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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.

Compared to the Novell agreement, Virtual Computer is not OEM’ing the XenoCode Virtual Application Studio.
It is just supporting the applications virtualized with the XenoCode technology out-of-the-box inside its NxTop virtual machines.

It is not a revolution but this way Virtual Computer is silently building an end-to-end VDI stack that one day could rival with the upcoming ones from Citrix and VMware.

Labels: Alliances, Platform Management, VDI, Virtual Computer, XenoCode

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.

Labels: Virtual Computer

The just announced partnership between Citrix and Intel certainly raised some serious concerns among the many virtualization companies that are developing a client hypervisor.
At least one of the them may be safe anyway: Virtual Computer.

The startup founded by Alex Vasilevski, the founder and CTO of Virtual Iron, launched in September 2008 and its product NxTop, currently in private beta, is really overlapping the Citrix plans to deliver an end-to-end VDI solution.

Despite that, today the company announces Citrix, along with Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, granted a second round of funding for as much as $15 million.

It’s a bold move, considering the investment that Citrix already has in place with Intel, and it may imply a future acquisition.

The news also highlights how active Citrix is becoming in the virtualization market, investing in a number of startups (just ten days ago the company invested in Open Kernel Labs) that may provide innovative products in the next few years.

Labels: Citrix, Funding, Virtual Computer

The US startup Virtual Computer continues to unveil bits of its upcoming product, NxTop, which manipulates server and client virtualization to build an innovative VDI environment.

At the beginning of this month the company launched a private beta program and now it demonstrates some high-speed 3D graphics on virtualized laptops.

One of the biggest challenges in adopting a hypervisor on consumer equipment like workstation or notebooks is granting satisfying performance that won’t damage the user experience.
But the hypervisors developed so far for server virtualization just emulate most of the physical devices so that quality display or audio cards are just unusable.

Virtual Computer developed a special version of Xen to address this shortcoming on client side, and now it’s ready to show how it works when dealing with a 3D video cards and some graphic-intensive software like Quake and Google Earth:

Labels: Virtual Computer

The startup Virtual Computer is completing the last steps to officially enter the market.

Last week its hybrid VDI solution, NxTop, moved to private beta, and now the company appoints its Vice President of Sales: Sandrijn Stead.

Prior to joining Virtual Computer Inc., Sandrijn served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Reflex Security Ltd (now Reflex Systems). As the first employee for Reflex Security in the EMEA region, Sandrijn built the global sales, technical and marketing teams and created a stable channel across the globe, including 300 VARs and 16 distributors.

Labels: Leadership, Virtual Computer

In September a new virtualization startup surfaced the crowded market: Virtual Computer.
Founded by the same man that created Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky, the young company didn’t reveal much about its strategy so far.

But this week Virtual Computer moves its first product, NxTop, in private beta and it’s worth a check.

Like a small number of brave companies (for example Phoenix Technologies or Neocleus), Virtual Computer enhanced the open-source Xen hypervisor to fit a client hardware (like a laptop).

At the same time the company took the Microsoft hypervisor, Hyper-V, and put it on a central server.

On server-side, Hyper-V is used to serve a master virtual machine for VDI. 
On client side, the modified Xen is used to serve a branch of the the master virtual machine.

Basically, every time the administrator decides to change the master VM on the server (for example to patch it), the modified bits are saved in a delta disk (like for any snapshot) that is compressed and streamed to the client where NxTop merges it with the main virtual disk.

On top of that the product wraps the virtual machine in a security layer, like Kidaro (now acquired by Microsoft), Sentillion or MokaFive do, applying the corporate policy of choice.

In this way Virtual Computer merged together several approaches, offering VDI and offline VDI in an interesting way.

Enroll the private beta here.

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

Labels: Virtual Computer

After the September launch, the US startup Virtual Computer (formerly known as Old Road Computing), co-founded by the Virtual Iron founder and former CTO, seems ready to build its leadership team.

The first one joining the two co-founders on the Board of Directors is Rick Faulk, President and CEO of Mzinga, a startup that launched in November 2007 that is focused on social networks.

Certainly Faulk has a vision about the so called Web 2.0 universe, but it’s not clear how his experience will benefit an emerging virtualization company like Virtual Computer.

Labels: Leadership, Virtual Computer