MokaFive BareMetal.

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