virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the RingCube official announcement:

RingCube Technologies, Inc., the creator of truly portable personal computing solutions, announced today that it has secured $12 million in Series B funding. The funding comes from MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures and first-round investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), bringing total investment in the company to $16 million.

RingCube will use the capital to expand its leadership in consumer and enterprise markets worldwide, including North and South America, Europe, Asia, and the BRIC nations. The company’s revolutionary operating systems virtualization software platform, MojoPac, gives users around the globe a truly mobile workplace in the palm of their hands. The MojoPac software platform is experiencing strong market adoption across consumer and enterprise channels. MojoPac has tens of thousands of users since launch in September 2006, while the MojoPac Enterprise Solution is seeing strong growth across legal, insurance, healthcare and home-based sales business verticals.

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RingCube has also announced that investor MDV’s Jim Smith will be joining its board of directors. Jim leads investments in software and systems companies, and is active in extending MDV’s relationships with leading universities and research centers…

KernelNewbies guys realized a nice wiki about Linux Virtualization and published an interesting comparison table of existing virtualization solutions for the open source OS.

It provides a good amount of details for each product with a mention on performances too.

Be sure to check the original source for updates.

Thanks to Tim Freeman for the news.

Brian Madden published a new interview with Pete Downing, Senior Engineer at Ardence (now acquired by Citrix), about several technical aspects of Ardence 4.0 solution:

• How Ardence “fakes out” the Windows computer name and SID
• Why Ardence chose to use UDP instead of TCP
• Where the Ardence cache file can be saved
• How people start using Ardence
• How the Ardence PXE boot process works
• How Ardence can share vdisks across multiple hardware platforms

Listen to it at source.

Citrix arranged an online webcast for March 13 to show new application streaming capabilities of its just released Presentation Server 4.5.

During the presentation following points will be touched:

• Presentation Server 4.5 Overview of Platinum Edition
• Overview and Benefits of Application Streaming
• Application Streaming Architecture
• Best Practices for Application Streaming

Register for it here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

At beginning of February 2006 VMware released a 22-pages whitepaper comparing performances of its ESX Server 3.0.1 against Xen 3.0.1, where Xen resulted slightly inferior.

Because of restrictive VMware EULA XenSource (as well as other virtualization competitors) is not able to respond with same tone, providing their own analysis of benchmarks.

But it’s clear XenSource is not satisfied with current state of things and just released a counter-attack paper where results are completely different, but are not showing ESX Server performances measurements:

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VMware is tilting at windmills once again. For a start, Xen 3.0.3 is not a commercial product, it’s a code base. Second, Xen 3.0.3 only had partial support for hardware virtualization, and third, the VMware results are off – it seems ESX can get more than 1Gb/s out of a GigE NIC! Also, we have no idea what VMware did to build their Xen bits – a good example of why we care so much about what can and and cannot be called Xen.

We have of course run exactly the same benchmarks, on the same kind of machine, pitting our commercial XenEnterprise product against ESX. As a result, I now understand why the ESX EULA forbids us from publishing the results without VMware’s approval – they would find the results extremely embarrassing.

All of XenSource’s commercial products match or beat ESX performance for Windows in all but a couple of benchmarks…

XenSource is waiting for official permission from competitor before releasing the complete paper, but making available the stripped version will be hard for VMware to not allow it, considering open source community and industry pressure to have a second opinion.

This counter-attack arrives in a very timely moment considering XenSource is a Microsoft partner since July 2006 and VMware challenged Redmond company on Windows licensing just few days ago.

Quoting from SearchServerVirtualization:

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“I’ve been asked by XenSource’s lawyers not to say the word that begins with ‘X’ since they own that word outright,” said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron Software in Lowell, Mass.

According to Grandinetti, XenSource’s lawyers “dropped a bomb” on the Xen community last month when they announced that “you’ll have to pay to certify your apps against our test suite, and you’ll have to pay us some more to use the name,” Grandinetti said.

