April 25, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Celebrating Parallels and its desktop virtualization gift
This week, Parallels announced that it has sold 1 million copies of Parallels Desktop, a utility that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows alongside Mac OS X. Although EMC's VMware unit now offers a similar product, it was Parallels that pioneered this application.
And this application has played a significant role in making the Macintosh more widely acceptable in both personal and business environments, as it got rid of the "what if my app won't run on the Mac?" dilemma that overshadowed Apple for years.
For the masses (including senior execs who sign IT project checks), Parallels defines virtualization. And that's a good thing, as it works quite well. I believe that the Parallels example will be a key factor beyond the Mac universe: It will show a successful use of virtualization on the desktop, where its benefits are far from widely realized.
That can only help make the case for desktop virtualization as Microsoft, Citrix, and others continue to push that nascent technology further.
Posted by Galen Gruman on April 25, 2008 05:00 AM
February 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Sun buys open source virtualization company
Sun Microsystems said Tuesday it plans to acquire innotek, which provides the VirtualBox open source virtualization software package.
VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM virtualization platform onto the desktop, enabling developers to more efficiently build and run applications on multiple platforms, Sun said. With more than 4 million downloads, VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop platform PCs running the Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris OSes to run multiple operating systems side-by-side. Users can switch between them with a click of a mouse.
Developers can more easily build multi-tier or cross-platform applications while power users can take advantage of applications not available on their base operating system of choice, Sun said.
“Where Sun xVM Server is designed to enable dynamic IT at the heart of the data center, VirtualBox is ideal for any laptop or desktop environment and will align perfectly with Sun’s other developer-focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects, enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next generation of applications," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Sun Software, in a statement released by the company.
Sun on January 16 announced plans to acquire open source database vendor MySQL for $1 billion. Terms of the agreement to acquire innotek were not disclosed, although Sun did note it is to be a stock purchase agreement. The deal is expected to close by March 31.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 12, 2008 08:48 AM
September 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Mobile virtualization gets smart
Desktop virtualization has a new form factor for delivery, the smartphone, thanks to Israel-based Ceedo Technologies, which today announced its Ceedo Mobile initiative at the TechCrunch40conference in San Francisco.
The initiative holds promise in enabling road warriors to carry enterprise applications and data on smartphones and then access those assets as needed through a virtualized environment that boots automatically when their mobile devices are hooked up to a host PC via USB.
Ceedo Mobile leverages the PC as an interface between worker and phone, thereby tapping the PC's connectivity and RAM. Moreover, all activities performed through the virtualized environment are cached to the mobile device's flash memory, enabling workers to eject the device when finished and leave no trace on the host PC.
The solution currently works only with Windows.
Although bundling virtualized applications on USB flash drives is nothing new, doing so on the flash drive of a smartphone opens up the portable virtualized app environment model to compelling possibilities.
Enabling mobile workers to perform and cache lightweight tasks on phones and leverage the PC environment in a completely secure manner when their work requires heavier resources, such as when a sales order must be processed, will surely prove enticing to today's increasingly mobile enterprises.
More TechCrunch40 coverage:
• TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild
• TechCrunch40: Learning from legends
• Google rep glib on enterprise play
• Xobni: Web 2.0 lipstick for MS e-mail pig?
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 17, 2007 04:59 PM
August 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Citrix and XenSource: The best offense is good defense
Citrix Systems was already a wild card in the virtualization game. The longtime leader in thin client computing, clearly awakened from a slumber by VMware's launch of the Virtual Desktop Initiative last year, has been sprinting ever since to stay ahead of the threat. The acquisition of XenSource fills the remaining hole in Citrix' virtualization portfolio, allowing Citrix to go shoulder to shoulder with VMware (and soon Microsoft) on the desktop virtualization front. It also plops Citrix into the lucrative server consolidation market.
For companies thinking of pulling end-user workspaces onto server farms -- both to break the cycle of expensive client-side hardware upgrades (a move encouraged by Vista) and to keep enterprise data safely tucked away in the datacenter -- desktop virtualization has a key advantage over thin client computing: Instead of serving a standard desktop configuration to every user, it gives each user the same sort of personalized workspace we've all become accustomed to.
When it became clear that VMware wasn't satisfied with owning the virtual server space but wanted desktops too, Citrix was quick to respond to the threat and also quick to see how both desktop virtualization and application virtualization could complement its flagship Presentation Server. By February of this year, it had rolled a SoftGrid-like application streaming solution into Presentation Server, and in April it unveiled Desktop Server, a connection broker and remote access manager to desktops hosted on any flavor of server, be it Presentation Server, hypervisor-based virtual servers, or a server blade system.
