Citrix takes bare-metal hypervisor to PCs

On Wednesday, Citrix Systems kicked out XenClient, a bare-metal (or type 1 in virt lingo) hypervisor aimed at desktop and laptop PCs, perhaps in an attempt to steal a little thunder from VMware and its upcoming VMware View 4.5 virtual desktop infrastructure software, expected to be announced at the VMworld conference in San …

[Tim Bates]

Sounds nice

It sounds like exactly what I've wanted to be able to do for ages. Pity you need a Intel CPU.

[b166er]

Alt-Tab

So, does this let us switch between windows and linux desktops with ease?

[Leeroy]

Sounds backwards.

I thought we were all moving to "THE CLOUD" ie lower power devices and more power in the server room. This sounds totally backwards for a laptop especially as running a hypervisor will increase power usage and reduce battery time, if the partition is encrypted even more so.

Citrix presentation server was a POS but this seems like using VM's because you can and not because its the best way of doing it.

[Anonymous Coward]

agree

Please to furnish list exactly who is asking for this...

[Tom Maddox]

View

View has supported offline desktops since version 3, so I'm not sure why the article claims that this is a "new" feature in 4.5. In any case, where VMware needs to focus their efforts with View is in making the damn thing stable and reliable. It has enough features; they just need to work reliably!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bare metal HYPErvisor

Look guys, there's no such thing as a bare metal hypervisor.

Any so called bare metal hypervisor is just a subset of an OS, with all the device drivers for the supported hardware, and the device-independent kernel and such. Then add all the necessary support and qualification infrastructure (and costs) that goes with it when it's in a mission-critical shop. All it's missing vs the usual server or desktop OS is a prettified GUI layer, but what it has in addition to the usual OS kernel (and no apps) is all the enterprise-class stuff for distributed manageability. The cost of that should have been obvious to anyone with clue right from day one. But there aren't many people with clue.

Why would anyone but a fashion victim want to put yet another OS layer underneath whatever OS the apps already need...

It's a funny old world.

In fact didn't VMware already get done for abuse of GPL? Using Linux for the underlying OS and VNC for the remote frame buffer and and and... still, if you can get rich by rebadging free software, why not, eh?

[Tom Maddox]

You don't get it

I'll assume you haven't really used virtualization, since you entirely miss the point of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

"You don't get it"

You get to introduce VMware's bugs as well as everyone else's, and VMware's costs as well as everyone else's. Who's not getting what?

There must be benefits that outweigh the costs otherwise VMware wouldn't have spread like the [whatever].

Perhaps someone could put a couple of paragraphs together to explain the business benefits they've enjoyed (not cut+pasted direct from a VMware website). After all, people routinely do that kind of thing before **and after** spending significant quantities of their employers' money, don't they?

IT people don't make something "strategic" (to the extent that if it doesn't run under VMware it isn't permitted and therefore cannot have been necessary) without having proper business justification, and then reviewing the actuals vs the plans afterwards, do they?

[Anonymous Coward]

amazed if you can say all this with a straight face -

"IT people don't make something "**strategic" (to the extent that if it doesn't run under VMware it isn't permitted and therefore cannot have been necessary) without having proper business justification, and then reviewing the actuals vs the plans afterwards, do they?"

**...depends how far up the 'useless' (management) tree the decision came from

Don't hold your breath for the before+after, especially if you're looking for real ROI numbers... soft HR nonsense you can get in spades, tho'...

[Michael Shaw]

Virtualisation - why I use it...

In my case there are two areas that i use virtualisation on a laptop. One situation is for experimental / research / untrusted stuff where i can run the task in its own OS, iosolate the risks from it disrupting my ability to work on other projects.

The second situation is for isolating project tool chains. having a VM machine for each customers environment mean that i can use the same tools as the customer without interfering with other customers work environments. I can also archive work environments so that when i get a support call 6 months later, i spend 15 minutes unzipping and powering up the work environment rather than a couple of days trying to cope with tool changes.

At the moment, i have to do this using vmware workstation, but a low level hypervisor has the advantage of preventing the host OS being used in an unmanaged way. With enough memory, I have found virtualisation to generally be good enough for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Michael - thanks but I do that for free with VMware player

Thanks for that Michael.

I already do similar things (I'm in a development+support role at work, and tinkerer at home) and right now I do them with VMware Player (cost to buy: zero). VMware Workstation might buy me something but IT won't buy me it, so I get by.

There are doubtless quite a few other tinkerers around doing similar things at work as well as at home, but surely these are not the mass market high volume rollout that are going to continue to make VMware shareholders rich? I'm looking for the business benefits of a *volume rollout*. And not seeing them yet.