There’s no doubt that VMware is still the top virtualization player, but the upcoming Q4 2008 will highlight in a crystal clear way that it’s no more the only player available.

The landscape is being reshaped by several major vendors trying to erode the VMware leadership with different strategies:

• Citrix is targeting the enterprises with a comprehensive product portfolio for application delivery and highly specific features: the Xen-based hypervisor (XenServer), the management layer (XenCenter), the desktop and application virtualization platform (XenApp), the VDI broker (XenDesktop) and much more.
• Microsoft just started targeting its SMB customer base with competitive pricing, extended support policies, massive interoperability agreements and an impressive number of converging products: its new hypervisor (Hyper-V), its new application virtualization and streaming platform (App-V), the upcoming new management layer (SCVMM 2008), the backup layer (DPM 2007), the performance monitoring layer (SCOM 2007) and more.
• Novell is including new products in its portfolio to extend its capability to sell virtualization outside the Linux world: a new high-performance virtualization platform based on the Xen hypervisor, P2V migration and capacity planning tools (acquired by PlateSpin) integrated with its ZENworks management layer, and a brand new application virtualization platform (offered through the OEM agreement with Xenocode).
• Oracle is recalling its own customer base with a strict support policy and a new, free of charge hypervisor based on Xen: Oracle VM.
• Parallels is working to release its first bare-metal hypervisor, strongly focusing on the Apple market and on the hosting segment, where it has a real leadership.
• Red Hat just found a unique opportunity to conquer an important side of the market, switching from Xen to KVM and buying the valuable VDI startup Qumranet.
• Sun is about to put on the table the most complete computing stack for virtualization, from servers and storage to hypervisor (xVM Server) and management (Ops Center), passing through VDI (Sun VDI).
• Virtual Iron continues to focus on the SMB market with a high quality virtual infrastructure and key new features.
  While it is the smallest vendor in this list but also the one of the most experienced. Acquiring its Xen-based hypervisor may represent the last cheap opportunity to enter the virtualization market for a big firm (IBM, HP, Dell, Symantec, Quest and few others).

Sun just released a new major version of its desktop virtualization product, VirtualBox 2.0, but doesn’t seem happy enough.
The French news magazine LeMagIT reported that Sun will unveil its new hypervisor, xVM Server, on September 10.

The bare-metal VMM is powered by Xen but Sun replaced the Linux kernel running in DomU with Solaris.
The company worked on this product for more than one year and last month finally started an Early Adoption program to approach the first customers.

Sun is one of the most interesting virtualization player to look at in the coming months.
It has a unique position as it will be the only vendor on the market able to offer a complete computing stack for virtualization: the physical hardware (both servers and storage), the hypervisor, the management layer and the VDI connection broker.
This implies less issues with support and licensing and new platforms specifically tailored for virtualization.

To further consolidate its position and fill up the holes in the current feature-set, Sun may proceed in acquiring multiple companies.
Any startup developing capacity planning, virtual lab automation (Sun seems smarter than Microsoft here, and it’s already pushing virtualization to its immense JAVA developers community) or VM lifecycle management products can be an acquisition target. 

If the news will be confirmed, this Q4 2008 is expected to be one of the hottest period ever for hardware virtualization.

Update: Sun officially confirms the upcoming launch and puts online a placeholder.
A live webcast is scheduled for Sep. 10 @ 9am PST.

Red Hat just announced that it acquired the VDI startup Qumranet for $107M.

The startup left the stealth mode in September 2007 and has just 60 employees, all of them will keep their work as Red Hat employees.

The move is critical and has a major impact on many aspects of the virtualization world.

The Qumranet strategy
Qumranet offers an interesting VDI solution made by a  management console, a connection broker and a new remote desktop protocol.
But more than that, Qumranet maintains KVM, the new virtualization platform that has been implemented in the Linux kernel after just six months of development.

KVM allows any Linux box to become a virtualization platform, and KVM is the only company at the moment able to offer a VDI solution for KVM.
This means that customers looking for cheap, large-scale virtual desktop infrastructures have to buy the Qumranet solution.

