It’s been a busy and exciting few weeks here at Virtual Computer as we worked to put the finishing touches on our NxTop 1.0 release. The blog has been an unfortunate casualty, so my apologies for the gap between posts. However, it was truly all hands on deck. We had our own flavor of March Madness where we set up a complete customer environment (wired/wireless networking environment, Active Directory domain controller, NxTop Center management server, desktops PCs, laptop PCs, etc.), and while our QA team executed a methodical testing program, a steady stream of developers, company executives, marketing and PR staff, board members, and anyone else we could scare up jumped in to help put the 1.0 product through its paces. As you can see from the photo, we even augmented our QA staff by having them bring in their children in on the weekends to help with testing. (Hopefully, we don’t have any child labor watchdogs reading the blog….)

In conjunction with our NxTop 1.0 release, we announced an exciting new program on Monday called NxTop Now!. As a step beyond the beta testing we have been doing since November, NxTop Now! is a controlled release of NxTop to our first paying customers, a very exciting milestone for our company. It is one thing for someone to agree to put your beta product in a lab, but it a quite another for them to get their checkbook out and put some skin in the game. It is really a credit to our engineering team for developing a product that dazzles everyone who sees it and a sales team that is highly adept at breaking through the noise in an increasingly confusing client virtualization space. This type of execution starts at the top, I would like to publically congratulate Peter Marconi, our VP of engineering, and Sandrijn Stead, our VP of sales for leading the charge on these two very important fronts.

This choice of the name NxTop Now! for our controlled release program is reflection of one of our biggest sources of pride. There are number of companies out there talking about client hypervisor use cases at this point. We are the first to deliver a true end-to-end PC management solution that makes use of a bare-metal client hypervisor. I honestly can’t remember the last time I used more than two or three PowerPoint slides during a customer or partner meeting. Rather than talking about use cases, we show use cases. The consistent feedback is that having something that is “here and now” clearly separates us from others who have jumped into the bare-metal client virtualization sandbox. I am sure that won’t always be the case, so now it’s up to use to keep the gas pedal down. On to release 1.1!

Greetings from sunny Cannes, where a team of us from Virtual Computer is in town for VMworld Europe 2009.  We weren’t really sure what the turnout would be given the state of the global economy and the corresponding pressure on IT travel budgets.  However, we were pleasantly surprised by a strong showing by both exhibitors and conference attendees.

The biggest news of the show so far has been VMware’s announcement with Intel to collaborate on bare metal client hypervisor technology.  It made a pretty good splash though many (myself included) are viewing it as a bit of a “me too” announcement given the Intel partnership that Citrix announced back in January in conjunction with their Project Independence initiative.  As a startup, the first instinct is to get a bit nervous when larger industry players begin to jump into your sandbox.  However, in our case it has provided tremendous validation of the technology model we have been focused on since 2007.  Both the Citrix and VMware client hypervisor announcements have generated tremendous inbound interest in Virtual Computer, since many recognize that we have a pretty significant lead in the race to deliver centralized PC desktop management using bare metal client hypervisor technology.

I was excited to be invited by Virtual Strategy Magazine to contribute some of my perspectives on the VMworld Europe festivities as part of their event coverage.  I have tried to keep these posts a bit more vendor-neutral than my posts here on the Virtual Computer blog, and hopefully they provide a good general flavor for what is going on at the show.  Visit Virtual Strategy’s VMworld Europe coverage center for reports from me and other contributors in attendance.

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.

OK, I don’t break out the Han Solo quotes for just any occasion, so clearly something big is happening at Virtual Computer today. Earlier this morning, we made a major announcement that we just closed a $15 million series B financing round, which is big news in itself given the state of the global economy. However, equally significant is who is investing in the company. Our existing investors, Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, doubled down on Virtual Computer, and we also welcomed in an exciting new strategic investor, Citrix Systems.

The addition of Citrix as an strategic investor is absolutely huge for us. I have already commented on the significance of the Citrix/Intel client hypervisor initiative and Project Independence and how they collectively stand to revolutionize corporate computing. An industry standard Xen-based hypervisor will dramatically accelerate Virtual Computer’s mission to refine PC management through client virtualization, and having two industry titans like Citrix and Intel throw their weight behind the client hypervisor model will only speed its adoption and acceptance.

Whenever the big guys jump into an emerging new technology area, there is always risk that the innovative startups who were there first will be squeezed on to the sidelines. An investment by Citrix signals that Virtual Computer’s unique vision and collection of important technology innovations have earned us a key seat at the table as these industry developments unfold in the months and years ahead.

With all of the excitement about the Citrix relationship, it is easy to overlook the significance of a $15 million infusion of capital into Virtual Computer. We have already been moving at a very good clip to outrun and outexecute potential competitors big and small, but this additional investment, which brings our total funding raised to date to $21 million, allows us to engage the hyperdrive on our go-to-market plan. It couldn’t have come at a better time as the client hypervisor / PC lifecycle management convergence we have been predicting is clearly heating up.

Traveling at light speed it not easy. As Han warned, without careful calculations you can fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova. However, you can’t win if you are not in the game, and I have to credit our co-founders, Dan McCall and Alex Vasilevsky, for coming up with a winning business plan and technology vision, building a winning team capable of making it a reality, and effectively steering a rocket ship that is moving faster than any of us imagined possible.

