With less than a week to go until VMworld, life has been pretty exciting around the Virtual Computer offices as we put the final polish on our latest NxTop product functionality demos.  Today, the excitement level reached a fever pitch, as we announced our new “Get Smart About Desktop Virtualization” program that will formally kick off at VMworld.  The “Get Smart” program will highlight how a PC management approach that leverages client-side virtualization provides significant cost-saving benefits versus both server-centric virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) models and traditional agent-based PC management approaches.  The best part is that when the dust settles, one lucky IT professional will walk away with a cool new car that is….well, smart!

The “Get Smart” program will feature a number of activities at VMworld where attendees can learn about NxTop’s unique PC life cycle configuration management capabilities, as well as interact with some of our key partners who help bring it all together.  The more you interact with us and our partners, the more chances you will have to win the car.  Keep reading the blog and come by and see us at Booth #1940 next week to get all of the details, including some “extra credit” opportunities for all of you star pupils out there.

Travel budget blues keeping you away from VMworld this year?  There are still plenty of opportunities to get involved.  In conjunction with the “Get Smart” program, we have launched a new online community site that includes a very nifty total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator.  The tool is highly configurable, so if you don’t like our cost assumptions, simply plug in your own.  Think our overall methodology is flawed?  Stop by the forums and say what’s on your mind.  While you are at it, sign up for one of our upcoming webinars on “The New Economics of PC Management,” which will provide another chance to see NxTop in action, along with an in-depth review of our TCO methodology.  Online forum contributions and webinar attendance will earn VMworld attendees additional chances to win the car and provide those playing along at home with a chance to win.

Stay tuned more more contest details as VMworld gets under way.  See you in San Francisco!

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!

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out the report (PDF) that IDC’s Michael Rose did on Virtual Computer’s Series B funding and strategic relationship with Citrix Systems.  Michael is one of a small number of analysts who have been predicting the emergence of client hypervisor technology for quite some time, so when Alex and I showed up at the IDC offices last summer (complete with laser-printed stealth mode business cards in hand), I recall Michael saying something along the lines of, “It’s about time somebody actually did this.”  He didn’t just take our word for it though.  He quizzed us on the finer details of our product for a good two hours during that initial meeting and later followed it up with a visit to our office to see the NxTop in action for himself.

Here’s an excerpt of what Michael had to say in his recent brief:

Although Virtual Computer’s product strategy is based upon the use of a client-oriented version of the Xen hypervisor, it considers itself a desktop management vendor, not a virtualization company. Although this difference may seem like semantics, IDC believes it represents a main point of differentiation between the server and desktop virtualization market. IDC believes that compared to server virtualization, desktop virtualization will be far less disruptive, and that hypervisors will permeate desktop hardware far more quickly and extensively than servers, only a minority of which are virtualized according to our most recent data.

There is also a bit about the potential for a “XenSource-esque” acquisition in the future that gave us all chuckle.  We haven’t had nearly enough fun yet to start looking for the exit, but surely we are worth at least triple that price.  Server virtualization is the easy stuff!  

Download the full IDC report (PDF).

The NxTop beta program we kicked off in November is moving full speed ahead. (Note that unlike with recent posts, I resisted the urge to use either a train or spaceship analogy.) We recently entered Beta Phase 2, which included a software upgrade for our existing beta sites, as well installation of a bunch of new beta sites in the US and Europe.

Another important part of this process has been ramping up our own internal usage of NxTop.  We’ve had our hands on the product all day, every day for quite a while, but there is still a difference between that and “eating our own dogfood” for day-to-day PC usage.

Over the last month or two, we have been making a concerted effort to get as many internal users as possible on NxTop, and we have a reached pretty impressive critical mass of internal NxTop users.  This is not limited to engineers.  My entire product management and marketing team is cut over, and we actually made our sales folks install NxTop Engine themselves on their PCs.  I am thinking we may have a GEICO-esque marketing campaign on our hands: “So easy, even a salesperson can do it!”  (Sorry guys, I couldn’t resist.)

We have been working hard on this product for a while, and it’s a blast to be able to see it in action every day.  It is still a little rough around the edges in places, but it is amazing to see the progress between development releases.  We use Agile development at Virtual Computer, so as internal users or beta testers find bugs or make suggestions, they don’t just go into a black hole.  Fixes and improvements show up every couple of weeks.

