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Citrix And VCs Invest Another $15 Million In Virtual Computer

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Virtual Computer today announced it has secured $15 million in series B funding, in a round was co-led by series A investors Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners with additional investment coming from Citrix Systems.

The latest round of financing positions Virtual Computer to significantly accelerate its global sales and marketing efforts and further advance development of the company’s NxTop product offering.

NxTop, Virtual Computer’s next-generation PC management platform, makes it as easy to manage thousands of PCs as it is to manage one, dramatically reducing PC management costs while improving PC reliability and security. NxTop isolates the PC’s critical components — hardware, operating system, applications, and user data — allowing each to be managed independently in a highly-scalable fashion without a persistent network connection.

“This is a blockbuster funding round for any company, especially in this economic environment,” said Dan McCall, president and CEO of Virtual Computer. “Not only did our current investors show their continued support for the company, but we were able to add a proven leader in the virtualization market as a strategic investor. We are looking forward to working with Citrix to help make Xen a market standard for PC lifecycle management.”

Lostcreation’s Virtualization Mobile Manager Reaches Beta 1.5

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From VMBlog:

lostcreations‘ Andrew Kutz is moving a mile-a-minute right now working on his Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM) application.  Only a short time since announcing it, he is now ready with Beta 1.5.  The new Beta introduces three important new features thanks to Beta user feedback thus far.

  1. In addition to VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Server 2, VMM now supports the management and monitoring of Citrix XenServer 1.5.
  2. VMM now works on ALL mobile devices via its new Lite Mode. VMM will gracefully degrade itself to a zero-Javascript version if a fully-Ajax capable browser is not detected. You can now manage and monitor VMware and Xen from your BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device, or any phone with a web browser!
  3. Beta 1.5 introduces a feature we are calling Accidental Touch Detection (ATD). ATD prevents users from accidentally brushing up against a power button in full mode (as opposed to the new lite mode) and shutting down a VM. ATD requires an intentional touch (measured by a depression of 500 milliseconds)

Citrix Systems And Intel Partner For Development Of Xen Client Hypervisor Technology

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Citrix Systems and Intel are working on developing technology to make desktop-as-a-service computing possible. The two companies said yesterday that they are collaborating to jointly deliver a hypervisor that will sit on end-user devices which will allow customers to have access to their virtual desktop PCs from any device without the need to boot up the device.

Under an agreement with Intel, Citrix plans to produce a new class of virtualization solutions that optimize the delivery of applications and desktops to millions of Intel Core2 and Centrino 2 processor-based devices, considerably reducing the cost of desktop management.

The new Xen-based client hypervisor resulting from the collaboration between Citrix and Intel will be optimized for bare metal virtualization and suited for delivery as an embedded, small footprint component of an enterprise laptop or desktop PC, and can also be installed on existing client systems that already have an operating system installed.

More perspective on the collaboration can be found on eWeek.

Release: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.3

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RedHat just announced the release of RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.3 which is available for immediate download from Red Hat Network. According to the company, with this update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability.

RedHat lists Increased scalability of virtualized x86-64 environments as it’s prominent new feature:

“This includes the industry-leading ability to support virtual servers with up to 32 virtual CPUs and 80GB of memory. Physical server limits have also been expanded to match the size of today’s latest hardware systems, with up to 126 CPUs and 1TB main memory. New features, such as support for Hugepage memory and Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT), dramatically improve the performance of virtual servers. For customers, these enhancements allow more and larger virtual systems to be configured on today’s powerful servers, thereby reducing costs. Additionally, more devices can be allocated to each virtual server (guest), enabling the virtualization of applications with heavy I/O requirements. ”

Amongst other improvements is support for the Quad Core Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processors and the inclusion of OpenJDK

More info including a Video on their blog.

Egenera Introduces PAN Manager 5.2

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Egenera today announced its next generation software solution for unifying virtual and physical infrastructure management, PAN Manager 5.2.

New features including open APIs enable customers and third parties to integrate PAN Manager commands and functions into their own software suites. By logically abstracting and representing all types of computing assets, both physical and virtual, PAN Manager simplifies the data center environment while ensuring high availability and full disaster recovery.

PAN Manager’s reliable virtualized architecture is based on industry standards and supports popular hypervisors, SANs and server platforms. PAN Manager minimizes data center complexity, and reduces operational and capital expenditures by up to 70 percent.

The major innovations in the latest release of PAN Manager software focus on simplifying manageability through an increasingly granular level of management for both virtual and physical resources. The many major new and enhanced features in PAN Manager software, release 5.2 include:

  • Open APIs enabling customers or third parties to integrate PAN Manager commands and functions into their own software suites;
  • Linux 2.6 kernel compatibility to run PAN Controllers for enhanced performance;
  • Embedded Citrix 4.1 technology enabling Live Migration, support for Red Hat 64-bit operating systems  and  dynamic memory allocation;
  • Support for vLAN technology enabling superior flexibility in designing computing environments within the processing area network – the PAN; and
  • Support for WinPE 2.1 enabling customers to utilize industry standard tools to manage their Microsoft operating system deployments and provisioning.

PAN Manager software by Egenera, release 5.2, is available immediately.

Cisco Plans Bold Move Into Server Business, Enters Arena With HP And IBM

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According to the NY Times, Cisco Systems is planning a big push into the server market, essentially entering into competition with its historical partners HP and IBM (who declined to comment on the story).

A risky move for Cisco, but a very interesting one.

The product — a server computer equipped with sophisticated virtualization software — is a bold but risky move by Cisco into an unfamiliar, intensely competitive market that typically produces far lower profits than Cisco makes from network gear. But it reflects the company’s ambition to grow beyond its roots as the so-called plumber of the Internet to offer everything from instant messaging software to digital stereos.

As The Register points out, VMware technology is likely the foundation of the virtualization part, since Cisco still owns part of the company (about 2%). Cisco is not disclosing any specifics though, but the NY Times learned that Cisco could show off the first of its new systems as early as March.

Acquisition rumors between Cisco Systems and VMware (and even EMC in full) are sure to flare up again.

A good follow-up article was published on Forbes.