Somewhere out there!

VMware, XenSource, and the future of virtualisation

The XenSource acquisition opens up the possibility that virtualisation, under Citrix sponsorship, will shift into delivering full desktops–a combination of an operating system and user application set–as virtual machines that are refreshed frequently. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, say Citrix officials, that one day such virtual machines will follow mobile workers around via the Internet, converting any available PC into a personal desktop. Virtualisation so far has been mostly a consolidation play in the data center or in the developer’s test bed, where one piece of hardware can be virtualized into several different test environments.

It is interesting in the context of the above comment that an original goal of the Xen project was global mobile computing. Maybe the XenSource-Citrix link isn’t so complicated after all, and driven by strong vision on both sides.