Neocleus announced that it has completed more than 18 months of work to enhance the Xen hypervisor to work on endpoints such as desktops and laptops. Neocleus will contribute these enhancements to the open source community to accelerate the adoption and development of a new generation of enterprise endpoint solutions.

To create the hypervisor, Neocleus enhanced the Xen Open Source server-oriented hypervisor and transformed it into an endpoint-oriented hypervisor. Whereby current hypervisors provide distinct benefits for server consolidation and desktop virtualization specifically within the data center, Neocleus has enhanced and modified the Xen code to address endpoint requirements. These include the need for a graphical interface, a diversity of connectivity and compatibility options, easy installation processes, security and performance specifically for the end user.

“Current desktop and laptop virtualization solutions rely on an underlying or “host” operating environment to operate. As such, these solutions are susceptible to the same limitations and pitfalls that befall the host operating environment and do not really address both end-user and IT needs,” said Etay Bogner, co-founder and CTO, Neocleus. “The Neocleus enhancements deliver a Type 1 hypervisor that works natively on the “bare metal” providing a virtualization solution that truly takes into account the needs of both IT and end users. Our approach empowers organizations to operate trusted virtual environments outside of and side by side with an underlying operating environment such as Windows, resulting in distinct performance, security and control benefits that were previously unattainable.”

Neocleus augments the hypervisor with a framework that includes the necessary application programming interfaces (APIs) to meet compatibility, usability, performance and scalability requirements. The APIs define how system resources can be allocated to separate virtual environments so that specific IT tasks can operate outside of Windows. This framework defines programming requirements in such a way that overall application performance is not impacted, the end-user experience is not hindered, endpoint IT control is increased and security concerns are addressed. The company will contribute this code to the open source community to allow software developers to enhance it as well as focus on building high-performance applications without having to worry about the underlying architecture.

“It is clearly in the best interest of the industry to collaborate and accelerate the delivery of a single uniform endpoint hypervisor that satisfies the many endpoint use cases that all types of organizations employ,” said Ariel Gorfung, co-founder and CEO, Neocleus. “Our contribution of an endpoint-oriented hypervisor and framework to the open source community will allow the community to further extend the value of virtualization across the distributed enterprise. “