Client Hypervisor Train Steams Ahead

There has continued to be great coverage and response to the Citrix/Intel client hypervisor and “Project Independence” announcements.  We have been keeping pretty busy over the last couple of days talking with press and analysts about our perspective on these industry developments, and it is already very clear that Citrix and Intel’s involvement is going to bring a whole new level of visibility to the ecosystem of companies working hard to make bare metal client hypervisor technology a reality.

Chris Wolf of Burton Group is one of the industry analysts who was way out in front of the client hypervisor’s emergence as a PC management technology, and he provides a very good assessment of the Citrix/Intel announcement on his blog.  In his post, Chris put out the call to other companies like Virtual Computer and VMware to comment.  So far, it looks like I am the only one who has weighed in.  Here is what I had to say:

At Virtual Computer, we are cheering this announcement, because it completely validates our vision of transforming the way PCs are managed through client-side virtualization. We also view Citrix as a very partner-friendly company that we can be successful collaborating with as part of a broader industry ecosystem. Since day one, Virtual Computer has described itself as a PC lifecycle management company—not a hypervisor company. If you go back and read our original press release when we came out of stealth mode, a lot of shared vision with Project Independence shines through.

We have implemented a Xen-based bare metal client hypervisor as transformational technology to help us achieve our vision for PC management. However, we never had any illusions that we would always own the hypervisor. If a standard or de facto standard client hypervisor existed, we would have used it. Given that one didn’t, we looked at available options such as Xen, KVM, etc. before ultimately deciding that Xen was the most mature technology available to serve as the “engine” of NxTop Engine. However, we went into it recognizing that just because a bare metal client hypervisor standard did not exist, this did not mean that there never would be one. At the time, many were predicting that Microsoft would include a bare metal client hypervisor as part of Windows 7. In addition, we also saw it as plausible that companies like Citrix and VMware would augment their server-hosted VDI offerings with a client hypervisor (though I would not have predicted so quickly!).

With that as the backdrop, we built NxTop around Xen, but with clear lines of delineation between our management technology/intellectual property and the hypervisor. We were never planning to monetize the hypervisor, and any improvements we make to Xen will go back to the open source community in a timely manner. If at some point, a better client hypervisor option than Xen emerged, we were well prepared for it. However, to the extent that Xen emerges as the industry standard client hypervisor, as the industry momentum is starting to foretell, it makes Virtual Computer a much more valuable member of the ecosystem given our expertise and head start. I also think that an ecosystem and standards driven approach, bolstered by the Xen open source community, has much better potential to achieve widespread adoption than a proprietary hypervisor approach from which only one company stands to gain.

The client hypervisor train is clearly picking up a head of steam this week, which is making life very exciting for innovative startups in the space like Virtual Computer.  That’s us waving from the front row!