The Red Hat strategy
In the last few years, despite a number of announcements, Red Hat didn’t demonstrate a neat strategy about virtualization. But in June the company officially declared its intention to move from Xen to KVM.

Just two months after, a Red Hat executive formally revealed the company interest in VDI. At that point it was easy to forecast a special deal with Qumranet.

(it seems that when virtualization.info presumed the acquisition, the deal was already signed)

Buying Qumranet Red Hat just solved a number of problems:

• obtaining direct control on the development of a virtualization engine (something that the company was never able to do with Xen because of XenSource, and even less after XenSource was acquired by Citrix)
• obtaining a platform which is ready for virtualization ubiquity (KVM is flexible enough to be deployed on servers, desktops, embedded devices and anywhere Linux can fit)
• obtaining a strong position in the growing VDI market
• differentiating its virtualization offering from the competitor Novell (both are currently adopting Xen)
• enforcing its position of open source leader while the competitor Novell is seen as a suspicious Microsoft ally

Both Citrix and Red Hat acquired a virtualization company that develop and control an open source virtual machine monitor (VMM). But there’s a major difference between the two companies.

Citrix never had an involvement in the open source world, and despite the culture introduced by Simon Crosby and his staff (and their tireless efforts), the community has a hard time in recognizing Citrix as a company that can give back. When talking about virtualization Citrix is first and foremost seen as the best Microsoft ally against VMware.
Red Hat instead is a beloved, open source paladin. The company made some mistakes in the past, but its effort in supporting Fedora still makes it a leader in the Linux world.
This difference is now specially important: some entities currently contributing to the Xen development may find much more interesting to work with Red Hat rather than with Citrix (think about IBM).

At the same time some firms heavily relying on Red Hat (think about Oracle), may be in deep trouble now that the company is definitively replacing Xen with KVM.
These entities may need to look at Novell now, or start working on their own implementations.

In any case the acquisition of Qumranet is a major achievement for Red Hat, which has now a unique opportunity to become a real virtualization leader.

Microsoft announces today that the new version of its application virtualization platform, acquired by Softricity in 2006, is now called App-V 4.5.

The product, once known as SoftGrid, has been renamed Application Virtualization for some months, but the company has finally decided to adopt the less confusing App-V name.

App-V 4.5 will be included in the upcoming Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2008 R2, expected within few weeks.
Additionally, the product will be fully supported by the just released System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2 and by System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 through a new Management Pack.

More important than that, along with App-V 4.5, Microsoft will release a new Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA), allowing 3rd parties to stream applications to their customers with App-V.

This new SPLA, called Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Hosting for Desktops, is not as open as originally planned and leaked by Endeavors Technologies and other application virtualization vendors.

Considering the original intention, it’s likely that the new restriction is now due to the upcoming competition with VMware, as the competitor is now fully into the application virtualization market with ThinApp, acquired in January by Thinstall.

Nonetheless this is a major step towards the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) reality: without a change in the Microsoft licensing, the number of business products that could be streamed on users desktop is limited and this severely restricts the profit opportunities.

virtualization.info will cover the new SPLA in details as soon as it’s available.

After losing its co-founder and CEO, Diane Greene, in July, VMware suffers another important loss: the Executive Vice President of R&D, Richard Sarwal.

Sarwal was recruited by Green and spent only nine months at VMware.

He goes back to Oracle, where he worked for 18 years. His former employer should be more than glad to have him back considering the company effort in developing a competitive hypervisor: Oracle VM.

Stephen Herrod, Ph.D, CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, will replace Sarwal.

The attention anyway is still much focused on Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Architect at VMware and husband of Diane Green.
Outside the company, he’s generally recognized as the company visionary and his departure could be a nasty event for VMware.

A couple of weeks after the sack of Diane Greene, virtualization.info inquired VMware and was granted that Rosenblum was still working for the company.

When Microsoft officially officially launched its new Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) just two weeks ago, an unexpected vendor applied for it: Cisco.

The SVVP program is developed to extend the support that Microsoft offers on Windows Server and most back-end servers to those 3rd party hypervisors that pass validation.

As far as we can understand, there’s no reason to apply for this program without a hypervisor.
So, or Cisco is about to announce a hypervisor, or the SVVP has additional purposes that Microsoft didn’t detail.

