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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Viewfinity Raises $9 Million in Series B Funding, Gains New Advisors

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Viewfinity last week  announced $9 million in B-round funding from Giza Venture Capital, JK&B Capital and Longworth Venture Partners.

This announcement comes in tandem with the expansion of Viewfinity’s advisory team and newest board members, Greg Butterfield and Nilanjana Bhowmik.

Systems management icon Greg Butterfield, former CEO and Chairman of Altiris, is renowned for his business achievements that include the growth and mergers/acquisitions of WordPerfect to Novell, Vinca to Legato, Altiris to Symantec and Omniture to Adobe. Greg’s proven success in the systems management space and his alignment with Viewfinity’s vision and direction will help speed Viewfinity’s growth and ensure that business decisions and technology vision are ahead of the market.

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs, Viewfinity offers cloud-based systems and privilege management solutions that allow IT departments to focus on managing systems and not the infrastructure. The cloud-computing model enables systems management support almost immediately so that administrators can begin managing the environment from anywhere and at anytime, for both local and mobile workers. Viewfinity’s expertise in application virtualization serves as the foundation for new levels of advancement in cloud-based systems management, providing more granularity and control than ever before possible with traditional systems management platforms.

Viewfinity introduces several new business and technology icons to its Advisory Board:

  • Dwain Kinghorn, former CTO of Altiris and VP with Symantec, Founder & CEO of Computing Edge
  • Stuart Schaefer, former CTO and Founder of Softricity and Partner Architect at Microsoft
  • Srinivasa Venkataraman, former CEO of Appstream and VP R&D for ZoneLabs
  • Benny Schnaider, former CEO and Founder of Qumranet, Pentacom and co-founder of P-Cube

VirtualLogix VLX Software Selected for Low-Cost Android-Ready Smartphone Platform

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VirtualLogix, a provider of Real-Time Virtualization technology for mobile handsets, last week announced that its VLX software solution for mobile handsets has been selected by ST-Ericsson for their new low-cost Android-ready smartphone platform.

Incorporating VLX into ST-Ericsson’s affordable reference platforms extends the relationship announced a year ago. VirtualLogix is providing important functionality which results in greater design flexibility and enables the delivery of Android-based solutions.

VLX virtualization software allows simultaneous operation of a high-level operating system (Android) and a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), thus enabling easier development of value-added smartphone functionalities on lower cost mobile handset platforms.

OpenECP, An ECP Fork

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Yesterday I got a new Twitter follower, OpenECP , given the open in it’s title … I had a look and I saw an Open Source Elastic Cloud Computing platform. (A virtual Machine Management platform if you don’t want to use the “Cloud” hype terminology.

The attentive reader might remember us announcing Enomaly ECP releases before..

However this was something different

Sam Johnston announces on his blog that he is pleased to announce
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Open Elastic Computing Platform (OpenECP) Version 4.0 Alpha (openecp-4.0alpha.tar.gz), provisionally tested on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (screenshots). This is an open source fork of the Enomaly ECP product following its abrupt commercialisation in November 2009, which resolves a number of serious security vulnerabilities. For more information refer to:

http://www.openecp.org/
OpenECP is a web-based management platform for Linux-based hypervisors including KVM and Xen which can be used to create “public” and “private” cloud computing environments.

He goes on to say
It will always be freely available under the Affero General Public License v3 or similar.

Sam apparently forked the platform after he noticed that Enomaly had closed the upcoming versions of their platform and didn’t look like it was planning on providing fixes for security issue he found within the platform.

Reuven Cohen stated on twitter that they made the changes in license because
“ECP 3.0 is a significantly different product than 2.0 servicing different market needs. Enabling Service providers to generate IaaS revenue.

ECP 2.0 doesn’t include the thousands of hours we’ve put into ECP 3.0, no cloning, no vlan, no metering / billing, no customer dashboard.

Re: Open Vs Proprietary, as a self funded company. Monetizing Free was very difficult. Proprietary gives us revenue to increase dev & supprt”

Fact is that @ruv and @samj aren’t really best friends there has been some more namecalling on Twitter before.

Apart from having the source code available, another important part of Open Source is community …so the question that time will answer, will OpenECP gain tracktion and community

KVM News

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The Qemu-KVM 0.12 release includes a very interesting new feature based on patches provides back in november 2009 by IBM.
This KVM version has a new feature called block migration which allows you to do block migration during the live migration of a VM.

