virtualization.info

As virtualization.info reported multiple times, VMware recently decided to appoint a second CTO to focus exclusively on desktop virtualization.
His business unit should include:

• the VDI connection broker View (acquired from Propero in 2007)
• the technologies OEM’ed from ThinPrint in 2007 (for remote printing), Wyse Technology in 2008 (for RDP acceleration) and RTO Software in 2009 (for persona management)
• the application virtualization platform ThinApp (acquired from Thinstall in 2008)
• the upcoming high-performance remote desktop protocol PCoIP (co-developed with Teradici since 2008)
• the upcoming hypervisor for embedded devices Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP, acquired from Trango in 2008)
• the upcoming client hypervisor Client Virtualization Platform (CVP, which will probably include the technologies acquired from Tungsten Graphics in 2008)

The mission to glue together such amazing amount of technologies, coming from completely different companies for culture and development style, is now in the hands of Scott Davis, who spent more than two years at VMware as Chief Data Center Architect and was, before that, the President and CTO at Virtual Iron.

In the last few weeks Brian Madden, and others, questioned the VMware capability to understand and be relevant in the desktop virtualization space.

Davis answers (ah! the beauty of this blog-centric era) on his new corporate blog:

…VMware’s vision for client or desktop computing is to use virtualization technologies to encapsulate and isolate all the aspects of the desktop. Make each aspect independently manageable, duplicate-able, recreate-able.  Employee-Owned IT? Separate into different virtual machines. Lost, broken or obsolete device? Throw it away, the VM is preserved in the data center and can be redeployed at will. 

I want the freedom that comes with complete separation between my physical devices and all my software. I want device independence; my applications, my data, my personality dynamically composited and encapsulated executing on the optimal device(s) for my  current time and location.  That may mean collocating layers on the same device or distributing across multiple systems. I want isolation; my personal and professional applications, run-time and data isolated and encapsulated, accessible via the internet, mobile devices, thin and thick clients. With client virtualization I want the display, the computes and the storage intelligently and automatically placed – sometimes its’ better to execute the workload in the data center and virtualize the graphics to a client. Other times, I want to take the whole workload with me and run it on a laptop. Or something in between. And why stop there? We’re also doing best of breed virtualization for isolation and encapsulation between all relevant boundaries – that’s why we have ThinApp for application virtualization and continue to invest in advancing that technology. And why we announced at VMworld our relationship with RTO to make use of their profile caching and replication technology in our solutions. And why we partner with Teradici to jointly bring solutions to market based on the best in class remote graphics protocol designed explicitly for virtualized desktops.  And there’s a lot more coming!…

The VMware marketing now calls this User-Centric Computing.

How to get there? First of all by easing the pain of enterprises that have to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7:

And with the Windows 7 refresh looming, this is the ideal time to make the break to virtualized clients. Rapid provisioning, desktop style. Replacing obsolete or lost devices. Painlessly. Upgrading any individual component part, be it hardware or software, without down time or outage. Reduced Complexity. Desktops have gotten burdened with greater and greater complexity, as anyone trying to figure out why their Windows system runs slower and slower will attest. Hey, I’ve built operating systems software and even I get stuck!

Are you satisfied Brian?