For those of you who haven’t heard of  Virtual Computer they are  a relatively new startup based on the East Coast in Westford, MA.  Their product offering in the form of NxTop claims to simplify your PC lifecycle management.

Wading through the sales and marketing spin reveals that under the hood NxTop is a bare-metal hypervisor built on top of Xendesktop.  Which shouldn’t really come as any suprise when you look at their investors, Citrix has invested $15 million dollars in them.

The bare metal hypervisor is depending on your viewpoint a nice feature, gets rid of the bloat that you get with a traditional OS.  Then the features and functions that make up NxTop (some of which they claim are unique and in reality are not) give you a solution that uncannily resembles VMware View!

The race is on, it is just a question of who gets there first the tortoise or the hare!

This summer at the Blackhat conference in Vegas there was an interesting talk on the merits of deploying virtual firewalls.  The speaker although he did not mention any particular vendors was hinting at the fact that Check Point the market leading Firewall vendor now have a Virtual Firewall offering in the form of Secure Platform or SPLAT as it is more affectionately known.

His thoughts were that care should be taken when moving a firewall from a physical to a virtual environment and that things like resource consumption and vmotion should be carefully considered.  It would after all be unreasonable to expect what was once a dedicated hardware appliance Firewall to perform in the same way when virtualised.  Stating the obvious for sure but something that is often overlooked.  The topic of vmotion was interesting as well and something that I hadn’t thought about but again obvious once pointed out.  The scenario was if you had one ESX host with a Firewall VM that was protecting other VM’s on the same ESX host and for whatever reason a vmotion occured then it would become highly likely that the VM’s the Firewall VM was protecting would no longer be protected as a result of the vmotion occuring.

The above scenario will be fixed in future releases of VMware but at the moment unless you architect and design your VM environment correctly then you could be giving yourself a false sense of security.

Whilst at VMworld in Vegas I came across this cool looking gadget!!!

Leveraging virtualisation technology (vmware) at the backend you can now push down desktop applications to this device and provide a very secure and efficient environment for your workforce.  The device has no OS, holds no data and has no moving parts!  If anyone steals it all they have is a very sexy looking Silver Cube but that’s it.  For more info check out the pano website (www.panologic.com).