VMware and Citrix Make Virtualization Mobile: What it Means to You

CIO — If the rise of cloud computing and the buzz about VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, discussed in a recent blog posting here ) haven't demonstrated that virtualization is exploding well beyond its back-room origins, two announcements last week hammered home the point. VMware and Citrix, two of the three largest virtualization vendors, announced initiatives to move virtualization all the way to the mobile device—just think, virtualization in your hand!

VMware's announcement was intriguing. The company purchased a small virtualization software provider called Trango a month or so ago and then last week announced it would ship a bare-metal hypervisor for ARM-powered devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. There is a lot of promise in this; most phones that seek to allow end user customization have to use multiple chipsets: one for end-user modifiable software, and the other for software controlling mechanisms that must not be modified by end users, e.g., the software controlling the phone's radio's frequency and power. While a multiple chip solution works, it obviously increases costs and—crucially—power draw.

Now VMware is talking about putting a hypervisor on a single chip and segregating two operating systems, one for system-specific software and one for end-user software. Even more intriguing, I saw some discussion about the announcement by someone at VMware, who posited that users might have a personal OS (actually, it was referred to as a "persona," which is jargon for individual) which would migrate from device to device. Imagine, no having to enter your contacts anew for every phone or trying to get some clunky synchronization software to work properly! This "persona" notion is intriguing because it would represent a real break from today's mobile world, where you're pretty much tied to whatever phone you happen to have: change phone and/or carrier, and everything gets tossed. It's real lock-in.

Expect to see a love-hate response from both device manufacturers and network operators. Their cooperation with this technology is crucial, because it can't be installed without their commitment. On the other hand, the telco industry is famous (or infamous) for resisting openness. So, they'd love it for reducing the costs and making their life simpler, but hate it for reducing their control (unlike most industries, the mobile industry often refers to having a billing relationship with a user as "owning the customer," which should tell you a lot about their worldview). Allowing individuals to control their own phone operating environment would denigrate the providers to commodity status, which no one likes.

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