I posted the following on my personal blog at work which is restricted. Posting here since it seems to have sparked some interest.
—-
I want virtualization ON the desktop. This is not about the common view of desktop virtualization where the desktop experience is presented to end users and the process is run on a server platform in a data center. I’m talking about real virtualization on my physical desktop machine. I normally run several virtual machines for different tasks using VMware Workstation. In doing so, I need a host OS to run Workstation and that OS needs to be patched and virus protected. Each VM must be launched from that host OS so I’m forced to always consume resources for that host OS. Each VM must also be patched and virus protected. So in order to run a VM for a task, I must have two instances of an OS running and two instances of virus protection running. This works and is a wonderful solution to some problems, however it is very wasteful of system resources.
- I want my laptop to boot directly into a hypervisor and be able to choose what VMs I want to launch.
- I want virus protection to run in a privileged and specialized VM with access to the hypervisor (think VMsafe) and protect all my VMs, at the same time, with one instance.
- I don’t want to be bound by a host OS that must always be running in order to access other VMs.
- I want to get memory savings across VMs if they happen to be running the same OS (duplicate memory pages).
- I want to be able to move an entire application from one VM to another, with all its settings, as easily as I could in the DOS days of copying a folder.
- I want the hypervisor shipped on my laptop.
- I want application virtualization to be the norm in how applications are delivered/packaged.
- I want my PC upgrade experience to be simply migrating my VM from one computer to another. At system boot, new hardware features would be available.
- I want to have a single instance of an OS on my laptop (one place that needs patching) and I want to be able to launch multiple sessions off that instance where different applications can be streamed down to.
In thinking of current desktop virtualization solutions, the virtual desktop is not mobile in the sense it cannot be run off-line. Now think about having a hypervisor on a laptop and being able to sync a copy of a VM that is running on the data center to the local disk on the laptop and allow the user to go into ‘off-line’ mode where changes are stored locally (think snapshot delta file). Then when they reconnect, the changes are synced back to the VDI (think deleting a snapshot).
Think about having a hypervisor on the desktop and being able to plug in a USB key with a VM on it and boot it up without installing any software and not requiring any host OS.
I know some of this can be done today with current solutions, and some of it is planned. With Intel planning quad-core processors for laptops, virtualization ON the desktop is going to become more interesting. Vendors are working to solve what they see as today’s computing problems, I just hope they don’t forget about the mobile desktop experience.
—-
One of the internal comments suggested Moka5 as a possible option. I looked at their BareMetal product and I’m interested. Let me know if you of any other products that can fit the bill as described above.