Intel Acquires Neocleus
September 3, 2010
BY CHAD JONES | VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT MANAGEMENT | NEOCLEUS
Intel has purchased client virtualization software and intellectual property, and hired key software and development
individuals formerly employed by Neocleus, Inc. These assets will strengthen Intel’s Desktop Virtualization capabilities and
further business client use-case development and innovation. More details on potential use-cases to follow.
Intel is currently integrating these technologies into its roadmap and working on enabling plans for OEMs and ISVs. This IP will
supplement Intel® vPro™ technology which supports all Desktop Virtualization models and delivers uncompromised performance, manageability,
and security for workers and IT.
This is an exciting development for the employees and management team of Neocleus. The power of the industry’s leading client hypervisor
combined with the #1 platform manufacturer will inevitably lead to a tremendous evolution in client computing and management.
This acquisition is the culmination of more than a year’s worth of hard work and tough choices which saw the addition of a seasoned
US management team (and an HQ move to Cambridge, MA), followed by the evolution of the Neocleus vision, the re-launch of the company,
the signing of the industry’s first OEM agreement with BigFix (acquired by IBM), and, finally, the acquisition of Neocleus by Intel.
Along the way, the development team went above and beyond in solving incredibly difficult technological conundrums to ensure that the N
eocleus platform was innovative and met the market needs.
This has truly been a fantastic year and the future looks bright indeed! Keep your eye on Intel and the subsequent developments that follow as they are sure to be exciting!
Chad
Posted by Chad Jones
July 1, 2010
BigFix becomes
“BlueFix” – IBM announces
acquisition of BigFix!
Today’s announcement by
IBM that they are acquiring Neocleus Development Partner, BigFix, will rock
the PC market in a way that surpasses any other acquisition in the past
decade.
Immediate Impact
First off, this will dramatically change the PC Lifecycle Management and PC
Security markets by combining the award-winning BigFix management and security
technology with IBM’s vast sales, service and partner networks. As we’ve
spoken to customers, analysts and other experts in the PC management market over
the past 3 to 4 years, it has become apparent that BigFix’ approach, centered
around an intelligent client technology and super-scalable architecture, is far
superior to the existing oligopoly of Microsoft System
Center, Symantec Altiris
Client Management Suite, and LANDesk. In the best estimate of
market share in the PCLM space, Microsoft System Center currently accounts for
about 60-65% of the market. This position has been secured not by
technological superiority, but because Microsoft had a stronger sales &
marketing channel than some of the smaller competitors, such as
BigFix. Growing organically, BigFix has been able to get to a
relatively strong market size of about 10 million managed
endpoints. By combining with IBM’s sales and global services teams,
that number could easily grow to 100 million within the next few years – and
much of that could come at the expense of Microsoft, especially if IBM builds a
Global Services practice around migrating customers to the new offering.
The Future? IBM becomes a Relevant PC Platform Vendor Again
A secondary benefit that will occur by this merger is probably not so evident
but could have an even broader impact on Microsoft, VMware and others. It
revolves around IBM getting into the virtualization market. As announced
earlier this year, BigFix
and Neocleus have been collaborating on a partnership where client
virtualization is merged with systems management and security technologies to
create a new type of model, whereby the sytems & security agents
reside OUTSIDE the core operating system instance, in a completely secure
and protected operating system “stub”. When you couple this with the
work that Intel is doing with vPro and Active
Management Techology (AMT) , you end up with a completely new PC operating
platform where Intel vPro is the base, AMT becomes a malleable management
platform and IBM virtualization and management technologies sit on top, taking
advantage of the underlying Intel paltform. In this architecture,
the PC is no longer bound to the single OS instance. Windows becomes just
a guest operating system – used only for the few legacy applications that
require Win32 support. Over time, as more and more apps move to a web
or other model, the importance of this Windows instance becomes
diminshed.
Congratulations to Dave, Amrit, Philippe, Dennis, Greg and the rest of the
BigFix team. It should be a very fun period for them, and great
for customers, as this plays out.
