On early December I suggested the idea of moving my everyday workstation on a virtual machine.
Even before, on September, I talked about an eventual upcoming portable environment based on the new U3 USB technology and virtualization.
I still believe this could be our future sometimes soon, but IBM Research seems to believe so even stronger.
On summer 2004 the IBM Research department produced an interesting project called SoulPads.
A SoulPad is a 2.0 USB portable device carrying a complete software stack with an autoconfiguration host OS (like modern Linux LiveCDs), a virtualization software and your everyday workstation in a virtual machine.
When you put your SoulPad in a new computer it starts the autoconfigurating host OS, runs the virtualization software and powers on your VM.
When you try to remove the SoulPad the VM is suspended and becomes ready to be resumed on any other machine you’ll move.
The great paper won the Best Paper Award at MobiSys 2005 and you should read it.
Also take a look at the IBM SoulPad video demo: low res and high res.