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Will Unidesk Bring Anything New to the VDI Table?

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VMBlog is reporting that a new desktop virtualization management startup called Unidesk is about to break out of stealth mode. (note: the Unidesk website is still under construction as some titles and text snippets appear to be missing)

Founded in December of last year, Unidesk raised a total of $8.1 million this year from Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. It has a strong management team, and recently opened up a second office in India next to their existing Marlborough offices. Their core offers are named “Composite Virtualization“ and “Desktop Management 2.0” and they claim it will dramatically simplify desktop management for enterprise IT organizations.

“Building on a core invention called Composite Virtualization™, Unidesk will offer IT organizations the desktop control they’ve been seeking to reduce costs, improve service levels, and tighten security, while, at the same time, give lines of business the desktop freedom they require to maximize knowledge worker innovation and productivity. Unidesk’s family of “Desktop Management 2.0™” solutions will provide the highly efficient image management, application delivery, and personalization capabilities that are currently missing from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) products from VMware and Citrix, and extend these same capabilities to non-VDI-based laptops and thick desktops so IT can easily support off-network computing. By eliminating the barriers to VDI adoption and enabling all desktops to be virtualized under a common management platform, Unidesk’s game-changing technology will accelerate the multi-billion dollar desktop virtualization market, and deliver significant returns to employees, investors, customers, and business partners.”

There’s not much else we can gather from the website, apart from the fact that the company is planning a free trial version, and that they’re hiring a bunch of people who will get – at least- a free mug (see here).

Unidesk

LinMin Releases Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2, Includes API

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LinMin, makers of the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning solution, today unveiled Release 5.2, featuring a new API, single-command installation, numerous feature enhancements and support for the provisioning and imaging of additional platforms. The API is designed to allow customers and partners to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning into environments that presently cannot do bare metal provisioning of Microsoft Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines.

“Having a best-of-breed provisioning and imaging solution was a great starting point, but being a standalone product didn’t maximize the potential of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning. Now, with the new LinMin API, customers can optimize IT resources (physical, virtual and human) around business processes, not the other way around,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin Corp. “LinMin’s ability to install applications and management agents during the provisioning process is even more valuable with the API, bringing a closed loop process to customers’ existing environments: automatically select an appropriate and available physical or virtual system, invoke the LinMin API, and after the system is provisioned, these agents identify themselves to their respective management, monitoring, policy enforcement, availability, compliance and other applications that then take control of the system. This is IT application integration at its best.”

The API offers both a graphical user interface that can be integrated into other Web-based applications, and a traditional programmatic interface, giving customers maximum flexibility.  The example GUI can also be used as a “teaching mechanism” with the option to view in real time the API-compliant commands that get issued to and the responses received from the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning server.  This enables software developers to quickly develop API calls with real-time debugging, reducing implementation times.

Once integrated with LinMin via the API, third party, internally-developed or open source software can create, maintain and delete system provisioning roles (e.g., Red Hat application server, Novell SLES database server, Windows Web server or Ubuntu office desktop) and assign them to specific physical systems or virtual machines, along with pre-determined networking and security settings based on business rules unique to each customer.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 also introduces a fully automated installation process. With a single command, LinMin detects all networking attributes, then downloads, installs and configures a database, network services and other required software components, and presents to the administrator a fully configured provisioning and imaging server in about 5 minutes.  LBMP 5.2 also supports the provisioning of additional platforms, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, Novell SLES10 SP2, CentOS 5.2, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.1 release.  LinMin provisions over 50 different versions and architectures of Linux and Windows.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning is priced at $250 for up to 10 client systems, $1,000 for up to 100 client systems and $1,875 for up to 250 clients systems. Annual subscriptions are also available for $100, $400 and $750 respectively.

LinMin Corp.

Virtual Bridges Upgrades Win4VDI Product Family

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Virtual Bridges announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Win4VDI family of products.  The company says the Version 5 release brings Win4VDI on par with the company’s standalone Desktop offerings.

Win4VDI, Virtual Bridges’ Educational/SMB and enterprise product, allows an organization to easily and cost-effectively deliver multiple Windows desktop sessions to PCs, Workstations and thin clients from a non-Windows server such as Linux and Solaris OS.

With this release Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server and Win4Solaris Virtual Desktop Server have been renamed to Win4VDI for consistency with the growing Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) market space that Virtual Bridges founded with their Win4Lin Terminal Server (WTS) products.