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Posted by Bill Corrigan
June 6,
2010
By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management | Neocleus
I was invited to sit in on a Podcast with Dana Gardner of E-Commerce Times as
well as a few industry luminaries to discuss the future of the client. We
discussed a lot of the trends in client computing out there right now, and
client virtualization was one that seemed poised to disrupt the status quo
within the next few years. The discussion was quite spirited and I came
away even more excited that Neocleus and client virtualization will change the
way computing is done in the near future.
Here’s a copy of the article, transcript and a link to the podcast.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Time-for-Some-Client-Side-Disruption-70145.html?wlc=1275854769
Remember, virtually, ANYTHING is possible!
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Posted by VirtualizationGuy
May 1, 2010
By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management
The concept of Bring your Own PC (BYOPC) has been picking up steam over the
last year or so inside of the Enterprise community. The ability to utilize
an employee’s personally owned computer as both a work environment in parallel
with the personal space is seen as a way to lower the TCO for the business in
both CAPEX and OPEX. Client hypervisors offer the promise of fulfilling
the BYOPC vision since a user’s personal environment can now be a separate
entity from a secondary virtual machine that provides the locked down and
IT controlled work environment.
However, there are specific areas where issues can arise that the normal
approach to adding a hypervisor makes the BYOPC model difficult without the
proper approach. Neocleus has thought through these issues and made sure
that NeoSphere has addressed them in a unique and pragmatic way. (Click here to see a NeoSphere enabled BYOPC scenario).
- Enable Existing Personal Windows PCs – A personal
environment is just that, personal. It must be enabled without
destroying state or the user experience. In order for realistic
deployment to happen, the system must be upgraded in-place. The
NeoSphere installer allows a hypervisor, Virtual Runtime Environment and
secondary VM to be placed under an existing Windows installation, even if the
drive is software encrypted. It does so without requiring the P2V
conversion of the file system to a VHD or VMDK format. NTFS remains
intact. NeoSphere provides the ability to run VHDs and VMDKs, however it
is not a requirement.
- Support Device Diversity – Typically in a VM environment,
you need specialized drivers (emulated or paravirtualized) that work with the
hypervisor layer to empower devices. However, there are over 5 million
devices in the client world and most don’t even come with as much as a Linux
driver, let alone a hypervisor capable driver. The user needs to be able
to plug in any of these devices including random devices like that Wal-Mart
USB picture frame they got for Christmas from crazy Aunt Jenny who hears you
like “technology”. Neocleus is the only company to productize the
pass-through device model, allowing native Windows drivers to pass-through the
hypervisor and control the device directly, providing the greatest range of
diverse devices. Neocleus also supports emulation and PV for
flexibility.
- Maintain the Rich User Experience – Because NeoSphere
pass-through takes out the software context switch associated with emulation
and paravirtualized drivers, critical elements such as graphics performance
are maintained at native PC levels. Windows Aero and glass as well as
video performance, etc. are the same, maintaining the rich user experience
that Windows provides. Pass-through also guarantees that devices will
have a driver that will allow them to operate without having to search for a
special driver.
- Preserve OEM Support – Windows OS, applications and
devices must retain the ability to be serviced from the manufacturer without
voiding the support agreement. Through NeoSphere pass-through and
keeping the NTFS file system intact with our minimally invasive P2V process;
IT professionals and OEM support personnel can troubleshoot Windows OS,
application and device issues as they normally would if the NeoSphere platform
wasn’t present.
Neocleus NeoSphere is the only pragmatic solution to enable a BYOPC
environment!
Remember, VIRTUALLY anything is possible!
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Posted by VirtualizationGuy
April 19, 2010
By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management
Hello everyone. It’s been pretty crazy since our announcement of the
OEM with BigFix and we have been inundated with requests for overviews of the
NeoSphere platform. In order to help shortcut the fulfillment of these
requests (not to mention take the load off of some of us), we have created a new
“Learn More” section (found here) as part of our web
site. You’ll find white papers and other resources to help you
better understand the NeoSphere platform.
I have also posted a couple of new videos. One is the “Neocleus
Platform Overview Presentation and Demo” which offers a presentation
overview of the NeoSphere basics as well as a demo of the platform including VRE
installation, the pass-through device model, and an anti-virus executing outside
of Windows in the NeoSphere environment, capturing and quarantining a virus
inside of Windows. The second video is titled “Neocleus
NeoSphere Platform Demo Only” where you get the same demo, minus the
presentation.
