The smart car photos from our Get Smart About Desktop Virtualization program are pouring in. You can see a sample of them to the left or on our Flickr page. Here’s a great collage put together for us by Gary Newman (thanks, Gary!) of the smart car and a few other smart car-sized vehicles at VMworld:

(And, yes, that photo in the bottom center is us being asked to move the smart car!)

Hope everyone’s enjoying the show — if you haven’t stopped by for a NxTop demo yet, you can find us at booth #1940.

Find the smart car at VMworld for a chance to win it! Stop by our VMworld booth (#1940) for details.

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!

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.

ChannelWeb posted their choice for 15 Hot Products From VMworld 2008 and Virtual Computer’s NxTop made the list (and we couldn’t be happier):

NxTop centrally manages both existing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for stationary virtual PC environments as well as virtual desktops built for mobile and remote workforces. It includes the NxTop Engine, a bare-metal PC virtualization platform, and NxTop Center, a management console to centrally management NxTop-enabled PCs. With NxTop Center, administrators can create a single master virtual desktop PC image and publish it to any of their users. The master image is maintained through a Web console which IT administrators can use to install additional applications, patches, or policy updates, and then publish just the changes to their users.

The folks at Virtual Strategy Magazine posted the first video I’ve seen of NxTop from the VMworld show floor (hosted by yours truly):

There’s a higher res version of the video available on the Virtual Strategy site.

Now that you’ve seen NxTop in action, let me know what you think. To see more of NxTop in action, sign up for updates from us and we’ll let you know when we are hosting our live demos via WebEx.

I posted a handful of photos from VMworld in our Facebook group:

We had a great time at the show and were very happy to hear feedback from all of the people who stopped by the booth to see what NxTop was all about (as TechTarget noted: it’s similar to the much-hyped vClient from VMware, except it’s here now).

Were you at the show? What’d you think?

My presentation from VMworld is up for anybody who wasn’t able to make it out to Vegas:

Let me know if you have any questions.

There have been a number of really big announcements at VMWorld this week – including the launch of our own NxTop!  A side effect of all the press releases making the round is that there is confusion around what a bare metal hypervisor is and why it is useful, so I thought some clarification would be helpful.

All of the virtualization options on mobile devices up to this point have been “hosted” solutions (sometimes called type-2 hypervisors).  That is, it is a virtual machine running on top of a standard operating system installation – like Windows or Linux.  VMWare ACE and others are examples of type-2 hypervisor solutions.   Also, according to their keynote demo and press release, the VMware vClient initiative is a ‘hosted solution’ of  a Linux operating system and a VMplayer.

NxTop is something different.  It incorporates a ‘Bare Metal’ (type-1) hypervisor. The NxTop engine sits directly on hardware and not on an OS.  Think of ESX vs. Workstation.  This gives you additional management capabilities and security.  For example, if Windows is inoperable (bluescreen, bad patch, etc.) and is not recoverable, NxTop Center still has access to the out-of-band management stack and can revert to a snapshot in a jiffy.  Additionally, the ‘attack surface’ is minimized as you are now talking about under 100k lines of code in a hypervisor vs. millions in a hosted operating system.  Finally, the hypervisor with full control of the hardware is better able to enforce isolation between multiple virtual machines running on the same client.

A hypervisor by itself is not that interesting – but the management and security features it enables are.  Hope this helps clarify the differences between a type 1 hypervisor (bare metal hypervisor) and a type 2 hypervisor (hosted solution).

Our booth at VMWorld has been packed all week long, thanks again for stopping by!

Another busy day at VMworld – once again, thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to watch a demo and talk to us. We know there’s a lot going on at the show and appreciate everyone taking the time (and if you haven’t stopped by, we’re in booth #562 and would love to show you a live NxTop demo)!

Some coverage from the show:

SearchVMware.com / TechTarget stopped by and wrote some kind words about us:

VMware not the first

VMware, however, is the Christopher Columbus of the hypervisor-based virtual desktop approach. Just as Columbus wasn’t really the first to discover America, VMware wasn’t actually the first to come out with this particular idea. I met with a smaller company, Virtual Computer, on the VMworld floor today. Virtual Computer had also announced its product the day prior. NxTop — which is almost identical to vClient — stands out for one big reason: It’s here, at VMworld, and you can see it in action today. VMware has yet to  demo vClient.

Dan Kusnetzky, as part of an overall blog entry on desktop virtualization, said:

Virtual Computer was demonstrating their own approach to a highly managed, highly secure VDI-based solution. Their technology was interesting in that it allowed each of the layers of technology making up a desktop solution (application, data, personalization and underlying operating system) to be managed from a common repository.

Gotta run – more later if I have time.