Simon Crosby, CTO at XenSource, disputes the notion that XenSource asked Virtual Iron to pay for the right to the Xen brand. “It’s not a money-making thing whatsoever,” Crosby said. “It’s about protecting the community.”.

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But Red Hat Inc., too, seems to be backing off any Xen nomenclature. While Red Hat’s Web site hasn’t been entirely stripped of the word Xen, the word is nowhere to be found under Red Hat’s virtualization page…

Read the original article at source.

Simon Crosby replied accuses on his corporate blog with a strong refute:

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XenSource is the legal owner of the Xen(tm) trademark. Xen is a code base for a freely available, industry standard hypervisor that is licensed under GPL and developed collaboratively by a community of contributors using the open source model.

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Naturally, since Xen is delivered to market by many vendors, many of them want to state that their product includes Xen. That way, they get to benefit from the brand awareness and customer preference that has arisen from the tremendous following associated with the Xen project. The XenSource trademark policy for the Xen brand was designed to allow any vendor that faithfully implements the Xen hypervisor to qualify, free of charge, to use of the “includes Xen” logo on its products, and to state textually that their product includes Xen. XenSource is no different than any other vendor in this regard.

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The Virtual Iron hypervisor is not the Xen hypervisor – it’s a proprietary product (some of which is open sourced because they use bits & pieces of Xen code). Virtual Iron has not yet made any significant contributions back to the Xen community. Presumably they believe this gives them an edge in the market. Maybe it does. But if that’s the case, I don’t understand why they don’t just stand up and say so, rather than trying to jump on the Xen brand-wagon…

For the second time in less than a month the application virtualization startup Trigence steals a Softricity executive to Microsoft, after company acquisition. First time Trigence gained its Vice President of US Sales.

Quoting from the Trigence official announcement:

Trigence, the leader in virtualization at the application level, today announced that it has appointed John Hamilton as its Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO).

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Prior to joining Trigence, Hamilton was at Softricity, Inc. (recently acquired by Microsoft) where he was Vice President, Worldwide Sales, responsible for national and international sales, channels and customer technical services…

Microsoft strategy about SoftGrid is still vague after nine months since acquisition, without a solid product re-branding or marketing push. Is this the reason of these leavings?

Quoting from the Sentillion official announcement:

Sentillion vBusiness, a division of Sentillion, Inc., today announced that its packaged desktop virtualization solution, vThere, has been awarded RSA Secured certification with RSA SecurID, signaling its interoperability with industry leading two-factor authentication technology from RSA, The Security Division of EMC. Additionally, Sentillion joined the RSA Secured Partner Program…

Sentillion used to adopt VMware Player virtualization engine for its delivery wrapper vThere. Then, after replacing it with Parallels Workstation, it achieved the RSA certification. It’s a sort of ironic VMware is preparing to invade same market segment with ACE 2.0, but has not RSA certification, even if ACE exists since much more than vThere and RSA is now owned by EMC, which owns VMware as well.

Quoting from InternetNews:

RHEL 4.5 is the first update for RHEL 4 to include Xen paravitualized kernels. Xen is the open source virtualization effort that Red Hat has already included in its Fedora community Linux releases and is part of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 release as well.

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“The virtualization in 4.5 is to let it be a paravirtualized guest on RHEL 5,” Joel Berman, product management director for RHEL explained to internetnews.com. “That means that RHEL 4.5 will allow any RHEL 4 customers to quickly run on RHEL 5.0 with the high performance that comes from paravirtualization and without requiring any special hardware.”

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The final release of update 4.5 is expected sometime after March 21, 2007…

Read the whole article at source.

Personal Computer World published a very brief review, possibly the first one, of new XenServer for Windows, providing an overall rating of 2/5 and the following conclusion:

An interesting alternative to more established server virtualisation tools but needs more work.

Considering kind of magazine and review approach it would be easy thinking author tried to compare XenServer with a desktop product like VMware Workstation or Parallels Workstation. Instead there’s a clear reference to VMware Server as term of comparison. Which makes the poor overall rating even more severe.

Read the whole review at source.