Breaking Down the Client Hypervisor
Brian Madden has a fascinating
post up about VMware's upcoming
bare-metal client hypervisor. Few details have yet been released about
it, and Brian does a great job examining all the various angles.
Not
much was released about the client hypervisor at VMworld, and VMware has
been tight-lipped about development -- CTO Stephen Herrod made a quick
mention of it during his Wednesday keynote, but no shipping date has been
announced, and we don't know much more about it than the project
exists.
Still, it's hard not to get excited about the potential of a
bare-metal client hypervisor. As Brian points out in his
article:
There are several advantages to running a
hypervisor on a client device:
- The hypervisor
provides generic hardware to the VM, so a single disk image can be used on
very different types of devices.
- Since the VM is
running locally, it works offline, and you don't have to worry about thin
client remote display protocol
At VMworld,
I talked to a VMware employee and he said that the client hypervisor will
not be based on ESX or ESXi, VMware's server hypervisors. The requirements
are just too different, he said, when you factor in client requirements like
graphics, video and other multimedia.
It's interesting that no other
vendors have discussed a Type I client hypervisor yet (that doesn't mean
Microsoft, Citrix and so on aren't working on one -- just that they haven't
released any information about it), given the obvious benefits. Now that
VMware has broken the ice, however, I predict we'll see similar
announcements coming soon from the others -- there's still a lot of "me too"
announcements in the industry, and they mostly follow VMware's lead.
Posted by Keith Ward on 10/13/2008 at 12:48 PM