I am running a mix of application staples, such as Microsoft Office and iTunes, installed directly into the NxTop virtual machine, as well as my own personal mix of virtualized applications (Skype, Firefox, etc.) layered on top of our shared corporate base virtual machine.  When the time comes to patch Windows, we just patch a single master virtual machine on NxTop Center, and each of our individual NxTop-enabled PCs is updated in the background while we are still using the earlier version.  On the next reboot, we’re fully patched.

If you would like to be added to our beta program waiting list, I encourage you to register on our web site.  You can also sign up to receive general product updates and availability information in the future.

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.

On December 29, Gartner released the latest update to its PC Life Cycle Configuration Management Magic Quadrant.  As it has in the past, the report focused primarily on traditional agent-based PC management tools such as Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, Avocent/LANdesk, and Symantec/Altiris.  However, the commentary and evaluation criteria applied by Gartner foretells a future convergence between PC life cycle management and desktop virtualization:

“The PC life cycle configuration management tool market is mature, but virtualization, mobility, and the convergence of security and operations are affecting customer buying decisions as well as vendor R&D investments.”

Desktop virtualization has traditionally been viewed separately from PC lifecycle management, and I think this is primarily due to two current limitations of desktop virtualization products:

• Most solutions execute virtual desktops centrally on a server, which is a dramatically different model from what people know today as PC life cycle management.
• The subset of products capable of running virtual desktops on “thick client” PCs such as laptops use type 2 hypervisors requiring a non-virtualized host operating system—making PC management more complex instead of easier.

With NxTop, we are bringing together the best of both types of products without the limitations.  Virtual desktops are created and maintained centrally on a server but executed directly on a PC—including disconnected laptop PCs—without the need for a non-virtualized host operating system (and an entirely different set of legacy management tools to go with it).  This effectively makes it easy to manage thousands of PCs as it is to manage one. The IT staff simply applies patches and updates to a master virtual desktop running on a management server, and these changes are automatically applied to the associated virtual machines running on end-user PCs while maintaining any user-specific data and settings.

If a laptop PC is not connected at the time the update is published, it is not a problem.  NxTop simply downloads the update the next time the laptop connects to a network and prepares an updated virtual desktop in the background (outside of Windows) while the user continues using the previous version of the virtual desktop.  That’s right, patches and updates become transparent to the end-user.  Sound like the next generation of PC life cycle management?  We think so too.  That’s why you hear us talk about PC management more than you hear us talk about virtualization, hypervisors, etc.  Virtualization is the enabling technology, but only when you have applied them to solving a business problem like PC management do you have a marketable product.

It was exciting to see Gartner connect the dots between PC life cycle management and desktop virtualization.  Our focus is on making client-hosted virtualization the predominant delivery platform for corporate PC desktops, and once we do the lines between desktop virtualization and PC management will get very blurry very quickly.

If you have a Gartner account, you can find the latest PC Life Cycle Configuration Management Magic Quadrant here.

Not that we needed another reason to love Starbucks here at Virtual Computer, but they are quickly emerging as a poster child for why a better management and security approach is needed for laptop PCs—something we are a bit passionate about here.  After a lot of Internet buzz, leaked internal memos, etc. over the last couple of days, Starbucks has confirmed that a laptop containing personal data on nearly 100,000 employees has been stolen.  Not only that, but they are the first high profile “repeat offender” I have seen in a while.  They actually lost four laptops in late 2006 that also contained sensitive employee data.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more information on what is another unfortunate example of stolen data and hardware leading to expense and, frankly, embarrassment that could have been avoided.

Our recent post on laptop theft statistics goes into detail on not only how many laptops are stolen and how often (one every 53 seconds – think about that) but also how we are designing NxTop to help companies avoid this problem in the future.

A government laptop containing personal information was stolen in North Carolina. The laptop contained personal information of people receiving services from the North Carolina Division of Aging and  Adult Services. Here’s the story.

