History

Quoting from The Register:

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“Right now we depend on Microsoft and Linux to deliver some of the core functions comparable to what VMware delivers,” Beloussov said. “So, we hope they ship a good product (next year). They are our best partner.”

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“In reality, it does look quite suspicious right now (as to whether Microsoft will ship a ‘good’ product),” Beloussov said. “They are delivering the product late and cutting the features. What they are planning to ship right now is like what VMware was shipping two years ago. That is really a concern.”..

Read the whole article at the source.

Quoting from the Endeavors Technologies official announcement:

Endeavors Technologies Inc, the pioneer in application streaming and virtualization technology, today introduced Application Jukebox, its next-generation application streaming and virtualization family of products.

Application Jukebox is initially available in three versions to meet differing market needs. Application Jukebox Lite Edition is a free, fully functional version supporting one server that allows administrators and ISVs to evaluate the product and discover the ease of creating and managing streamable versions of existing applications. Application Jukebox SaaS Edition includes metering and a kiosk mode to support a pay-as-you-go, application rental model, its customizable portals create an easy-to-use environment for OEMs or ISVs to build a unique application access landing site. Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition adds Active Directory support, and includes user and group monitoring, plus extensive tracking and support to cost-effectively streamline license management.

Application Jukebox products contain three key components. Application Jukebox Player sits on the client to create the virtual application environment and provides user authentication and application license enforcement. Application Jukebox Server controls and delivers applications, provides usage monitoring and logging, plus group, user and application level administration. Application Jukebox Studio allows ISVs and IT administrators to create a streamable, virtualized “appset” from standard, Windows-based applications that is then published to the server.

Endeavors’ is previewing Application Jukebox at Interop New York. Product availability will be in early 2008…

Microsoft just released a new Management Pack for System Center Operation Manager 2005 (formerly MOM) which allows integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007.

It’s a critical component for large scale deployments and enables monitoring of several Virtual Machine Manager servers, agents deployed on Virtual Server 2005 hosts, and virtual machines stored in available Library Servers.

In no way it replaces the Virtual Server 2005 Management Pack, which instead monitors virtual machines and virtualization hosts running in the infrastructure.

Download it here.

VMware is about to release the first minor update for its new Mac OS virtualization product: Fusion 1.1.

In this release candidate (build 61385) VMware fixes several bugs and introduces improvements in Unity and BootCamp support.

The product will be ready for new Apple Mac OS 10.5 Leopard.

Enroll the beta program here.

In the video contest VMware launched during its VMworld 2007 a little jewel appeared (and won the grand prize): a videoclip titled Virtualization Hardware Hotel, made by Lodge McCammon, Brian Bouterse, and Sammie Carter.

It’s worth a break in the weekend:

Xen-based virtualization platform from Virtual Iron reaches version 4.1.

The release only introduces support for 64bit Windows Server 2003 guest OS and some bugfixes.

Read the whole Release Notes here, download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

From its corporate blog Jeff Woolsey, Lead Program Manager Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, unofficially announces a new version of Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian) APIs draft documentation, which now reaches version 0.83.

The updated APIs are now included in the so called Open Specification Promise, a licensing agreement which simplifies development of 3rd party applications for Microsoft technologies, and cover:

• Partition Management
• Physical Hardware Management
• Resource Management
• Guest Physical Address Spaces
• Intercepts
• Virtual Processor Management
• Virtual Processor Execution
• Virtual MMU and Caching
• Virtual Interrupt Control
• Inter-Partition Communication
• Timers
• Message Formats
• Partition Save and Restore
• Scheduler
• Event Logging
• Guest Debugging Support
• Statistics

Final version of this documentation will be released along with Viridian RTM, in September 2008.

Read the whole specifications at the source.

The application virtualization company Endeavors Technologies, once doing business as Stream Theory, announces ends of its last lawsuit:

Endeavors Technologies, Inc., Stream Theory Inc. and Exent Technologies Inc. today jointly announced an agreement ending all outstanding lawsuits that Stream Theory has pursued on its patent portfolio. Under the agreement Exent has been granted licenses to Endeavors’ and Stream Theory’s streaming patents and Endeavors and Stream Theory were granted licenses on Exent’s streaming patents.

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Commercial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Before this one Endeavors closed similar lawsuits with Microsoft and Citrix in March 2007, and with AppStream in June 2007.

The PC component known as BIOS is present in every box since first IBM PC compatible appearance. But in these years its features failed to keep the pace with technology evolution, so that Intel started to work on a modern replacement called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, formerly EFI).

This obliges Phoenix Technologies, which is one of the two worldwide leaders in BIOS manufacturing, to reshape its business model and find new revenue streams. And virtualization is one of the best opportunity at the moment.

virtualization.info has learned that Phoenix is developing its own hypervisor, called HyperCore, designed to host traditional operating systems like Windows Vista, side by side with a special multi-purpose environment called HyperSpace, produced by Phoenix itself.

HyperCore is a true bare-metal Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) which will load directly from Phoenix BIOS, while HyperSpace will be able to provide basic capabilities for daily tasks, like internet browsing and multimedia files view, in isolated virtual machines. The HyperSpace will also provide some security tools, like an anti-virus, to recover other compromised virtual machines.

HyperCore will also be able to run embedded OSes inside its virtual machines, developed by third party ISVs for different purposes.

virtualization.info has also learned that Phoenix Technologies has hired Joanna Rutkwoska, the security researcher behind the Blue Pill rootkit prototype which divided security and virtualization experts, to grant HyperCore’s security level before release.

At the moment no further informations are available. Stay tuned for new details.

The move is of notable importance: while VMware and Citrix fight to embed their hypervisors into popular servers for enterprise customers, Phoenix may be free to do the same thing in the consumer market, but without a single competitor because of its privileged position in the computing stack.

Phoenix may look for acquisition in the virtualization space to achieve the goal as soon as possible.

Worldwide investors are waiting for 2pm PST when VMware will disclose earning report for Q3 2007, the first one as public company.

The announcement will be made with a live webcast, which can be enrolled here.

Meanwhile VMW opens today at $106.15, over three times the IPO price set in August.

Update: VMware published the complete report for Q3 2007, which reveals a 90% growth in net income from $19.2 million (9 cents a share) in 2006 to $64.7 million (18 cents a share), exceeding analysts expectations reported by Bloomberg and other financial media.

Despite the achievement VMware didn’t provide any forecast for Q4 2007, and closed with a -2.48% ($103.52).