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Release: HyTrust Appliance Community Edition

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HyTrust recently announced the availability of HyTrust Appliance Community Edition, a free product that delivers a central point of control for management and visibility of virtualized environments. HyTrust Appliance Community Edition features the same functionality, features, and benefits as the company’s Enterprise Edition but is limited to three protected hypervisor hosts. HyTrust also announced that it has built and made available a new online community to support this strategic vision and provide a central repository for sharing information, gathering feedback and fostering interaction among community members.One of the key drivers behind Community Edition is to enable small and medium businesses to cost-effectively gain the same features and benefits for their virtualized environments as their counterparts in the largest enterprises.

In addition to serving the needs of the SMB market, HyTrust aims to build a community of professionals who are committed to growing the reach of cloud-based computing services and expanding the use of virtualization throughout their organizations. Community Edition enables large enterprises to quickly and easily evaluate HyTrust Appliance capabilities in their environments. Most importantly, HyTrust is now able to widely disseminate its product and gain valuable insight directly via Community feedback. This will lead to more rapid product development and innovation, allowing HyTrust to respond quickly to an already dynamic and rapidly changing marketplace.

HyTrust Appliance Community Edition is now available for download as a pre-built, VMware-compatible virtual appliance to members of HyTrust Community.

DMTF Announces Virtualization Management Forum Formation

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the formation of its Virtualization Management (VMAN) Forum, a group dedicated to promoting interoperability between products that support the VMAN standards. The forum will develop and conduct programs to determine specification conformance in the areas of system virtualization management, virtual system management, and the open virtualization format.

The VMAN Forum plans to develop a set of test tools for measuring conformance to the specifications included in DMTF’s VMAN Initiative. These tools will allow DMTF members to confirm the conformance level of their products that implement DMTF virtualization management standards. The forum also plans to host plugfests to help identify interoperability issues among various implementations and validate conformance testing procedures.

Twenty leading companies in the virtualization management industry are currently participating in the VMAN Forum. These companies include:

  • Broadcom
  • Cisco
  • Citrix Systems
  • Dell
  • Emulex
  • Fortisphere
  • Hewlett-Packard Company
  • Hitachi
  • IBM
  • Infosys Technologies Limited
  • Intel Corporation
  • Microsoft Corporation
  • NextIO
  • Novell
  • SAP AG
  • Solarflare Communications
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Symantec Corporation
  • VMware
  • WBEM Solutions

Membership in the VMAN Forum is open to all DMTF members.

Embedded below is our earlier video interview with DMTF President Winston Bumpus:

Neocleus Debuts Client Virtualization Solution Neosphere

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Neocleus last week introduced Neosphere, a desktop and laptop management platform and the first Neocleus product built upon Neocleus’ second generation, Type 1 client hypervisor. Neosphere centrally manages and controls multiple concurrent isolated operating system (OS) instances as virtual machines (VMs), which execute locally on a single laptop or desktop.

Neocleus will demonstrate Neosphere for the first time at the upcoming Citrix Synergy Conference, May 4 – 7 in Las Vegas, NV. The product will begin shipping to customers and partners this May.

The most prominent use cases Neosphere tackles include:

  • Side by side execution of two separate and isolated OS instances. One instance could be a 100 % secure locked-down operating environment containing all the corporate applications, data, network connections, and hardware configurations while the other OS could run an open image with applications that have a high intrusion threat such as music sharing software, games and social networking websites.
  • Operating two separate corporate images side by side on the same laptop or desktop; ideal for running two environments on separate, secure networks, managing application migration during mergers and acquisitions, and multi-project initiatives or environments with outsourced workers.
  • Running two versions of Microsoft Windows natively on the same machine to allow those legacy applications that have not yet been updated to Windows Vista or the upcoming Windows 7 to still be used while end users also leverage the benefits of the later operating environment in a separate VM.
  • Creating new efficiencies in desktop and laptop management by delivering a single “gold” image to a variety of different hardware platforms, thus dramatically reducing the amount of time necessary to prepare and test the corporate OS environment prior to delivering it to end users.
  • Controlling hardware components without ever touching the laptop or desktop by centrally virtualizing the hardware components of the desktop and laptop and allowing IT administrators to turn various hardware components of the endpoint device on and off on a per-VM basis.

Neosphere leverages the company’s second generation Type 1 client hypervisor to address these challenges. The product allows two fully functional virtual machines, or “spheres” to run simultaneously and natively on a single desktop or laptop. Each sphere is centrally controlled by IT policies and requires no incremental hardware in the data center. Spheres are distributed to PCs where they execute locally in 100% secure isolated VMs. Users seamlessly move between environments without any degradation in performance. The spheres have full access to the power of the underlying hardware, including native access to the RAM, CPU, hard disks, network cards, USB devices, touch screens, and other devices attached to the local desktop or laptop. Neosphere offers the broadest hardware support of any client-side virtualization product in the industry with future plans to support the Apple iMac and MacBook platforms.

The Neosphere product is designed to work in conjunction with existing systems and tools familiar to desktop administrators. There is tight integration with applications such as Microsoft Active Directory and SQL Server. The system is designed to work in conjunction with all OS patching and updating products as well including existing change and configuration management systems such as Microsoft SCCM, Symantec Altiris Client Management Suite, Tivoli, HP Radia, BigFix, Novell ZENworks, and others. In addition, Neosphere works in conjunction with existing application virtualization solutions such as Microsoft App-V, VMware ThinApp, and InstallFree.