Today another unexpected vendor appears on the SVVP applicants list: Unisys.

It’s not a secret that Unisys is heavily involved in virtualization, omnipresent in virtualization adoption projects across the globe, but as far as we know the company doesn’t offer (yet) a hypervisor.

As Unisys contributes to the Xen open source project, this may be the first step to launch a Xen-based solution.

Just two weeks ago Microsoft officially launched its new Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), developed to extend the support to those 3rd party hypervisors that pass validation.

At the announcement time a number of key virtualization vendors already applied for the Program, including Citrix, Novell, Sun, Virtual Iron and Cisco (why Cisco?).

At the last minute VMware confirmed its commitment and now, ironically enough, its flagship hypervisor, ESX 3.5 Update 2, is the first to pass the validation.

This means that from now on, Microsoft had to deliver cooperative technical support to those VMware customers running Windows Server 2008 and earlier, as well as any Microsoft back-end server defined in the program (and this includes mission critical products like SQL Server and Exchange).

With a surprising announcement Novell unveiled its plans to enter the application virtualization market yesterday.

The company signed an OEM agreement with a small firm called XenoCode, which recently reshaped its technology to deliver application virtualization.

Novell already rebranded the XenoCode Application Studio as ZENworks Application Virtualization (ZAV), offering it at $39 per concurrent user.

With this move Novell confirms its strong commitment on virtualization.

Novell already has its own hypervisor, the Xen implementation embedded in SUSE Enterprise Linux 10, but it’s also planning a second virtualization platform featuring just the hypervisor.

On the management side its ZENworks Orchestrator acts as hypervisor console, VM lifecycle management and virtual infrastructure orchestrator.

Last but not least, at the beginning of the year Novell acquired PlateSpin granting itself P2V migration and capacity planning capabilities that should be integrated in the ZENWorks family by the end of this year.

Sun releases today the second generation of its desktop virtualization platform, VirtualBox, acquired by innotek in February.

This new version introduces a few but important capabilities like:

• support for 64-bit guest OSes (Microsoft Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5)
• support for AMD RVI
• support for Microsoft VHD virtual disk format
• new interface for Apple Mac OS edition (native 10.5 Leopard GUI)
• Python API (for Solaris and Linux hosts only)

Download it free of charge here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Last week Citrix announced that the its next generation desktop and application virtualization platform, XenApp 5.0, will be launched on September 10.

The company made the product available slightly ahead of time so you can download a trial later today here.

Citrix also published a valuable Technical Guide for Upgrading or Migrating to XenApp 5 that every customer should read.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Xen 3.3 has been just released and Xen.org already publishes the roadmap for the next version of the open source hypervisor.

The document reveals a major focus on desktop deployment, with multiple major enhancements to make Xen a great client hypervisor:

• Client device virtualization (e.g. battery status etc)
• GPU virtualization with Gallium
• USB 2.0 support, PV USB support
• Trusted HID
• Simple VGA/text-mode management console

Probably, the most important entry in the list above is the display card (GPU) virtualization, one of the most complex task to achieve in hardware virtualization.

As reported by Wikipedia:

Gallium3D is a software library for 3D graphics acceleration being developed by Tungsten Graphics, an engineering company with expertise in Linux and open-source graphics technologies. Gallium 3D operates between the graphics API and the operating system with the primary goal of making driver development easier, bundling otherwise duplicated code of several different drivers at a single point.

…

Gallium3D provides a unified API exposing standard hardware functions such as shader units found on modern hardware. Thus, 3D APIs such as OpenGL 1.x/2.x, OpenGL 3.x, OpenVG, GPGPU infrastructure or even Direct3D (as found in the Wine compatibility layer) will need only a single back-end, called state tracker, targeting Gallium3D API…

To allow a full GPU virtualization, display cards vendors (Intel, AMD/ATI and nVidia mainly) will have to support the technology.
The current status reported is not exactly encouraging:

The first implemented and already partially working drivers are Cell and Intel GPU drivers. Work is done on ATI Radeon cards providing a skeleton driver, and the Nouveau team is moving development to Gallium3D, including a solution for older fixed function nVidia cards which lack programmable shaders.