Features of Win4VDI Products include:

  • Dynamic Renewable Desktops for instant deployment and centralized software updates and patches
  • Easy to use and install thanks to powerful management console and comprehensive documentation
  • Seamless remote printing over LAN, WAN, or Internet
  • Highly scalable infrastructure, supporting high server density
  • Powerful new architecture improves performance, scalability, security, and reliability
  • Win4DI for Linux: Works on any 32-bit or 64-bit x86 Linux platform running a 2.6.x kernel
  • Supports connectivity from almost any type of client (PC, thin client, workstation)
  • Centralized management and provisioning of users
  • Consistent user access to personal desktop environment from home, office and other network connected locations.
  • Support for multiple remote display choices – Win4Lin client, NoMachine, LTSP, VNC, and X, for example
  • Increased security and reliability by running on Linux and Solaris servers
  • Lock down Windows read, write and other operations with Linux and Solaris permissions – an administrator’s dream!
  • Provide standard application environments to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, or Linux on the client, but standard application profile served from Win4VDI servers.

Win4VDI allows organizations to standardize the application environment to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, Linux or Mac can be used on the client, but a common application profile can be created and served from Win4VDI server configurations such as blade servers, rack arrays or large multi-way machines.

Win4VDI for Linux and Win4VDI for Solaris are available immediately. Win4VDI is priced at $125 per user with a minimum configuration of 10 seats. Win4VDI for Workgoups, a 10-seat configuration is being offered at a special price of $699 until September 15, 2008.

Virtual Bridges

0wning Xen?

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InvisibleThings.org posted some more details on their Xen Owning Trilogy session at last weeks Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Joanna Rutkowska and her crew gave a series of 3 talks discussing different potential security issues with Xen. With the VirtSec awareness growing this obviously is an important topic .

When quickly skimming trough the presentations the big question that arise is , how relevant is this all for a day to day production environment. Given the fact that some exploits assume you already root before you can install a stealth backdoor and others rely on specific hardware features that might or might not be available in your setup things might be that critical yet.

All 3 talks can be found on the Invisiblethingslab.com site

Virtualization.com will have a closer look at the discussed issues and we’ll be back with more detail later.

VirtualLogix Joins LiMo Foundation

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VirtualLogix today announced that it has joined the LiMo Foundation, an industry consortium dedicated to creating the first truly open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system (OS) for mobile devices. VirtualLogix joins LiMo to extend the discussion and application of virtualization in the mobile handset space in order to make devices more efficient, secure, powerful and cost-effective.

VirtualLogix’s VLX real-time virtualization technology enables Linux to be deployed on low-cost feature phones by sharing a single core baseband processor with the Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) supporting the wireless protocol stack, thus avoiding the need for an additional application processor and associated peripheral hardware. These low cost VLX-based, and LiMo compliant, Linux feature phone platforms are deployed today by LiMo member companies. In addition, VLX provides Linux-based mobile phones with a standards-conformant advanced security architecture, which enables trusted security services to support m-commerce, financial transactions or DRM protected content distribution. VLX handset solutions are based on ARM, XScale, and Intel Atom processor families.
VirtualLogix

Monitor Your Citrix XenServer Environment With Hyperic HQ

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Open source Web infrastructure management provider Hyperic today announced Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer management and monitoring software for Citrix XenServer. The new software allows XenServer administrators to quickly and correctly assess IT decisions within their XenServer environment.

“Our customers manage some of the world’s biggest Web environments where every second of downtime can mean losing revenue, users or both. Virtualization software such as Citrix XenServer delivers these organizations the necessary tools to be ultra-responsive to changes in user patterns and application performance,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO for Hyperic HQ. “By adding support for XenServer, we are once again taking the guesswork out of the management side of the equation. In providing management support for all virtualized and non-virtualized systems from one central location, we continue in our mission to make Web-based applications more manageable.”

Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer combines performance metrics, log data, configuration and security events in a single view correlated by time. These events can be used to link errors reported in the XenServer logs with other performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment, generate alerts or trigger automated control actions to remediate the current problem. Additionally, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer allows users to suspend, shutdown, start and reboot directly from the HQ interface and record the action in the event history for future reference.

Currently, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer is available on Hyperic’s community Hyperforge. Hyperic will incorporate this new plugin directly into the core distribution in the upcoming Hyperic HQ 4.0 release, due out later this summer.

Hyperic