Keep a look out for additional videos and white papers in the near
future.
Remember, VIRTUALLY, anything is possible!
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Posted by VirtualizationGuy
March 30, 2010
By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management
An article came across my email the other day titled “VMware, Citrix struggle
with bare metal hypervisor”. (Article can be seen here: http://ow.ly/1rbAp). The
biggest issue that was hampering the efforts was the device driver model, and I
can understand why this is a big issue.
One of the biggest misunderstandings in the market is that a client
hypervisor is simply a server hypervisor that is running on a client PC with
some bells and whistles for distributed management. This misperception
comes from many places but mainly because you can, in fact, run Hyper-V, XEN
Server or ESXi right on your laptop with a single Windows client instance and
have it essentially work. However, when we look at the practical
requirements of Enterprise computing, there are a wide range of use cases that
require specifically tailored configurations for local client computing, which a
client hypervisor is specifically designed to handle and a server hypervisor is
not. This is most clearly personified in the device driver model.
Server hypervisors interact with a finite and known set of devices.
Typically, servers have no requirement for a rich UI experience or multimedia
capabilities, let alone a monitor in its lid like a laptop. It also does
not have batteries and the power management concerns that accompany portable
computing, nor does a server typically sleep. Most importantly, the server
doesn’t have a random set of USB devices that connect to it and are expected to
simply work without special IT intervention. Device diversity and
performance are very big concerns when it comes to maintaining the rich user
experience of client computing. In most client hypervisors (as in server
hypervisors), there are typically two device driver models: emulation and
paravirtualization. However, Neocleus has productized a third model, known
as pass-through, which utilizes the native Windows device driver in conjunction
with the client hypervisor. This model is critical for reaching the
broadest set of client computing use cases in the Enterprise.
I put together a comparison white paper on the three device driver models and
how they can work independently or together so IT can reach their desktop
goals. It’s entitled “Client
Hypervisor Device Driver Overview” and can be found here.
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Posted by VirtualizationGuy
March
25, 2010
By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management
In the blog post entitled “Client Hypervisor Management: Evolution NOT Revolution”, I
went through a bit of the history of the server hypervisor and management.
When we looked deeper into the rise of the hypervisor in the data center, it
really wasn’t until the central management capabilities came to being that the
true management potential of hypervisors could be realized. However there
was an additional dimension to this story. Once an API was made available
to the hypervisor, a whole new realm of start-up companies came into being.
It was at this point that the next wave of innovation came to bear through a
number of start-up and established companies. Through these companies’
expression of their own management logic on top of the hypervisor, the
hypervisor platform benefits moved from hardware consolidation with a management
trade-off to a truly transformative management paradigm, despite being based on
a closed source hypervisor. The result was a tremendous rising tide that
floated many boats.
This unlikely “Band of Brothers”, although in competition for customer
dollars, produced and continues to produce an innovative wave in how the data
center is designed and managed. Now, with Microsoft pushing the hypervisor
to commoditization and Citrix XEN Server being open source, the benefit to IT in
the form of downward price pressure, with ever increasing capabilities,
continues to be a huge win for the customer.
When looking at the client PC, the industry is at the same inflection point.
There is tremendous management and security TCO reduction potential in
separating the management environment from the user application environment and
is the next logical progression for PC architectures. There are currently
only a handful of companies that are working on changing the fundamental
architecture of a PC through a client hypervisor. This new virtualization
“Band of Brothers” includes Neocleus, VMware, Citrix and Virtual Computer.
If we dig a little deeper though, you’ll find that VMware has been working
on CVP (which still remains to be seen), while Neocleus and Virtual Computer both use XEN, which is an open source project
managed by Citrix. Citrix also has their own XEN based open and closed
source client hypervisor projects called the XCI project.
The availability of the XEN hypervisor as an open source project has further
accelerated the ability for third parties to innovate on the PC Hypervisor and
more rapidly bring the next evolution in PC architecture to market in
unprecedented time when compared to their server counterparts. This
innovation path is already stretching to a party beyond the direct players with
the visionary BigFix, OEM’ing Neocleus NeoSphere (announcement seen here).
