Virtualisation gets ready for the mainstream
Published: 07 Sep 2009 17:13 BST
Virtualisation is a hot topic in the IT industry, to be found in every new processor, every datacentre and on every roadmap. But if the average person on the street has even heard of virtualisation, the idea probably left little impression beyond something to do with running corporate datacentres packed with computing hardware.
However, the era in which virtualisation directly affects ordinary people is on its way.
The company in the forefront of the technology, EMC subsidiary VMware, drew 12,488 people to its VMworld conference in San Francisco last week, and one theme of the show was the growing push to move the technology beyond the server realm. Initially that means PCs, but the company demonstrated its technology on mobile phones, too.
Simply put, virtualisation lets a single computer run multiple operating systems at the same time in compartments called virtual machines. Each instance of an operating system runs on a virtualisation layer rather than on the actual computer hardware. The company in charge of that foundational layer has tremendous power in the computing industry.
VMware has competition from Citrix, Red Hat, Microsoft and others, but for now its head start, corporate alliances and solid technology give it a lead in the market.
Most of VMware's business comes from virtualising servers, which lets companies replace a host of largely idle machines with one that is running full tilt, but the company is working to expand into many new markets.
Employee-owned IT
Before it met its present success in the server market, VMware started out on PCs.
Virtualisation proved useful, for example, for developers who wanted to switch rapidly between different versions of an operating system to test their software, or different versions of a browser to test their web pages. VMware can also help people run Windows, Linux and Mac OS X on the same machine — but these are obviously not mainstream needs.
As VMware sees it, virtualisation could become more widely used as a way to smooth the differences between people's own computer preferences and their employers' needs.
In the 'employee-owned IT' vision, virtualisation could let people put a corporate-managed virtual machine on an personal computer. The corporate partition would run only company-approved applications and could connect to the company network; the personal half could run the chaos of other programs that cause headaches for corporate IT people.
VMware has a technology — formerly called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and now sporting the more palatable name of VMware View — that also could fit into this idea. With it, the brains of a PC run on a central server, with a person's local machine serving as a mechanism to show the display and capture mouse clicks and keystrokes.
As a result, an employee's corporate PC could be housed at the corporate datacentre and piped over the net to wherever the employee happens to be.
VMware View is the latest twist on a technology called thin-client computing. That approach has found a solid niche in some large businesses...
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