Virtualisation: Forget datacenters, think ordinary people

The era in which virtualisation directly affects ordinary people, not just those responsible for corporate datacentres, is on its way.

The company in the forefront of the technology, VMware, an EMC subsidiary, drew 12,488 people to its VMworld conference this 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.

What is virtualisation? Simply put, it 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's 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 got its start on PCs. Virtualisation proved useful, for example, for developers who wanted to switch rapidly among different versions of an operating system to test their software or different versions of a browser to test their web pages.

But 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 a 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 corporate IT people to grind their teeth.

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 actually 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. So an employee's corporate PC could actually be housed at the corporate and piped over the net to wherever the employee happens to be.

VMware's View demonstration featured graphics acceleration using Microsoft's DirectX 3D graphics and full-motion video - albeit with some jerkiness. Hardware support in newer Intel and AMD processors also speeds virtualisation performance.

VMware View is the latest twist on a technology called thin client computing. That approach has found a solid niche in some large businesses but has never caught on widely. In my opinion, though, the greater challenge comes from an entirely different way of attaining the same centralised goals: cloud computing.

Cloud computing, in which applications run over the web in web browsers rather than natively on PCs, provides another way to provide access to corporate resources. It can't do everything but it's gradually maturing as a way to run software. And it has the advantage of requiring only a modern browser rather than VMware's software.

VMware showed Google's Android system running on a Windows CE mobile phone through VMware virtualisation software (photo credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Virtual phones
At VMworld, CTO Stephen Herrod and Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of emerging markets, also demonstrated virtualisation on a mobile phone. Specifically, they showed a mobile phone using Windows CE 6.0 run Google's Android operating system, too.

"Why not virtualise the phone itself?" Herrod asked. "It's really becoming more of a mobile personal computer."

But why bother? VMware has two arguments...