Several companies are currently working to make Xen a client hypervisor: the BIOS leader Phoenix Technologies (with its HyperCore), the just-launched startup Neocleus, and several major OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo.

If Xen 3.4 will really develop the features above these companies may get major benefits from it and push for an early implementation in their commercial products.

The upcoming new version anyway is not just about desktops. It includes an impressive range of additional features, including:

• full support for Intel VT-c (VMDq and SR-IOV)
• full support for OVF
• Virtual machine synchronization for fault tolerance
• SATA command virtualization

In June 2007 Google acquired a stealth-mode startup focused on application virtualization called GreenBorder.
As common practice, the search giant never detailed how it planned to use the technology.

Yesterday the company unveiled the first public beta of its own browser, Chrome, featuring the capability to isolate the instances running in each tab.

InformationWeek is reporting that this security feature depends on the GreenBorder technology.

While there’s no official confirmation, it makes sense and leaves open a wide range of possibilities: if Google really deploys an application virtualization platform along with its browser, it could stream inside the virtualized layers any kind of application, on any kind of operating system.

By the way: virtualization.info is fully compliant with the Chrome rendering engine, so feel free to browse us with it.

In the past few weeks we introduced a number of top-notch speakers that will give their keynotes at the Virtualization Congress 2008, the independent conference that virtualization.info will hold in London, October 14-16.  

All of them are well-known protagonists in the virtualization industry and really don’t need any introduction. Except one: Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow at Microsoft.

For those ones that don’t know him, Mark is a legendary figure in the IT world because of his previous companies: Sysinternals and Winternals (both links now redirect to Microsoft TechNet).

While working there, Mark did so much reverse engineering of the Windows kernel that he ended up knowing it as much as the Microsoft architects. And this is the reason why Microsoft acquired his assets two years ago and hired him as a Technical Fellow.

The tools that he developed during the last ten years became fundamentals for generations of IT professionals in understanding the Windows behavior, and are still unrivaled at today.

Now what does Mark have to do with Microsoft virtualization?

As Technical Fellow, Mark is deeply involved in the development of the Windows kernel (Windows 7 and beyond), taking care that its architecture is fully virtualization-aware.
If there’s one that can have a discussion about virtual resources hot-plug, memory overcommit, performance comparison against VMware ESX and other virtualization hardcore topics, Mark is that one (this recent interview is a clear example).

Best of all, if you check his keynote abstract you’ll discover that Mark will preview some unannounced products at the Virtualization Congress, giving a glimpse of the Microsoft effort in the space.

Here’s Mark introducing his own keynote:

The Virtualization Congress 2008 is next month, October 14-16 at the London ExCeL Conference Centre.

Register now!

It’s well known that multiple companies are working to deliver connection broker capabilities to the new Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0. The list includes at least Citrix, Quest/Provision Networks, Ericom and VDIworks.

So far anyway was unclear how these company interact with Hyper-V and how complex it could be for newcomers.
Now Microsoft clarifies that it exposes a new set of APIs for the Terminal Services Session Broker to achieve the task:

…while the built-in functionality of the TS Session Broker in WS08 only supports routing connections to terminal server sessions, we’ve created a set of APIs that ISVs can use to create connection brokers for other kinds of devices. Basically, these APIs allow you to lobotomize the TS Session Broker and replace its brain—its brokering mechanism—with a new plug-in. This plug-in can contain a new set of rules that support redirection to other types of destinations. It can also provide different means of deciding the best target for new connections, such as load balancing rules based on server resources or login time…

The existence of these APIs could simplify the entrance of new competitors in the VDI market, which is becoming hotter and more crowded every quarter.

As multiple sources are reporting, Alex Vasilevski, the co-founder of Virtual Iron, is about to launch a new startup temporary called Old Road Computing.

Vasilevsky left Virtual Iron in December 2007 to immediately found this new firm with Dan McCall.
McCall comes from Reflex Security, one of the first security firm approaching the virtualization market in early 2006, and Verisign.

The new company is currently funded by Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures) for an undisclosed amount.

Mass High Tech reports that Old Road Computing will be renamed as Virtual Computer Inc. as soon as the team is ready to leave the stealth mode.

