BigFix Pushes Desktop Virtualization

Neocleus is a provider of a Type 1 hypervisor implementation of a virtual machine for client systems, called NeoSphere, that is based on Xen open source virtual machine software. As a Type 1 hypervisor, the Neocleus software runs on top of the hardware, rather than the operating system. That approach then allows customers to deploy any operating system environment or third-party virtual machine from multiple vendors on top of the Type 1 hypervisor from Neocleus.

According to BigFix CTO Amrit Williams, this approach allows BigFix to leverage its management platform for heterogeneous client systems without requiring customers to opt for a VMware, Microsoft or Citrix-specific approach virtualization. Instead, virtual machine software from any vendor runs in the NeoSphere Virtual Runtime Environments (VRE). That capability, he said, is going to be especially important because none of the major desktop virtualization offerings are likely to dominate the market, which means customers will need an efficient approach to manage diverse virtual machine deployments from multiple manufacturers.

The other major benefit to the Neocleus approach, said Williams, is that it is designed to pass through calls directly to graphics cards, which means virtualization software no longer gets in the way of applications that need access to high-performance graphics cards.