Linux startup moves desktop Windows to the data center

Qumranet is well-known for kernel software, and today we find out what they do for a living: desktop virtualization.

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 09/24/07

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Qumranet, the company behind one of the hottest Linux kernel features, is scheduled to announce its first product, a new desktop virtualization system, offering today at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego. Qumranet's Solid ICE product moves desktop users' Linux or Microsoft Windows installs onto virtual machines in the data center, allowing the users to run their applications and OS of choice from thin clients or from Windows or Linux PC clients. Unlike VMWare's ESX server, the Solid ICE server runs on a host with a standard Linux distribution from Red Hat, Novell, or Canonical.

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The company already has five Fortune 1000 customers participating in an early adopter program, says John-Marc Clark, the company's VP of Marketing.

Qumranet offers a physical to virtual (P2V) tool for converting a customer's physical OS images to virtual machine templates, says Rami Tamir, the company's President, VP of R&D, and co-founder. The company offers a remote desktop protocol it calls SPICE, which Tamir says is suitable for use over a LAN and supports high-bandwidth uses such as bidirectional audio and video. Solid ICE also supports RDP for lower-bandwidth links, but Tamir recommends "remote presence" —moving a running guest machine from its original server to one closer to the user. Solid ICE does not have support for offline use independent of the server.

The number of users per server is limited by available memory, Tamir says. "we are typically quoting from 5 to 10 users per core," he says, but the number could go up or down depending on applications. Solid ICE "oversubscribes" the server's memory by 40%, so a server with 10GB of RAM could accomodate 14GB of guests. Qumranet's management interface allows for guest systems to migrate transparently from host to host to balance the load.

In the Solid ICE client interface, users can browse a selection of virtual machines and start the ones with the applications they need. Client systems may be Linux or Microsoft Windows PCs, thin clients, or, for customers who want to convert old PCs to lightweight systems, Linux machines running Qumranet's "miniOS." miniOS is just enough to get the Solid ICE session started and let the user launch his or her virtual system.

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