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KACE Buys Into App Virtualization Market With Computers In Motion Acquisition

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KACE (previous coverage), the systems management appliance company, Tuesday announced its entry into the application virtualization market with its acquisition of Computers in Motion. Financial details of the acquisition are not being disclosed. The company intends to release products around this acquisition by year-end.

Established in 2001, Austin-based Computers in Motion provides technology focused on making applications easy to distribute and secure through application virtualization technologies. With this acquisition, KACE plans to revolutionize the application virtualization market by extending the benefits of virtualization to other desktop management areas such as application security and data management. The technology and development staff of the Computers in Motion team will form the foundation of KACE’s application virtualization products.

A preview of KACE Virtual Kontainers will be offered at KACE’s booth at the upcoming VMworld Conference in Las Vegas.

The Computers in Motion acquisition fits in squarely with KACE’s strategy of lowering the total cost of ownership for IT organizations through its appliance-based systems management and virtualization technology. This acquisition also builds on the product momentum KACE has made throughout the year in the virtualization market, including the recent launches of the Virtual KBOX Systems Management and KBOX Virtual Remote Appliances offerings.

KACE

DiscCloud Launches Virtual Appliance for Mac OS X

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DiscCloud today announced the release of the DiscCloud Virtual Appliance, the world’s first desktop virtualization platform designed for Mac OS X clients.

With DiscCloud, Mac desktops can be centrally administered, supported, and maintained using trusted and well known practices used by VMware professionals. The DiscCloud Virtual Appliance runs as a Virtual Machine on VMware Server and ESX class products, and hence on vast assortment of standard x86 platforms.

DiscCloud extends existing capabilities of the Mac desktop, via advanced VMware features such as automated backup, continuous availability, storage scalability, mobility, and desktop disaster recovery.

DiscCloud’s approach to desktop virtualization is 100% Apple license compliant, and supports Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) clients.

Apani Pushes EpiForce VM as Virtual Appliance (Free Trial)

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Apani, provider of cross-platform server isolation solutions for large enterprises, today announced that EpiForce VM is now available as a virtual appliance free trial. EpiForce VM is the industry’s first software-based solution that secures corporate networks, containing both physical and virtual machines, from a single platform.

EpiForce VM is part of Apani’s security software product family and provides enterprises the ability to adopt a single security solution that will protect mixed data centers. From legacy systems to contemporary platforms and now virtualized environments, Apani’s EpiForce product line is the silver bullet for enterprise IT departments looking to simplify security enforcement and move away from a silo approach to protecting the inside of the corporate network.

The EpiForce VM virtual appliance free trial is a fully functioning version of EpiForce VM designed to install and run as a VMware VI3 appliance. The trial version includes two virtual machines (VMs) with agents pre-installed and license keys for up to 10 agents that can be installed on any physical or virtual Windows or Red Hat Linux platform. A complete video tutorial and training guide is included to help security administrators to configure and test EpiForce VM in their own environment.

EpiForce VM is based on the EpiForce platform v2.5 and initially supports VMware ESX Server 3.0 and 3.5 and uses on-demand policy distribution to offer enterprises the ability to manage and deploy policy to thousands of virtual or physical servers and endpoints with no impact to the network, application or user. EpiForce VM offers a centralized management console that enables a consolidated view to manage all EpiForce VM-protected machines — whether they are virtual or physical, without regard to their physical location on the network. Persistent security policy management allows administrators to utilize VMotion or Virtual Center to migrate EpiForce VM-protected virtual machines from one physical host to another with no disruption of security policy, minimizing unplanned downtime and maximizing operational flexibility.

Statelesx Looking For A Home

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If you’ve been following the Vinternals blog too, this will be no news to you, but the guys behind it have been busy building a virtual appliance, and they are now releasing version 1.0.0 of the app called Statelesx (placeholder page for now).

From the blog post:

“The architecture of the app is something like this:

1) A python script on your fat ESX boxes that runs on startup
2) A Java app that listens for requests and acts via the VirtualCenter SDK
3) A minimal web interface for managing XML cluster configuration files

In a nutshell, you create a cluster configuration file that contains cluster options (DRS,DPM,HA) and network info (vSwitches, portgroups, vmkernel interfaces) and then associate hosts to the cluster config file by their FQDN and UUID. The python script on the ESX host sends the UUID to the statelesx listener, which searches the cluster config files for a match on the UUID. If it finds one, it goes to work. If it doesn’t, nothing happens.”

It runs on Ubuntu 8.04 JeOS with the Sun Java 6 package and Tomcat 6. VI 3.5 is required, although if they get enough requests they may also backport to VI 3.0.

The team has created a couple of demo videos to show off the app: the first one giving an overview and basic configuration demo, and the second one going into much more detail around the XML config files and demoing an advanced configuration being applied to some hosts.

Unfortunately, the app isn’t available for download yet, as they haven’t yet found a hosting provider who can host the 200 MB zip file for free as well provide the necessary bandwidth. If you can help them out, get in touch! (vinternals at gmail dot com)

KACE Releases Virtual Appliance Enabling Remote OS Provisioning

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KACE, a management appliance company we covered earlier this year, today announced the industry’s first virtual remote appliance to deliver remote operating system (OS) provisioning. As part of its KBOX family of appliances, the new KBOX Virtual Remote Appliance allows a central KBOX to extend full systems provisioning to remote offices, helping organizations to eliminate the cost and time associated with manual imaging approaches.

Consisting of an easy-to-deploy virtual appliance that resides in an organization’s remote offices, Virtual Remote Appliances work in conjunction with a central KBOX Systems Deployment Appliance to push out entire OS deployments to offices outside of a corporate network, oftentimes hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.

By automating machine provisioning at remote offices, KACE gives IT administrators a centralized way to execute deployment tasks, such as hardware independent network OS installation, disk imaging, software distribution, configuration management, and recovery at any location.
Virtual Remote Appliances allow the KBOX to provision systems in any remote office, including the ability to:
  • Provision from a centralized deployment library of operating systems, disk images, drivers, and applications;
  • Perform hardware independent network OS installation (scripted installation);
  • Deploy disk images;
  • Utilize a GUI-based pre-installation environment for the recovery of corrupted systems;
  • Deliver full reporting capabilities for system history, installation, and images.
Virtual Remote Appliances are available now and included at no additional cost with the purchase of a KBOX Systems Deployment Appliance.
KACE