While each company might have a different vision for how management and
security logic is expressed, we all share this common vision that the client
based hypervisor will be the driving force that transforms PC architecture to
the next logical architectural evolution and will drive client side innovation
in a whole new dimension. It will be the combined ideas, perspectives and
approaches of these innovative companies, working together to build a strong XEN
client hypervisor foundation, which will drive this next great PC
evolution. In the end, a rising tide floats all boats and the customer
will be the real winner.
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Posted by VirtualizationGuy
March 24, 2010
By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management
Virtualization has forever changed the server room and it’s about to do the
same on the desktop. Whether it is virtualization in a macro context
(servers, storage, networks, desktops (VDI), Server Based Computing (SBC), etc.)
or in the microcosm of a single machine (user settings, registry, files,
applications (which has a fond place in this author’s heart)), virtualization
now plays a first order and indispensible role in providing the necessary
flexibility for next generation computing stacks. In the Enterprise data
center today, the question of “will I deploy a physical or virtual server?” is
almost non-existent. How else would a cloud be pragmatically possible
except through the coalescing of multiple virtualization technologies?
If we look back just 10 years ago, the data center was an immobile collection
of rack mounted servers, each with a specific purpose, chugging along at 10%
utilization. Then along came the hypervisor, forever changing the way IT
utilized servers. Dozens of physical servers could be consolidated to a
few boxes, but all was not bliss. Instead of looking at 25 pizza boxes and
knowing you had 25 servers, all of a sudden it was a black box where dozens of
inactive servers with a few active servers lived, all with unknown patch levels
that required an admin to touch a reduced number of physical boxes but actually
touch more servers due to the sprawl.
Yes, consolidated servers held tremendous benefit, however it wasn’t until
the central management capabilities and exposed API came to being around the
hypervisor that the true management potential of hypervisors could be
realized. Now, with Microsoft pushing the hypervisor to commoditization
and Citrix XEN Server being open source, the benefit to IT in the form of
downward price pressure, with ever increasing capabilities, continues to be a
huge win for the customer.
When looking at the client PC, the industry is at the same inflection point.
Although PC lifecycle management (PCLM) systems have reached an evolved
state, they are limited by the reliance on Windows to be managed from within
itself, either through a client or network available API (WSMAN, WMI, PowerShell
etc.); and rely on a mini-OS to be deployed before Windows itself can be
delivered. Due to these challenges, the Windows OS is being forced into
unnatural architectures, such as VDI, in hopes of alleviating some of the
challenges with deployment and management. However, VDI is falling into
niche status since the TCO results in OPEX and CAPEX are not materializing for a
broad set of desktop replacement use cases, despite many innovations and
improvements.
This means the timing is right to replay the hypervisor movie at the client
level. There is tremendous management and security TCO reduction potential
in separating the management environment from the user application environment
by applying virtualization directly to the client, and is the next logical
progression for PC architectures. However, client hypervisors alone, just
like their server counterparts, will not provide the management capabilities
needed to truly transform the desktop. The benefits in essentially
extending VDI principles to distributed clients (simplifying device driver
models, “golden image” OS deployment, disaster recovery, out of band management
of Windows, etc.) only occurs when the hypervisor is managed by a robust
centralized management system. The good news is that the majority of
Enterprises already have these in place in the form of the PCLM system.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, the future of PC management is bringing
together the client hypervisor with the existing PCLM system. This will
drive a new level of management capabilities. Neocleus has built the
platform to manifest this vision and we are already seeing adopters embrace it
such as BigFix (check out this Podcast with Amrit Williams, CTO of BigFix).
Just as the hypervisor is a standard on the server side and has moved to
commoditization, the client side hypervisor will most certainly follow the same
path in the future, but it will be the evolution of the existing PCLM that will
drive it. What if the PC came with a client hypervisor built in and
ready for subscription to the existing management system? The
possibilities could be endless…
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Posted by VirtualizationGuy
March 11, 2010
This week, Neocleus and BigFix announced
a joint collaboration where BigFix will embed
the NeoSphere client virtualization platform into the BigFix Unified
Management Platform.
