Be Still, My Beating Heart!

Although VMworld is done, more cool stuff keeps pouring in.

For those of us who love personal communication gadgets, this is not to be missed!

It's VMware MVP virtualizing Windows CE and Android on a Nokia side-by-side.  You just have to see the video to believe this ...

But there's more to this than just a pure geek rush ...

What Does The Mean For Enterprise IT?

How many of us have a "corporate laptop" that's configured and supported to IT's wishes, rather than our own? 

Or perhaps you've got a "corporate supported" mobile device?

Either way, there's two inherent limitations with this model:

• IT spends a ton of money and effort in selecting devices, testing devices, configuring devices, supporting devices -- and putting up with cranky users.
  
• We, as knowledge users, don't get the freedom to use the devices (or the working environment!) that *we* prefer to use.

As an example, I travel with a Macbook Air.  It's light and small.  It runs a VM of EMC's official desktop image.  And I'm not the only one.

Shouldn't IT just be in the business of providing a 'standard user image" in a VM?  And as vClient technology evolves this year, shouldn't this image just "inflate" on whatever device happens to be invoked?  And be able to run off the net in a cached mode?  And resynchronize when a network appears?

Enterprise IT would have a choice: provide desktop devices, or not, or any mix.  Users would have new choices as well.  

If you think in terms of "private clouds" like I do, this is the user endpoint we all could live with, isn't it?

The VMware revolution continues. 

And it's scary cool to see it running on a smartphone.

Comments

[Scott Barneson]

Another benefit is you can now allow IT to "lock down" the corporate image being delivered to your mobile device for even greater security. Increasingly important now that "app stores" exist for most major platforms...I'm sure IT would feel better knowing their precious data is insulated.

I've had a chance to play with a few of the MVP devices (albeit before they were VMware) and walked away amazed. Glad this landed in the EMC family!

[Martin G]

As many corporates already have standard desktop builds; I would agree that this would be a great approach but there are some issues to be dealt with first.

For example, I would love to be able to simply use my MacBook at work and have the work standard XP environment available to me as a virtual machine but it doesn't get away from the fact that I would still have my machine on the corporate network with all the nasties that I might run on it.

The poor security guys already have enough problems.

But I have been saying for quite a while, virtualisation /= consolidation or does not have to. Virtualisation can equal standardisation and provides a HAL which could enable true commoditisation.

[Ian M]

To Martin G's comment. If the office LAN is treated as an insecure zone and all corporate data is behind security boundaries, the virtual machine build can then include a VPN client that is used to create a tunnel into the secure environment and the delivery of the desktop as a virtual machine image and be done in a secure fashion.

[Chuck Hollis]

Agreed!