The acquisition of XenSource continues the series of defensive moves against VMware, which Citrix must keep from eating away at its hosted desktop business. It also allows Citrix to hit back at VMware on the server virtualization front. Here, Citrix's resources could give XenSource a much-needed boost in beefing up its virtual machine management tools, where XenSource trails not only VMware but also Virtual Iron and undoubtedly Microsoft, whose server virtualization solution finally seems to be closing in on a ship date.
With VMware's hugely successful IPO and Citrix's XenSource gambit, this has been a fun week for virtualization watchers. But the weeks and months ahead will be even more fun as the one-horse race turns into a real fight. Microsoft is entering the ring. With XenSource snatched up, Virtual Iron expects to draw more interest in partnerships from industry heavyweights. And Citrix, whose claims to virtualization leadership carried the smell of desperation just a year ago, now holds a virtualization technology portfolio that perhaps only Microsoft can beat.
The Citrix play for XenSource might simply amount to good defense, but it puts the company in excellent field position. Whatever happens next, it looks like VMware might have launched that IPO just in the nick of time.
Posted by Doug Dineley on August 15, 2007 11:22 AM
September 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Just blogging from the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum, where Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe said that Novell will support virtualized instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4) running on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) on systems that use Xen and Intel's Virtualization Technology.
According to Novell's statement, the company will offer support for virtualized RHEL 4 on SLES 10 "up through and including Level 3 (or core engineering) support. That means Novell will provide technical support for the Xen hypervisor if a customer uncovers an issue running a virtual instance of Red Hat Linux and that issue is not reproducible in a native, or non-virtualized, environment."
In case you missed the underlying competitve play here, Novell makes it clear, noting that the program will "allow Red Hat customers to migrate to Novell service and support while still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a virtualized environment."
Integrated XEN 3.0 support was one of the key innovations in SLES 10, allowing companies to host virtual servers via XEN.
And Novell isn't stopping with SLES 10. According to Jaffe, developers are working on a fully virtualized version of Netware for SLES 10, due out next year.
Posted by Paul Roberts on September 25, 2006 12:46 PM
September 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Speaking as someone who travels often and, without exception, has to lug his laptop along for the journey, I've been on the lookout for something lightweight that will replace my ThinkPad (no offense, IBM/Lenovo). It's not that my laptop's all that heavy, but it's cumbersome, especially when you add in the power cord and wireless ethernet card and the other peripherals. That's why startup Ringcube Technology's product Mojopac gets my nod for the "cool technology I really want to use" award. (OK, I just made that category up.) The company, which just landed $4 million in VC and will be pulling the covers off at Demofall. Mojopac is a patent-pending technology for encapsulating Windows XP and -- soon -- Windows Vista desktops on any USB 2.0 storage device -- iPods, USB flash drives, you name it, according to Shan Appajodu, CEO and Co-Founder of RingCube told InfoWorld last week.
Plug your device into a Windows host machine -- desktop, laptop, whatever. With Autorun enabled, you simply click on the Mojopac icon and your Windows desktop appears in a virtualized environment on top of the host system desktop. You can access applications, documents, you name it -- and all with your own settings: wallpaper, preferences, fonts, bookmarks, etc. The entire image is small -- Appajodu says around 13MB to start, and there's no client application that needs to be installed on the host system.
Even more interesting: there's nothing left behind on the host system after you unplug your portable drive -- that's key. As SSL VPN vendors figured out a long time ago: road warriors want to work without leaving sensitive documents, e-mail, and other IP left behind when they leave.
This is cool stuff. I was especially impressed that you can still use your iPod as an iPod, even after Mojopac is installed. Your "desktop" is just another file stored on the hard drive. That means that you can synch iTunes with your iPod on your iPod. The device actually figures out where to drop the iTunes files on its own.
There are limitations here, in particular: synchronization. Ringcube provides a synchronization tool to copy documents and other information over between your PC and your storage device, just as you would with a PDA. However, you can't just mirror your desktop onto your iPod or USB device because THAT WOULD VIOLATE YOUR EULA , as Appajodou must have said five times. This was a phone briefing so there may have been a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" going on in Mountain View that just didn't translate over the phone.
A better approach, Appajodou said, is just to install all your applications to the Mojopac environment from scratch, he said. Sounds good -- but I'm betting most users aren't going to put all their eggs into the Mojopac until its more proven.
The other limitation, obviously, is that this is Windows only -- in fact, for now its Windows XP only, though Appajodou says the company will support both W2K and Vista eventually. But no Mac or Linux support. The Ringcube folks are in talk with "major players" but won't say who. View the Mojopac demo here.
Posted by Paul Roberts on September 25, 2006 09:19 AM
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