As astute analysts such as Fred Broussard, Rachel
Chalmers,
Doug Brown and Brian Madden have pointed
out; this is a HUGE step forward for the industry. I don’t think it’s
hyperbolic to say that managing and securing your PC will never be the same
because of it. Why? Simple. This addresses the number one
reason for instability on the current PC - the operating system and
the fact that you are forced to manage it from within the OS itself. In
Windows today, there are anywhere from 8-50 software agents running all the time
trying to manage and secure the OS, applications, user state, etc.
as depicted in the diagram below. This creates problems for your
security and management systems because they are forced to compete for
resources at the hardware, OS and state levels. They are also
vulnerable to any attack or failure within Windows itself.
Current Windows Architecture, with Agents embedded in
the OS
In a terrific post
today, Amrit Williams, the BigFix CTO, explains why moving the PC management
and security system OUTSIDE of the core OS (in most cases Windows) into a
protected layer creates the next-generation “enlightened” systems management and
security tools. We couldn’t agree more and have created the NeoSphere
platform to allow ISVs such as BigFix a way to easily snap client
virtualization into their broader offerings. Our stance is that we are
good at client virtualization and have the strongest platform on the
market. We understand that others, such as BigFix, have excellent products
that customers have spent years deploying. So, the goal was to create
distruptive Type 1 Client Virtualization technology that didn’t disrupt
IT. The BigFix licensing deal and subsequent partnerships will help make
this a reality.
The "Enlightened" PC - Security, Management and Help
Desk Agents running outside the OS
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Posted by Bill Corrigan
June 11, 2009
Blue screens are not a rare commodity when working with virtualization. Most
of the times, full crash dumps do the trick, but sometimes live kernel debugging
is required. Hard disk related crashes that prevent memory dumping is a good
example where it is required, but there are times where it’s just easier to
follow the entire crash flow instead of just witnessing the final state.
Type 2 (hosted) virtualization usually comes with an easy solution. But type
1 (bare metal) virtualization, like Xen, complicates matters. Debugging must be
offloaded to a remote Windows machine. The common solution, it seems, is to
tunnel the hosted machine’s serial connection over TCP to another Windows
machine where WinDBG is running, waiting anxiously for a bug check. There are
many websites describing this setup in various component combinations. I have
gathered here all the tricks I could find plus some more of my own to streamline
the process and get rid of commercial software.
Lets dive into the nitty gritty little details, shall we?
Hosted Windows
Kernel debugging requires some boot parameters. Windows XP includes a utility
called bootcfg.exe that makes this easy.
bootcfg /copy /id 1 /d "kernel debug"
bootcfg /raw "/DEBUG
/DEBUGPORT=COM1" /id 2 /a
bootcfg /raw "/BAUDRATE=115200" /id 2 /a
bootcfg
/copy /id 2 /d "kernel debug w/ break"
bootcfg /raw "/BREAK" /id 3
/a
This assumes you have only one operation system configured in Windows boot
loader. If the boot loader menu shows up when Windows boots, you might need to
add the flags on your own to C:\boot.ini.
Xen Host
Windows will now try to access the serial port in search of a debugger. Xen’s
domain configuration file can be used to forward the serial port over TCP.
Locate your domain configuration file and add the following line. The
configuration files are usually located under /etc/xen.
serial='tcp::4444,server,nowait'
Debugger Machine
The server side is set and it’s time to move on to the client. As previously
mentioned, WinDBG doesn’t care for TCP. Instead of the usual TCP to RS-232
solution, named pipes are used here. I wrote a little application called
tcp2pipe (download available on the bottom) which simply pumps data between a
TCP socket and a named pipe. It takes three parameters – IP, port and named pipe
path. The IP address is the address of the Xen host and the port is 4444. For
named pipe path, use \\.\pipe\XYZ, where XYZ can be anything.
tcp2pipe.exe 192.168.0.5 4444 \\.\pipe\XYZ
All that is left now is to fire up WinDBG and connect it to \\.\pipe\XYZ.
This can be done from the menus, or from command line.
windbg -k com:pipe,port=\\.\pipe\XYZ
To make this even simpler, you can use kdbg.bat and pass it just the IP. It
assumes WinDBG.exe is installed in c:\progra~1\debugg~1. If that’s not the case,
you’ll have to modify it and point it to the right path.
tcp2pipe
Source code is included in zip file under public domain.
Download tcp2pipe.zip (mirror).
Happy debugging!
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