While the data on the laptop was password protected, there is no guarantee that the personal information stored on the computer can’t be accessed. Now, there’s hassle and expense all around:

• North Carolina must contact all of the potentially affected people
• These people are asked to place a fraud alert on their credit report and to regularly monitor their credit report
• Additional people were notified to be alert (presumably, contact information was on this laptop but not social security numbers)
• The end user needs a new laptop and hopes their data is backed up (not just the consumer data but anything they’ve had on the laptop)

As you can see, this is a real problem for many people and, rightfully, there is real concern. In a situation like this, you hope it’s just the hardware that will be used by the laptop thief and not the data on it.

This scenario is one we are solving with NxTop. We realize that laptops will be stolen and that dealing with the follow-up in any situation is a pain. In most cases, it is the data on the stolen laptop that causes problems and not the hardware itself.

The solution we’ve come up with combines use of disk encryption and data leakage protection with the ability to remotely “kill” the PC from NxTop Center with a few mouse clicks.  Plus, all of the user’s data, applications, and settings are seamlessly backed up on the central server.  Simply register a new PC with NxTop Center—even a completely different laptop from a different vendor—and within minutes the user is restored to their personalized environment.  I don’t mean a base Windows image with collection of files from a backup server.  This is their desktop environment, right down to the settings and the wallpaper picture of their cat.

For more information, see this post: How Do You Deal With A Stolen Laptop? and this web page: Laptop Management and Mobile User Management

Stolen laptops are a real problem. Whichever statistics you choose to believe, the numbers are staggering and growing every year. Granted, this is no great surprise since laptop use is growing every year (side note: I haven’t seen anything but it would be interesting to compare the growth of laptop use with the growth of laptop theft).

With today’s solutions, a stolen laptop causes many problems and headaches:

• Confidential data may be lost
• User isn’t able to work until new hardware can be provisioned
• In a best case scenario, there is a recent backup of user data that can be restored to a new machine
• Employee wastes time re-customizing machine to their liking
• IT needs to build the laptop…best case, this involves an updated image
• Employee hunts down license keys for user-specific programs, wasting more time
• Depending on data on laptop, may need to communicate loss to customers which can be costly and embarrassing

What if there were a better way? What if you could simply “turn off” the laptop remotely?

This isn’t a problem with NxTop.

NxTop’s architecture separates the four main components that make up a PC: the hardware, operating systems, data and applications. This presents a very unique way of dealing with laptop theft: since all four components are separate, you can simply stop a piece of hardware (a stolen laptop) from accessing the other four components. Without that access, the stolen laptop is no longer a real problem.

As for the user, simply get them a new piece of hardware and provision a new NxTop to them. A few mouse clicks is all it takes to get them up and running on a new laptop, complete with their previous configuration (including any customization they’ve made), all of their user data and applications, and virtually no loss of productivity – and less of a headache for the IT administrator.

Sure, you still lose the hardware (assuming it isn’t recovered or found) but that’s much less of a loss than it could be otherwise.

Want to try NxTop for yourself? We’re still perfecting it but take a moment to register and we’ll let you know as soon as NxTop is available for download.

Earlier this week, we showed a demo of NxTop to a group of IT administrators that we’ve been working closely with during development. We’re working with them as part of our customer focused development to ensure that NxTop is what IT administrators want, would use and would see cost and time saving benefits from. While we’ve worked with them for a few months now, this is the first time they’ve had a chance to see NxTop in action.

All of the feedback we’ve received has been very positive but there was still a bit of anxiety in showing NxTop for the first time and the anticipation of feedback. Our demo runs about 40 minutes and covers the creation, patching, updating and provisioning of a NxTop to an end-user, showing how activity on the management server can affect change on the client side in real-time (look…here’s a new operating system! now it’s gone! there it is again! now there’s a new application on the desktop!). We also took a bit of time to show how to set policies, customize a NxTop master image for a specific user, clone a NxTop and take some Q&A.

The demo was a great success for us and the feedback we received at the end was wonderful. It’s great to hear the validation that NxTop is something end users really need, are looking forward to using and that it will solve problems seen in current PC management solutions.

Of course this wasn’t the first time we showed a demo of NxTop. We were running non-stop demos at VMworld in September, some of which was captured on video:

- First Public Video of NxTop

- SearchServerVirtualization (under the ‘VMworld 2008: Exhibitors’ tab)

If you want to attend a live webinar to see the NxTop demo, let us know via our website. As soon as we have some dates lined up later this year, we’ll let you know when and how to sign up.