Virtualization coming to desktops

By Kevin Tolly, Network World, 05/29/06

 Start a discussion    Print article

 Comments (1)    Print article

Whether you like it or not, if you are at all involved with selecting the corporate desktop, you are going to have to deal with virtualization. Intel's recent announcement of its vPRO and its attendant publicity campaign will make sure of that.

It's not that virtualization isn't valuable, but its status as buzzword of the moment and its use across areas as disparate as desktops, servers and storage has unfortunately made the word devoid of almost any meaning when used on its own.

Virtualization usually refers to creating an environment that appears one way to users but is something else altogether in physical reality. Storage vendors talk of virtual tape in which programs behave like they are performing input/output operations on a tape, but the data is actually being written to disk or some other physical media.

For desktops and servers, the term typically refers to running multiple logical machines on a single physical desktop or server. In many ways this is similar to what Citrix offers with its Presentation Server, which virtualizes the desktop any application using its specialized version of the Windows Server operating system.

For all the hype the term is getting, virtualization is not new. IBM released its Virtual Machine/370 (VM/370) in August 1972 (IBM's history of VM) after having used it for internal operating system development for some years. Like today's offerings, it lets you boot a real operating system that talks directly to the hardware and offers a virtualized view of the same hardware to one or more guest operating systems booted under it.

That is one of the ways that we can virtualize desktop machines today. Running a system such as VMWare essentially implements IBM's concept on today's desktop.

However, that is not what Intel's vPRO is getting at. While I admit that it is not completely clear to me, it seems to be based on using Intel's virtualization technology and, specifically, its dual-core CPUs to do in hardware what the VMWare solution implements in software.

Featured Whitepapers

LinuxCast Listen to the latest Linux news.

About Us | Contact Us | Advertising Info | Terms of Service/Privacy

Copyright, 2006-2007 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.