Old Road Computing (until there will be a confirmation of the new name) has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Update: Old Road Computing officially confirmed its new name: Virtual Computer.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Today a new European startup leaves the stealth mode: Icomasoft.

The company is based in Switzerland and managed by the CEO Diego Boscardin, coming from Veritas and EMC where he was CEO and General Manager for Switzerland.
Along with him there’s a well-known name in the virtualization market, Dennis Zimmer, working as CTO. Dennis comes from the storage vendor Pillar Data Systems and is the founder of the German community at vmachine.de.

Leveraging the recent VMware PowerShell Tookit, Icomasoft announces today its first product: VI PowerScripter.

This is a plug-in for VMware VirtualCenter Client 2.5 able to run a Microsoft PowerShell script against any guest OS or against ESX 3.5 / ESXi hosts.

The company just launched the beta program and the users can apply for PowerScripter beta 1 here.

As the product can be used to perform any kind of task, to demonstrate its capabilities Icomasoft will provide a number of sample scripts in the final version of the product:

• Check Cluster Settings
• Rescan All HBAs Host or Cluster
• Update VMware Tools
• Config Export of Host or VM
• Mass provisioning of VMs
• Mass configuration VM
• Disconnect all removable Medias
• Evacuate host for Maintenance
• Create resource graphs

Icomasoft has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

So far a really small number of companies worked to deliver a management console for multiple hypervisors. And at the moment just one of them offer the product with an open source license: Enomaly.

Now there’s a new competitor in town: BlueBear.

BlueBear is a new US startup that is developing its own management console, planning to support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. And just like Enomaly, it will offer its product with an open source license.

The first version of the product, called Kodiak, is currently in private beta and at the moment only supports ESX, but it’s available for a wide number of systems, including Linux and Mac OS (to achieve the goal BlueBear used the new runtime environment Adobe AIR).

The interface is really interesting and while there’s no way at the moment to figure out how well it works in large-scale deployments, it certainly deserves a better look. 

BlueBear has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Thanks to Scott Lowe for the news.

VMware just published a new benchmark on its VMmark results page.

The tested hardware this time is a HP ProLiant DL585 G5 powered by four Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8360 CPUs (16 cores total) @ 2.5GHz with 64GB RAM.
The tested platform is VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 (build 82663) with no additional software.

This quad-core system is currently the fastest among the ones listed by VMware, winning over Dell, IBM and Sun machines in the same range. But to be fair we have to note that while the HP machine scores 14.74 serving 10 tiles (60 virtual machines), the Dell PowerEdge M905 scores a slightly lower result, 14.28, serving 11 tiles (66 virtual machines).

There’s a major difference between the two systems: the former runs a VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 while the latter runs the Update 2. It would be interesting to know if (and how much) the update level impacts on the overall performance.

Read the whole analysis here.

In the final rush to deliver its new desktop virtualization platform for Apple users, Fusion 2.0, VMware introduces a new, unexpected feature in the latest build: the antivirus.

The company has an agreement with McAfee to include VirusScan Plus, offered as trial feature, and a complimentary 12-months subscription.

There is no special integration anyway: the users will just be able to install the security product inside Windows guest OSes as they do with the VMware Tools.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Two weeks ago Microsoft released an update for Windows Server 2008 to improve the failover capabilities when the OS is configured to work as Hyper-V parent partition.

The package includes a long list of enhancements:

• Changes to the virtual machine view
• Changes to virtual machine actions
• Allow for more than one virtual machine in a "Services or Applications" group
• Add support for mount points or volumes without a drive letter
• Changes to the virtual machine refresh action
• Behavior changes if any node of the failover cluster has a disconnected virtual machine
• Behavior change when you add a pass-through disk to a virtual machine
• Behavior change when the parent differencing disk is not on shared storage
• Volume path copy

Microsoft anyway doesn’t seem 100% confident on the reliability of its own fix as it warns:

Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing this specific problem. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.

Download it here.

Thanks to HyperVoria.com for the news.