RingCube Introdes vDesk Version 2.0

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RingCube recently announced vDesk version 2.0, an enterprise desktop virtualization solution that simplifies the creation, access and management of Windows desktops. With the release of vDesk 2.0, RingCube advances its virtualization architecture through its new Workspace Virtualization Engine (WVE) expanding the manageability, security, and supportability of its enterprise-class virtual desktop solution. With version 2.0, vDesk also extends its advantage in the areas of application support and ease of management as compared to application virtualization offerings while continuing to maintain a significant cost and performance advantage over client hypervisor-based solutions.

RingCube vDesk 2.0 delivers a Workspace Virtualization Engine (WVE) which provides a lightweight and complete virtual desktop that can join an enterprise domain, has an isolated network stack and supports applications such as endpoint security, databases, and PC management software that require drivers and security services. Below is a listing of key components of the Workspace Virtualization Engine (WVE):

  • Virtual Networking, called vDeskNet, allows the virtual workspace to separate and isolate network traffic from the host PC including VPN clients running within the virtual workspace.
  • Virtual User Management allows the virtual workspace to have a unique set of user accounts separate from the host PC. Also, vDesk users within the virtual workspace can add/join an Active Directory domain independent of the user authentication and authorization rights of the host PC.
  • Virtual Security Store provides a separate protected storage area within the virtual workspace where items like certificates are kept isolated from the host PC.
  • Virtual Windows Services allows greater process and application isolation from the host PC. Virtualized services within the virtual workspace include LSA (local security authority), Microsoft TCP/IP networking, and NTFS volumes. These virtualized services help to increase the number of kernel-mode applications that can be supported within the virtual workspace.
  • Generic Driver Support provides a virtualized framework for the installation of drivers within the virtual workspace which includes a virtualized Plug-n-Play service. The generic driver framework increases application support particularly when new drivers are required.

vDesk 2.0 delivers full workspace encryption through its integration of 3rd party encryption software which protects the information stored within the virtual workspace. Also, vDeskNet provides a virtual networking stack so all network traffic within the virtual workspace can be isolated from the host, protecting confidential information from spyware on the host PC. VPN clients and end-point security software can also be installed inside the virtual workspace for additional security protection of the virtual workspace.

vDesk 2.0 improves the manageability of the virtual workspace by allowing users within the vDesk virtual workspace to add or join an Active Directory domain. Further, vDesk 2.0 has the ability to consume and apply Group Policy Objects (GPO) within the virtual workspace itself independent of the host PC. Enterprise customers can leverage existing management tools with vDesk by running them outside or inside the virtual workspace. By co-existing with traditional PC life cycle management tools and processes, vDesk provides a seamless transition path from traditional desktop management to virtual workspace management.

The vDesk 2.0 client has a more streamlined interface making it easier for vDesk users to get access to their virtual workspace with less interaction required. Also, vDesk support of Windows Vista has gone from technology preview in the previous release to general availability.

vDesk 2.0 is available immediately through RingCube. Pricing starts at $200 per user.

Updates on Xen

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When you have been in this industry for a couple of years, you might think that the Virtualization industry has stopped innovating, that there are no new awesome features coming out anymore.

Obviously they aren’t coming at the same pace as 5-10 years ago anymore, we aren’t surprised anymore when people add Virtualization support for yet another CPU or publish yet another new and fresh management framework, with a cloud sauce .. But hidden far in the back corner innovation still happens, be it with much smaller and less intrusive steps than before.

So lets have a look at these small changes

First of all a project I’ve been following for a while now .. XenFS , XenFS builds on the idea that you often want to share filesystems between virtual machines on the same physical machine and that you don’t want to use NFS, Cifs or even the regular network stack to achieve this goal.

According to Mark Williamson who’s working on the project :

The major differences from a traditional network filesystem are in the implementation. XenFS is implemented as a XenLinux “split driver”, with kernel modules implementing the client and server portions. Instead of exchanging protocol messages over a network socket, XenFS exchanges requests and responses using shared memory, similar to the “device channels” used by the block and network split drivers. Beyond that, instead of copying data from the server to the client (and back) XenFS also shares the memory containing the actual file data.

XenFS has been around for a while, but KXen is actually brand new. Argumenting over the advantages and disadvantages of a TypeI vs TypeII hypervisor is now over as Xen “supports” both.

Stephen Spector announced the availability of the first public release of Hosted Xen (KXen)

According to Stephen

Xen is the leading open source Type-1 VMM, providing a fast, robust and secure virtualization platform. KXen leverages the Xen technology, extending the range of environments in which the same core engine can be used to existing desktops, laptops and allowing scenarios like run from usb stick.
Work is underway to support MacOSX as the host, as well as 64-bit versions of Windows. The windows 32-bit host code is designed such that it is easy to port to other host operating systems.

The Remus project which we covered earlier , has also released it’s initial Request for Comment code. Remus allows systems to transparently move to another physical machine in the event of a failure on the primary machine , with only seconds of downtime, while preserving the original host state such as active network connections , memory and disk state.
Being an RFC release means that it is meant to start a discussion on how it might be merged with Xen and Kemari. According to the announcement it is not by any means in shape for application to the Xen tree
But it is a giant step forward towards a better high availability solution using Virtualization.