There are a handful of mainstream bloggers in the virtualization space that really “get it”. Brian Madden is in that handful. Sure, every once in a while I think he’s in left field but hey, maybe that’s where you have to play to catch a ball. It always takes different views of the world to make it go round.
Brian had a recent post on vClient – VMware’s upcoming bare-metal client hypervisor. This was announced at VMworld so no one is spilling the beans. Make sure to go read Brian’s article in full here. The main point that I think he hits on that vClient solves is the underlying OS in a VDI deployment.
“This is the exact problem that a Type 1 bare-metal client hypervisor can solve. In this scenario, there’s only one OS to manage.”
I’ve heard this question over and over again from clients – how do I manage the underlying OS on the client device in a VDI environment. You still have to patch the thing and license it and virus scan it. I’ve seen a lot of customers trying to turn their PCs into thin clients using a Linux install. There are other 3rd party solutions out there as well such as ThinLaunch. VMware’s vision is to simply have this built in as part of the hardware. This lets you take the main job of the operating system (abstracting the hardware from the Apps) out of the picture. If you have a truly universal abstraction layer in place then you get to what I call the “I don’t care” state. You don’t care what client is out there. You don’t care what OS is running where. You simply have an application with some data that you want to get to the client. Now you can truly write your app once to run in a VM and deploy it anywhere. That was the promise of Java and .Net that can now be realized with the help of virtual machines.
So to sum it up vClient is really about “I don’t care”. Remember those 3 words – you’ll hear them a lot more from me as time goes along and I explain some other VMworld announcements.
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