History

KACE is the very last company that entered the application virtualization market. It acquired Computers In Motion in September 2008 and released their rebranded technology this March as Virtual Kontainers.

Just before VMworld 2009 the company released Kontainers 2.0, which introduces some interesting features:

• a signature update service (customers can use it to inform KACE about new applications that don’t work properly in the virtual layer)
• the capability to patch/updated a virtual application without repackaging it
• a self-service provisioning web portal
• a command-line interface (CLI)

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The Canadian startup CiRBA recently released a new minor update for its capacity planning tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

The company is trying to simplify the use of its product, so DCI 5.2 ships with a number of new, pre-defined analysis templates tailored for consolidation in VMware infrastructures.
CiRBA will release additional templates during the next quarter to support Hyper-V and Xen hardware virtualization, as well as IBM AIX and Oracle/Sun Solaris OS virtualization solutions.

CiRBA is one of the many companies that revolves around VMware. But the once preferred partner is about to compete with them by releasing CapacityIQ, somewhere next year. 
So no surprises that CiRBA is now looking around for new opportunities.

After a couple of months of beta, Quest released the second minor update for its multi-platform connection broker vWorkspace 6.0.

The new build introduces several enhancements in multi-monitor, USB and graphic support, and a couple of new features:

• the integration with NetApp FlexClone technology (only for VMware VDI environments)
• the integration of vWorkspace Web Access portal with Microsoft SharePoint (experimental)

Despite its current size Liquidware Labs, the new company of David Bieneman, founder and former CEO of Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008), is demonstrating to be extremely aggressive.

The startup acquired VMSight in May, just before its public launch, and then opened a community portal at VDI.com (which is a notable investment considering the length and the relevance of the domain name) which collected over 1,000 subscribers in just a few weeks.

Now Liquidware Labs proceeds with a second acquisition: Entrigue Systems.

Entrigue is small US company founded in 2000 which offers a product called Script Start.
Script Start is able to create, provision and remotely manage the Windows user profiles (what the industry is now calling persona).
It also does other things like software/hardware inventory, but most of all it supports presentation virtualization environments like Citrix XenApp, VDI environments like VMware View and even enterprise desktop virtualization wrappers like Microsoft MED-V.

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Despite a new $4 million investment secured at the end of 2008, Embotics has been mostly silent in the last few months.

The company released version 3.0 of their lifecycle management product V-Commander at the end of August, but it didn’t introduce groundbreaking new features that show the vision and strategy of the startup.

This sort of information may come from a different front: just before the VMworld 2009, Embotics announced a partnership with Surgient, one of the oldest virtual lab automation firms currently on the market.

Unfortunately the press announcement does everything but explain what this partnership will actually imply.

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Virtual Computer, the company founded by the father of Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May) continues to evolve its management solution NxTop Center heavily using multiple forms of virtualization.

The company already has a Xen-based client hypervisor and a fairly complex web-based console which uses virtual machines,  snapshots and clones to publish the right system environment to the right user with the right customization (what the industry is calling persona now).

Now Virtual Computer also simplified the management of the application layer thanks to a technology partnership with XenoCode, the application virtualization company that already has an OEM deal with Novell.

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PHD Virtual seems to have finally found the right pace to compete in the crowded virtualization market.

The company is releasing new, significant updates for its flagship product much more frequently than in the last three years (esXpress 3.5 was released in June, 3.6 just one month after), and it’s investing to expand the product portfolio and the staff.

In early September in fact PHD Virtual announced that has doubled the R&D capacity and hired Vladimir Hrabrov, former R&D and Program Manager for Business Service Automation at HP.

Hrabrov, appointed as Vice President of Engineering, come from Novadigm where he worked for 10 years as Senior Software Architect before HP acquired it in April 2004.

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In mid-July virtualization.info unveiled that VMware was looking for a second CTO, who could take care of a desktop virtualization business unit that includes View, ThinApp, the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), the new Virtual Profiles product OEM’ed from RTO Software, and more.

To cover this role VMware didn’t hire an external resource but promoted its Chief Data Center Architect, Scott Davis, co-founder and former President and CTO at Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May).

Davis is in VMware since April 2007, but VMware formally presented him as CTO only at VMworld 2009.
This move should unload the growing responsibility of Steve Herrod, who leads the VMware technical effort since December 2001.

In our VMworld 2009 live coverage of the Day 2 keynote, we briefly mentioned that VMware has now an OEM agreement with RTO Software to use their Virtual Profiles products inside View.

The OEM agreement allows RTO Software to sell Virtual Profiles independently and update the product’s code base.
The interesting part anyway is that RTO Software has a similar deal with another major vendor that is become increasingly active in the desktop virtualization space, Symantec, even if their version of Virtual Profiles is not out yet.

Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a virtual desktop infrastructure.
This agreement will help VMware to better compete against Citrix, Symantec and the other vendors that are developing end-to-end VDI solutions.

On top of that the persona management is a building block of the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) effort as much as the mobile hypervisor acquired from Trango in November 2008.

At the beginning of July virtualization.info reported how VMware, Cisco and EMC (the VCE triumvirate?) are working together to execute virtual machines live migrations across data centers that are 80 km (50 miles) away from each other.

Well, what was considered an impressive yet experimental configuration in July became an officially supported scenario in September.

The three companies discussed three different scenarios for long-distance VMotion at VMworld 2009 and announced the joint validation for one of them, where VMware supports a 200 km live migration (assuming you can satisfy some pretty demanding requirements):

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