Interop: VMware To Bring Virtualization To Smartphones

At Interop Las Vegas 2009, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod said the mobile phone is becoming a more necessary business tool, making it nearly as important as the desktop.

"The evolution of the mobile phone is that it's become a mobile computer," Herrod said during his keynote presentation.

With that in mind, Herrod revealed that VMware is working on virtualization on smartphones with its VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform.

Essentially, VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform will create a virtual machine for the smartphone and unlock the ability to move it to different phones.

Herrod said the ability to move applications and operating systems virtually between phones will enable users who lose or damage phones to download it back and have access to the applications and data they had before.

The idea of virtualization on smartphones also opens up the ability for separating different virtual machines on one smartphone.

While Herrod noted "we're very early on" in smartphone virtualization, the company is working to extend it to extremely mobile devices for anytime access to critical data and applications.

A mobile phone virtualization platform would fall in line with VMware's other virtualization offerings, which include virtualization tools to consolidate servers and desktops.

Herrod also discussed VMware's overall vision of virtualization and cloud computing, highlighting how VMware has grown from being just a server virtualization player and reaching into the network, desktop and other infrastructure areas.

Herrod also highlighted VMware's vSphere version 4 offering, which was released earlier this month. According to Herrod, vSphere 4, its cloud operating system, is the next step in computing. The solution lets customers bring cloud computing into their infrastructures, ultimately reducing capital and operating costs.

vSphere 4 is built on VMware's virtualization platform to build the foundation for internal and external clouds and uses federation and standards to bridge cloud infrastructures, ultimately creating a secure private cloud.

Herrod said vSphere can cut capital and operating costs up to 50 percent for all applications, while also automating quality of service and staying independent of hardware, operating system, application stack or service provider.