Virtual Computer, the market leader in distributed desktop virtualization, have announced a new pricing model to enable corporate IT teams, VARs, and PC enthusiasts to use VirtualComputer’s complete NxTop product suite for free. The free version allows you to manage up to five PCs without any licensing fees or time-based evaluation restrictions.
With a bare metal hypervisor on a client device you can make use of centralization technologies to reduce management costs of your infrastructure – while at the same time being less dependent on binding the operating system to the device directly. As we mentioned back in May, Citrix have released XenClient – their client-side hypervisor offering. While a very popular download, many have found that the Release Candidate’s hardware compatibility list is too restrictive and the lack of management means that it is not yet viable as a deployable solution to users.
NxTop on the other hand has a far greater hardware compatibility list, including support for newer Intel vPro enabled systems as well as a wide array of corporate workhorse models dating back to early 2007. This wider hardware list will mean that you’re more likely to have a device that can run the NxTop client component allowing you the opportunity to better understand how client side hypervisors could be implemented in your environment. NxTop’s management interface is comprehensive – allowing you to the ability not only to create hosts with a new image, but to migrate existing images into a client-side hypervisor environment as well as manage user data and deploy applications – although bear in mind the management interface requires that you have a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V service available.
The free download is available at http://www.virtualcomputer.com/download.
For full information on this announcement follow this link