As I have described in the past, NxTop makes use of the Xen open source hypervisor to bring bare metal desktop virtualization to traditional PC hardware. Even though we have put a significant amount of our own work into implementing Xen as a bare metal client hypervisor, this effort would have been impossible were it not for the hard work and innovation of the global community of Xen open source contributors.

A couple of times a year, the leaders of the Xen project conduct an in-person event called Xen Summit. Xen Summit is an opportunity for Xen developers and researchers to share new concepts with the broader Xen community. The next event, Xen Summit North America 2009, is coming up in a couple of weeks. It will be hosted by Oracle at their Redwood City, CA headquarters on February 24 and 25.

While some of us will be at VMworld Europe that week taking our medicine from the VMware marketing and public relations machine, our co-founder and CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, will be keepin’ it real out at Xen Summit. Alex has been a long-time thought leader in the Xen community dating back well before his time at Virtual Computer, and he has been helping out with the upcoming Xen Summit as part of the committee that reviewed and approved proposed papers for the event. He’ll be introducing the authors of the various paper submissions and no doubt stirring up interesting conversation and debate throughout the event, so if you are going to be at Xen Summit please do introduce yourself to him. If you tell him you are a loyal reader of the Virtual Computer Blog, he will give you $100 from his own wallet. (Just kidding.)

Visit the Xen community site to learn more or register for the event.

When the topic of virtualization comes up, there are really only four companies that come to mind: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, and Virtual Computer.  Right? 

The folks at SAP recently finalized the agenda for their upcoming SAP Virtualization Week 2009, scheduled for April 20 – 23 in Palo Alto, CA.  One of the highlights of the event will be a panel discussion that will feature our own Alex Vasilevsky along with Simon Crosby of Citrix, Mike Neil of Microsoft, and Steve Herrod of VMware.  I am guessing that it will be a lively and entertaining discussion.

The event agenda and registration details can be found on the SAP web site.  The SAP event timing and location lines up very well with the IDC Virtualization Forum West if you happen to be attending that event.  Travel budget in shreds on the floor?  SAP is also offering an option to view a webcast of the event via Citrix GoToWebinar.

Our view from day one has been that by running virtual machines directly on traditional PC hardware rather than remotely on servers, we can deliver the manageability, reliability, and security benefits of desktop virtualization while providing a better end-user experience.  Graphics performance is quite literally the most visible aspect of the user experience, so it is a major area of focus for us.  We have great 2D graphics working in our beta deployments today, but we won’t be satisfied until we have 3D graphics performance that is not discernable from a native operating system installation.  We don’t want to “cheat” (and open up a big security hole) by allowing a graphics driver in Windows to bypass the hypervisor.  We want to do it all in virtualization.

Our fearless CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, not only came up with a great architecture for fully virtualized 3D graphics, he actually showed up one day with a working proof of concept.  A couple of us decided to put it to the test and run two separate 3D applications (Quake and Google Earth) in two separate virtual machines. As you can see, they are running simultaneously. With NxTop, you can switch between them in an instant while both operating systems are using 3D graphics. By the way, be careful when switching to Google Earth while playing Quake, as you generally get killed pretty quickly when you’re not paying attention to the game.

Check out the video:

As a new company, we’re often asked who we are and what we do. Well, let’s answer the “who” starting with our management team:

Dan McCall is Virtual Computer’s president and CEO. Before starting Virtual Computer with Alex, Dan was a co-founder of Guardent, which was sold to VeriSign. Dan started as a software engineer back in 1983 and aspired to drive the “then” car on our home page.

Alex Vasilevsky was the co-founder of Virtual Computer with Dan and is our chief technology officer. Alex has a great background in the virtualization space and was a co-founder of Virtual Iron, a well known player in the server virtualization space. Alex holds six US and European patents and is a primary inventor on sixteen pending patents.

Peter Marconi, our VP of Engineering, has been very successful building both teams and products. At Virtual Computer, he’s done it again with a top notch team and our upcoming product. Peter is the holder of several patents in hardware architecture and mechanical chassis design.

Doug Lane is the Director of Product Management at Virtual Computer and is focused on making sure that our upcoming product is designed with the customer in mind. Working on technology products for the past twelve years, Doug knows the importance of making the customer happy with a product that works as promised. Doug is practicing hard for our Then vs. Now Bowling Challenge at VMworld even though he’s not eligible for any of the prizes. Stop by our booth (#562) and take the challenge.