Year: 2010

With an unexpected move, at the end of last week Parallels announced support for the upcoming Google operating system, Chrome OS, in its Desktop 5 for Mac.

While it’s entirely expected that consumers use desktop virtualization platforms to test new operating systems, it’s pretty uncommon to see a vendor that officially supports a beta product that is not widely deployed like Windows.

Considering the long beta cycles that Google products have (sometimes years), the effort to support multiple beta builds will be remarkable for Parallels.

The first stable release for Chrome OS is not expected to arrive before the second half of 2010.

Neocleus is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in May 2008 without much fanfare  (see virtualization.info coverage).
At that time, their Xen-based client hypervisor, Trusted Edge, was pitched as a secure endpoint platform that could be enriched by 3rd parties applications.

Two years after that, Neocleus still doesn’t get any significant traction despite many customers are well aware of (and very interested on) the client hypervisor concept because of its potential to deliver VDI in offline mode.
One reason for this lack of interest is that so far the startup made extremely complex to exactly understand the details of its product and to access it (the whole “drop us an email” argument doesn’t work well for a technology that is completely new and that faces severe skepticism about performance and hardware support).

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Last week Reuters and other news outlets reported that the VMware’s board approved a plan to buy back $400M in Class A shares.

The operation will happen over the months, through the end of 2011.

EMC said it has no intention to modify its ownership of the subsidiary, keeping it at around 80%.

In another note, the VMware’s CFO, Mark Peek, sold 15,000 shares at an average price of $46.72 a share in mid-February.

New month, new rebuttals in virtualization-land.
Evidently, virtualization players still consider the marketing skirmish very helpful to increase sales (virtualization.info has a slightly different opinion) so this March we have VMware leading three major campaigns against competitors.

Two of them are defensive, one is not:

• VMware View PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX
• Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales
• Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

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VMware just launched a new online facility called Labs.

It seems a sort of R&D website that exposes company’s engineers pet projects before they turn into real products, similarly to what other companies like Microsoft and Google do.

At the moment Labs hosts ten projects, all released as Technology Previews, under open source licenses, without any support and without any indication about future inclusion in the VMware product portfolio.

Some of them, like the previously covered VMware Guest Console, are extremely interesting:

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A few minutes ago a couple of videos of a new VMware product called Guest Console (VGC) surfaced.

Guest Console, currently in Technology Preview phase, is a new management console able to independently monitor and manipulate files and processes inside any guest operating system.

It can connect to any guest OS, it doesn’t matter if the VM is hosted on ESX, Server and Workstation.
Once connected to the host, VGC provides a task manager, a file system explorer, a snapshot manager and a virtual machine manager that work with Windows and Linux guests.

With these tools an administrator can perform simple tasks like ending a running process or start a new program, as well as more complex things like copying the same file to multiple guest OSes at the same time.
In similar fashion, it can manipulate snapshots of multiple virtual machines at the same time or store the information coming from multiple guest OSes for inventory purposes.

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Exactly one year ago the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore made clear its decision to extend the focus to hypervisors from Microsoft and Citrix.
At that time the company announced the upcoming support for Hyper-V and XenServer in the new vControl enterprise management console.

Twelve months later, according to ComputerWorld, Vizioncore is getting ready to further support VMware competitors and unveils that its performance monitoring product, vFoglight, will support Hyper-V by mid-year and XenServer within the end of 2010.

One of the biggest assets VMware has, excluding of course its product portfolio, is its VMTN Forum facility, which hosts a large and incredibly active community of professionals that quite often are more knowledgeable, faster and way more efficient than the company’s paid support.

Any new customer that wants to learn VMware technologies inside out, well beyond what the official training class can provide, should consider investing at least 6-9 months just to follow the threads on the VMTN board in passive mode.

There’s a large number of VMware employees that contributed the success of VMTN. The first one that comes to mind for sure is John Troyer, Senior Social Media Strategist, who definitively is the VMware front man for everything related to the community.

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Exactly one year ago, PHD Virtual Technologies (formerly PHD Technologies) lost its CEO Sridhar Murthy.

In the last twelve months the company was led by its Executive Chairman Joe Julian, former Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Global Accounts at Veritas Software.

PHD Virtual Technologies yesterday announced that the former CEO of Shunra Software, Thomas Charlton, joined the company as new Chairman and CEO, thus replacing both Murthy and Julian.

This is the third CEO the company has since its launch in March 2006.

The most interesting thing is that the press release explicitly says that Charlton was chosen by Insight Venture, the VC firm that invests in both Shunra and PHD Virtual.

The security virtualization startup Altor Networks announced this week a new round funding, $10M, led by DAG Ventures, Juniper Networks, Accel Partners and Foundation Capital.

Accel and Foundation already led the previous one, equal to $6M, in April 2008.

It’s not clear if this is the second or third round: the company claims it is the second one, but the $6M announcement says:

…today announced it has secured a $6 million second round of financing led by Accel Partners and Foundation Capital