VMware just released a minor update for a number of products:

• Server 1.0.7 (build 108231) - Free Download
• Workstation 6.0.5 (build 109488) - Trial
• Player 2.0.5 (build 109488) - Free download
• ACE 2.0.5 (build 109488) - Trial

The reason behind this update is fixing four security vulnerabilities.
Three of them allow attackers to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges.

Update the products as soon as possible.

Update: It seems that also the new Server 1.0.7 build is still vulnerable to CVE-2008-3697.
This flaw in the VMware ISAPI extension for Microsoft IIS allows remote denial of service, so avoid to expose the Server web console outside the corporate LAN until a new fix is available.

Veeam just released a couple of minor updates for two product: FastSCP and Backup.

FastSCP 2.0.1 introduces the mail reporting capability while Backup 2.0.1 introduces support for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) 1.6 and VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2.

Download FastSCP trial here, Backup trial here.

At the end of February 2008, virtualization.info launched its first localized version in Japan.

Providing a daily, quality translation of all contents appearing on this website have been possible only thanks to the outstanding work of our exclusive partner for Japan: Networld.

Translating virtualization.info in Japanese implies a big effort for a notable number of people and a big bet, but the results we gotten so far are impressive.

In just 6 months virtualization.info JP became a leading news source in Japan, achieving over 1,000 page views and almost 500 feed subscribers per day.

More than that, and amazingly enough, the total number of unique visitors scored in July surpassed the ones that virtualization.info has from UK.

virtualization.info recognizes Japan as a key emerging market and we are proud to evangelize the country about the many vendors, products and technologies that we have covered here since 2003.

We are working hard to put online a few additional localized versions.
If you distribute virtualization products in non-English countries and are interested in a business partnership let us know.

At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2008, Intel showed on stage its upcoming new quad-core CPU codename Nehalem, much expected by the virtualization professionals because of the included Extended Page Tables (EPT) technology.

On top of that now there’s another reason to wait for Nehalem: the processor will support a new technology developed by VMware and called VMDirectPath.

VMDirectPath will allow ESX to avoid the emulation of network interface cards and map the physical NICs directly to the virtual machines:

Intel delivered a very interesting presentation about its effort to boost the hypervisor performance with VT-x, VT-d and VT-c technologies and slides from 27 to 32 are about VMDirectPath:

Nehalem CPUs for server use will be released no earlier than H2 2009.

VMware predicted that around that date the technology would completely cancel the performance degrade that virtualization introduces. 
It seems that to go there customers will have to bring with them a lot of hardware (and possibly drop a lot of flexibility).

Citrix announced that the next generation of its desktop and application virtualization platform, XenApp 5.0 (formerly Presentation Server), will be released September 10, 2008.

Customers can see an online event on Sep. 9 with keynotes and live Q&A sessions.

The new product includes over 50 enhancements, detailed in a 13-pages comparative document.
Some of the new features are:

• Application streaming via HTTP/S
• Load-balancing defined by groups/users or applications
• Support for Windows Server 2008
• Support for IPv6
• Support for Microsoft XPS Universal Printer
• Support for Radius and Kerberors authentication (web interface)

The retail price per concurrent user is defined as follow:

• Advanced Edition – US $350
• Enterprise Edition – US $450
• Platinum Edition – US $600

Anyway customers can just buy the application virtualization and streaming components at the price of $60 per concurrent user.

Download a trial here (starting Sep. 10).

By reading the first page of the feature matrix above it seems that the Citrix marketing department worked much to redefine the concept of application virtualization so that our familiar terminology is turned upside-down:

• What we call today Desktop virtualization becomes Server-side Application Virtualization
• What we call today Application Virtualization becomes Client-side Application Virtualization

This redefinition, that will create a lot of confusion, was probably necessary because many vendors (including Citrix itself) are now using the term Desktop Virtualization referring to Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs).

Following the Citrix approach both Desktop Virtualization and VDI seems wrong. The correct term should be Server-side Hardware Virtualization for Desktop OS hosting, or something like that.

The discussion could go on as the vendors currently use other overlapping terms like OS Virtualization, Server Virtualization and many more.

An attempt to define a firm glossary seems as challenging as designing a virtual machine standard format, so Citrix can’t be blamed for this attempt.