VMware announced the client edition of its hypervisor in September 2008. Dubbed Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), the product’s launch was planned somewhere in Q4 2009 but, like its competitor Citrix, VMware missed its own deadline.
In September 2009 the company updated the roadmap, suggesting that CVP won’t arrive before H1 2010.
In March VMware postponed the release again, this time to the end of 2010.
Now, in a new interview with a company executive, it seems that VMware is no more committed to any specific date. This either means that CVP is finally ready and the vendor wants to surprise its competitors, or that the technical challenge is more significant than expected and the vendor doesn’t see the project as a priority anymore to justify additional investments on it.
Meanwhile, the company radically changed its message about the benefits of a client hypervisor to achieve the so called offline VDI.
The upcoming release of View 4.5, delayed multiple times too, will introduce an alternative based on the Workstation engine, the VMware’s hosted virtualization platform for the consumer market.
For years VMware advocated the competitive advantage of type-1 virtual machine monitors (the bare-metal platforms or hypervisors) over type-2 VMMs (the hosted platforms).
In the early days the company used to have both for server virtualization: a type-1 VMM, ESX Server, and a type-2 VMM, GSX Server. But the over the years the R&D investment solely focused on the former, pushing VMware to release GSX Server (renamed just Server) for free first and then to dismantle it.
Indeed, type-1 VMMs are better suited for server consolidation and all major virtualization players are primarily focused on hypervisors, except Red Hat, which is betting on KVM.
If VMware now wants to say that type-2 VMMs are better suited for client-side virtualization, the very first competitor to benefit from it will be precisely Red Hat.