The early stage startup Virtual Computer entered the virtualization market in September 2008 but didn’t unveil anything about its new product before December.
The fact that the company was founded by Alex Vasilevsky, the Virtual Iron founder and former CTO, and the fact that it’s trying to revolutionize the desktop management using a client hypervisor based on Xen, is enough to mark Virtual Computer as interesting.
Citrix must have the same opinion as it partially funded the startup round B ($15 million).
The first version of their flagship product NxTop went out in April, featuring some high performance 3D graphic inside a virtual machine.
The new NxTop 1.1 entered in beta last week and featuring a new thing called System Workbench.
With System Workbench is adopting some isolation techniques already seen in the application virtualization products, abstracting some parts of the corporate virtual machine (a clone obtained from a gold master) that the users perceive as persistent as they survive a system reboot or a gold master patching.
NxTop has a great potential, and while Virtual Computer is using it just to simplify the management lifecycle, it could easily compete with Microsoft MED-V, VMware ACE, Sentillion vThere and a couple of others in this segment.
It’s just a matter of allowing the product to enforce a corporate security policy. And while the competitors are doing this with a slow and limited hosted virtual machine monitor (VMM), Virtual Iron can do that with a bare-metal VMM.