History

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

Last week Pano Logic announced its third round funding, equal to $20M and led by Mayfield Fund.

As result, Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha will join the company’s Board of Directors.

With this investment, the startup raised more than $40M. The previous round, $18M, was led by Foundation Capital and Goldman Sachs.

Pano Logic revealed that its sales tripled in 2009 and while its revenue may just get better this year, the startup is seeing increasing pressure from bigger firms that embrace the idea of a zero client for thin computing and VDI environments.
Dell, for example, just announced its own zero client: the FX100.

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Last week the virtualization security startup HyTrust announced its second round funding: $10.5M, led by Granite Ventures and Cisco.

The first round was equal to $5.5M, provided by Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.

Only Len Rand, Managing Director at Granite Ventures and former General Manager of Strategic Marketing and Global Alliances in Intel, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Director. Nobody from Cisco.

On top of this, HyTrust also announced that Jim Gannon, the former Director of Global Accounts at VMware, joined the company as its new Vice President of Sales.

The virtualization startup Reflex Systems may have changed its go-to-market strategy, focusing more on virtual infrastructure management than on security, but it didn’t forget its roots.

Exactly one year ago the company hired a former ISS executive, Preston Futrell, as new Vice President of Sales, in September 2009 launched a new version of its new flagship product that features a VMware VMsafe-certified policy compliance enforcement engine, and now it closes a deal with TippingPoint, a well-known player security market.

TippingPoint, a subsidiary of 3Com, which was recently acquired by HP, offers a popular line of intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
The partnership allows TippingPoint to include Reflex VMC in its Security Virtualization Framework, a bundle of products (Digital Vaccine Labs, vController, Security Management System and of course the IPS appliances) that enforces segmentation between virtual machines and supports separation of duties between the different teams that manage the virtual infrastructure.

At the end of January VMware released a couple of minor updates for its desktop virtualization platforms for Windows and Linux: Workstation and Player.
For some reasons we missed this product update, so we are reporting about it now.

The new build (227600) is primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces support for a number of guest and host operating systems:

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