Business Tech

Have desktop, will travel.

VMware unveiled Tuesday its open source virtual desktop client VMware View Open Client, designed to provide users with constant access to their personal desktop on almost any device.

VMware View Open Client aims to provide organizations with the ability to host user desktops within their respective datacenters and allow their users to access their personal desktops from a variety of devices at any given time.

Jocelyn Goldfein, general manager of VMware's Desktop business unit, said in a statement:

Now we are sharing our source code in VMware view Open Client so vendors can easily optimize devices to create the best virtual desktop solutions. As a result, IT is able to reduce the total cost of providing desktop environments by allowing low-end or less-expensive devices that provide the same feature set as higher-end devices.

The VMware View Open Client is offered up through the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1.

VMware reported Monday a 25 percent jump in fourth-quarter revenues and an increase in its quarterly net profit, despite recessionary times gripping the economy.

The virtualization software maker generated fourth-quarter revenues of $515 million, up by double digits over the same time a year ago. That performance beat analysts expectations of $512.3 million, according to Thomson Reuters.

VMware posted fourth-quarter net profits of $111 million, or 29 cents a share, compared with profits of $78 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 26 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters.

"VMware delivered a solid fourth quarter to cap off a successful 2008. We have been executing well in a difficult economy," Paul Maritz, VMware CEO, said in a statement.

But despite beating Wall Street's expectations and posting growth, VMware fell 3.17 percent to $21.40 a share in after-hours trading.

Investors may have been spooked by VMware's warning that the dire global economic conditions make it difficult to predict the company's performance for all of this year, resulting in the company withholding its financial guidance for 2009.

VMware was only willing to provide a forecast for the first quarter of revenues of approximately $475 million.

Forget stargazing. Oracle and Intel are looking up at the clouds.

The technology giants announced Wednesday they're teaming up to accelerate cloud computing for corporate titans, collaborating on improving the efficiency, security, and standards-based technology for pushing programs and data storage into virtual clouds.

"Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards based," Robert Shimp, Oracle's technology business unit group vice president, said in a statement.

As part of the cloudy collaboration, Oracle and Intel will continue their efforts to improve the performance of Oracle's software on Intel chips. Recently, the companies said, their teaming up of Oracle VM and the Xen open-source hypervisor with Intel VT produced a 17 percent performance improvement in virtualized Oracle databases running on Intel's Xeon processors.

On the security front, both companies aim to improve the integration of their data encryption technologies for customers using shared cloud computing. They also will work with other industry players in enabling portability of virtual machine images and creating Web services standards for securing and managing cloud-based services.

LAS VEGAS--VMware's forthcoming ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor update will allow users to change the amount of RAM allocated to virtual machines without rebooting them, VMworld 2008 attendees here heard Tuesday.

In addition, the new hypervisor will enable businesses to configure virtual machines with eight virtual CPUs and a maximum of 256GB RAM, VMware product manager Carter Shanklin said in a technical briefing at the Las Vegas conference. The current version of ESX Server supports a maximum of 64GB RAM and four CPUs per virtual machine.

Although there have been several rumors about ESX 4.0 published by bloggers, until now, VMware has been tight-lipped about new features in the hypervisor update, which is expected to be launched next year. The ability to "hot-add" RAM to virtual machines should help companies avoid disruption or downtime when they have to make a memory switch.

Shanklin revealed the ESX 4.0 features during a demonstration of VMware's free VMware Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit 1.5, in which he showed how its integrated Microsoft's PowerShell command-line interface could be used to adjust the configuration of a virtual machine running Microsoft Exchange. In the demonstration, the Exchange server virtual machine was upgraded from 1GB to 4GB of RAM without a reboot.

"Microsoft PowerShell is designed for automating the management of Windows applications. All Microsoft server products must support PowerShell to some degree, so time spent learning PowerShell will be time well spent," Shanklin said.

Hot-add memory support is a feature of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.

The VI Toolkit runs on top of Microsoft PowerShell and includes 125 command-line tools for managing servers running VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX3i. It is available free of charge as a download from the VMware Web site.

Roger Howorth of ZDNet UK reported from Las Vegas.

Xen has yet to reach Zen.

Xen's open-source standard for virtualization is gaining traction as cloud computing takes off, but despite claims by some companies that their Xen hypervisors outperform others, Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of Citrix, which acquired XenSource, had this advice during his keynote speech at LinuxWorld on Thursday: don't believe it.

"To say my Xen is better than your Xen is utter nonsense," Crosby quipped.

But while Xen, like its other virtualization offerings from VMware and Microsoft, are designed to allow a computers to operate multiple operating systems simultaneously to shift work demands among servers in an adaptable data center, the technology, while important, remains in flux.

Crosby's Xen evangelism comes as the industry faces growing competition from the likes of Red Hat and others that have begun touting KVM over Xen as their virtualization software.

And even within Xen, some competition exists, given its base bits change, resulting in different features depending upon when a snapshot was taken and built into a product. And another differentiator comes from the management tools that take advantage of the virtualization, such as tools that create new virtual machines to ones that monitor the machines if they become overburdened.

Despite competition from other forms of virtualization software, Crosby finds the use of Xen is growing. The Yankee Group, for example, estimates that 17 percent of the enterprise server market uses Xen, but Crosby estimates it may be more.

Xen, for example, is finding its way into laptops, as it addresses legacy workload issues, Crosby noted.

"Xen is everywhere in the clouds that I visit," said Crosby.

Xen has a development community to rally behind the virtualization technology and drive improvements and its integration into a range of products, other than just servers.

Nonetheless, challenges remain for Xen, such as virtual machines still tend to be tied to a specific hypervisor vendor and version, in addition, the technology is not verifiably secure.

Noted Crosby: "hypervisors are free...the next challenge is getting them ubiquitous."