The concept is pretty similar to RAM migration. First the full disk is being copied , then the dirty blocks are being copie. Having this feature means that you can do live migration without having shared storage available.
Obviously performance will be lower and you might end up with a bigger hickup at the final phase of the migration than in a regular live migration.

On the Windows side of KVM the biggest news is that the Balloon Drive code has been GPL repository of the KVM windows guest driver. Up till now Linux was the only operating system that supported ballooning … now work is under way to have windows supported too. The block drivers for windows XP have also been updated in that repository. The iso with the new drivers can be found here

In other KVM news Chris Wright, a Principal Engineer at RedHat announced to the KVM Mailing list last month that the annual KVM forum is planned next to the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon 2010 which will be held in Boston this August. The KVM summit is scheduled for August 9th and 10th

RealVNC Debuts VNC Viewer for iPhone and iPod touch

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RealVNC has launched its new VNC Viewer (iTunes link), an application for the iPhone and iPod touch that allows users to connect to and take full control of a computer anywhere in the world.

VNC Viewer makes it possible to run applications, access documents and change settings on any Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or UNIX computer, just as though you were sitting in front of it.

With VNC Viewer, iPhone and iPod touch users can view Flash-based websites and copy and paste text between applications on their mobile device and computer. The new application is also ideal for system administrators who can troubleshoot and manage remote desktops or servers, check logs or install/uninstall and test applications, wherever they are.

Users can apply standard touch, tap and drag gestures to control the computer; for example, pinching to zoom into a specific area or out to see the whole picture. As an alternative to gestures, VNC Viewer has mouse button mode – virtual left, middle, and right mouse buttons, and an imaginary scroll wheel are superimposed on the desktop, giving users precise control. Text can be entered using the iPhone or iPod touch on-screen keyboard and displayed using preview facilities. VNC Viewer also includes special buttons for non-character keys such as the cursor keys and Shift, Ctrl, Alt and Delete.

To connect from VNC Viewer, VNC-compatible technology must be installed and running on the computer to be controlled. The recommended VNC Enterprise Edition provides robust, high?performance connections and unmatched flexibility along with strong security. Connections to VNC Enterprise Edition benefit from additional features such as secure communication encrypted by industry?standard 128 bit AES technology, platform?native authentication, international keyboard support and enhanced performance.

Release: Paragon Virtualization Manager 2010 Personal

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Paragon Software Group, provider of data security and data management solutions, has released Paragon Virtualization Manager 2010 Personal.

The program provides the user with the complete set of tools to easily perform any migration operation to the majority of virtual machines, including Sun Virtual Box, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual PC 7, VMware Player and Workstation 4.0-7.0 and Fusion 1.0-3.0.

The product includes the unique technology which can connect an offline virtual disk and work with it as if it is an ordinary physical disk performing various disk and other virtualization operations to significantly ease day-to-day usage of virtual machines. The user can easily achieve partitioning operations, exchange data between physical and virtual disks and perform other disk operations.

Paragon Virtualization Manager 2010 Personal is the only solution which solves boot problems after an unsuccessful migration attempt by a third party. The program offers the easiest, intuitive way to migrate a Windows-based computer system to a virtual environment (P2V) and vice versa (V2P).

Main Features:

  • Guaranteed support for any Windows operating system since Win2K (excluding server editions).
  • Migrate a physical system to a virtual machine or convert backup image to a virtual disk.
  • Recover the OS startup ability after unsuccessful virtualization by a 3rd party tool.
  • Recover the OS startup ability after system migration to a different hardware platform.
  • Migrate from one virtual environment to another.
  • Migrate a virtual system to a physical environment.
  • Exchange data between your physical environment and the virtual one or between a virtual disk and its snapshots.
  • Hot processing of locked (in-use) hard disks to migrate a computer without rebooting and interrupting Windows.
  • Makes the process of adding new drivers smooth and easy.
  • Preview changes before they are applied on a handy disk partitioning map.
  • Choose any destination to create virtual disks, including a network share.
  • Transparent processing of virtual machine snapshots disks.

Paragon Virtualization Manager 2010 Personal is available for $29.95.