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!

Citrix Systems made multiple major announcements today centered around making Xen a ubiquitous bare metal client hypervisor for PCs.  Among the announcements:

• A partnership with Intel to bring Xen-based hypervisor technology to millions of Intel-based PC platforms.
• Project Independence, an exciting vision for how client virtualization will transform desktop computing.

As you might expect, Brian Madden put together a solid overview and assessment of the announcements over on his site.

At Virtual Computer, we see these industry developments providing tremendous validation of our approach of using client virtualization technology to redefine desktop computing in a way that is better for IT professionals and better for end-users. The reason we chose to use Xen as the foundation for NxTop Engine, our bare metal client hypervisor, is that we felt that it would take an industry ecosystem and the added leverage of the open source community to realize such an ambitious vision.

The technical challenges of deploying a bare metal hypervisor on a end-user PC are very different from the requirements for servers performing backend data center workload.  While we have overcome a great many of these challenges on our own, working with the open source community has already yielded significant advantages as we set out to complete against companies like VMware who have substantial resources but are constrained by their use of a proprietary hypervisor.

A major push, led by Citrix and Intel, to make Xen the de facto standard client hypervisor technology will provide even greater advantages to small but innovative ecosystem players like Virtual Computer.

When we were in the early stages of developing NxTop Engine, our bare metal client hypervisor, one of the more challenging exercises we faced was determining how to best address the various input/output (I/O) paradigms on a PC. On one hand, we wanted to fully abstract the hardware from the operating system, so we could have a common virtual hardware platform and eliminate driver management headaches as part of our broader mission to make PCs easier to manage, maintain, and secure. On the other hand, there are a number of I/O touch points with a PC end-user, most notably in areas such as graphics, USB, disk, and networking, where the performance expectations are extremely high.

When it comes to dealing with I/O on a client hypervisor platform, a number of options exist. The first I will mention is full hardware device emulation. Complete emulation of physical devices is the “bread and butter” of virtualization technology. It does come with a performance price when compared to an operating system running on native hardware. This makes emulation a suitable option for less intensive I/O activities for which a slight performance hit is indiscernible to a PC end-user.

Another I/O virtualization technique is paravirtualization (also known as “enlightenment” in Microsoft Hyper-V parlance). With paravirtualization, optimizations (in a form of specialized class drivers) are made within the guest operating system that enables it to more effectively share physical hardware resources with other guest operating systems, achieving near-native I/O performance. This makes it an ideal approach for I/O activities with higher performance requirements, as it provides the end-user with the look and feel of native PC performance without “breaking” the virtual hardware platform abstraction model that makes life so much easier for the IT team to manage desktops. To build great paravirtualized I/O subsystem is a huge undertaking, but our awesome engineering team made it look easy.

When all else fails in attempting to achieve true virtualization on a client hypervisor, a final I/O approach that can be utilized is a technique called “pass-through.” As the name suggests, pass-through allows a guest operating system, such as Windows, to achieve native I/O performance by bypassing the hypervisor and using the same collection of Windows drivers that IT folks love to hate to access the physical PC hardware. For a virtualization vendor, a pass-through approach is a tempting way to avoid the whole issue of building a high performance paravirtualization I/O subsystem. Perhaps the engineering skill set to do that is just not there, so why not just use some hardware PCI mapping tables and off you go. However, if you think that native Windows drivers, bypassing the hypervisor and talking directly to physical PC hardware is a “visionary” virtualization technique (as another virtualization company likes to call this approach), then I have a famous bridge to sell to you.  We view pass-through as an I/O technique of last resort to use in a client hypervisor, because that model of I/O virtualization makes desktop management more complicated and more expensive. And after all, isn’t desktop virtualization is all about simplifying and reducing management costs? If a client hypervisor doesn’t make PC management easier, what’s the point?

As we were designing NxTop, we painstakingly analyzed each I/O requirement of the client PC and selected the most appropriate approach for each. In doing so, we struck what we feel is the most optimal balance between PC manageability and security for the IT team and a better overall user experience for end-users. Early feedback is that we have hit the mark.

Alex Vasilevsky and I had an enjoyable discussion yesterday with Dan Kusnetzky of the Kusnetzky Group, and he posted an update on our company this morning on his ZDNet “Virtually Speaking” blog. It is quickly becoming clear that Dan is one of the hardest working guys in the virtualization business. When we originally came out of stealth mode back in September, he made time for a briefing on Labor Day morning (sadly, we were all in the office making a final push towards VMworld), and clearly he is powering through the late December holiday lull as well.

Dan keyed in on an important aspect of our value proposition: the fact that we are building an end-to-end solution that includes both a feature-rich management system and a type 1 (“bare metal”) client hypervisor.  Doing both is hard, but we saw it as the only way to create real value for our customers.  While we are not a consumer technology (yet, anyways), we take our cue from MP3 players.  They existed before the iPod, but it was only when Apple brought together a great management tool (iTunes) that worked seamlessly with a great player (iPod) that downloadable music really took off.

Here is Dan’s take:

Unlike some competitors that focus on the hypervisor and just assume a management system exists that would help the IT administrators manage the encapsulated workloads, Virtual Computer started with the management system and then built a small hypervisor/client management tool.

This approach appears likely to result in a very well managed, optimal environment.

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: