VMware updates VMworld attendees on the future of mobile virtualization

Ask anyone who attended VMworld 2009 and they will certainly tell you that the world we live in is quickly becoming virtual in so many ways. At the same time, we’re also very much a mobile world. So doesn’t it make sense to marry these two worlds?

While I think VMware will agree with that, mobile virtualization still isn’t top of mind for the virtual giant these days, nor was it during this year’s VMworld show. During the event, mobile virtualization was but a tiny sliver in the large and varied breakout listings. There were only three sessions focusing on this emerging technology:

• Virtualization on mobile phones? Why do I need that?
• An Insider’s View of Mobile Phone Virtualization
• vCenter Mobile Access — Managing Virtual Infrastructure From Your Phone

[ New feature lets VMware manage virtual machines from mobile phones | Keep up with the latest virtualization news with InfoWorld’s virtualization newsletter and virtualization channel. ]

Mobile virtualization did, however, make its way to the big stage this year. During the keynote session on day two of VMworld, VMware made a quick attempt at introducing the company’s mobile strategy. VMware CTO Steve Herrod discussed the various ways in which VMware was enabling virtualization within mobile devices.

It is clear that VMware now wants to provide easy management for the virtual datacenter, and one of the ways it plans on doing this is by leveraging the mobile device. During the keynote, VMware talked about one internal product that would deliver on this strategy: vCenter Mobile Administrator. The company also talked about VMware View iPhone clients that have been approved, such as the one from Wyse called Wyse PocketCloud.

But it was VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) that really raised a few eyebrows and got the VMworld keynote audience interested in what was happening on stage.

The mobile phone is no longer about just making phone calls — that seems so 2000, doesn’t it? Most mobile devices now provide e-mail, chat, music, videos, cameras, GPS, and a host of other applications. And they still make phone calls whenever you can get a signal through all the noise.

But the realization here is that individuals and groups have different mobile device manufacturers, models, and operating systems. Yet many of us want to run the latest application we saw on a television ad or the one we heard our friends talk about during lunch, only we too often find out that it doesn’t work on the phone type we own — out of luck again!

That’s where VMware comes in. Much like the company has done for the x86 hardware market, it wants to extend the benefits of virtualization to the mobile phone market. To reach this market faster, VMware acquired the technology it needed from a company called Trango Virtual Processors back in October 2008. By being able to abstract the applications and data from the hardware, VMware expects that virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market, but also pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users.

During the VMworld keynote, Visa took the stage and showed off one of its mobile applications: Visa Mobile. The application delivers near real-time alerts, offers, and other useful tools to your Google Android mobile device. While the Visa application itself may not have been all that awe-inspiring, the interesting thing here was that the demo was running on a Windows mobile phone — not an Android device. So while the application may not have jumped out at you, the demo certainly showed the audience the possibilities of running whichever applications you desire regardless of the underlying device platform being used.

As mobile devices continue to advance in features such as processor, memory, and storage, virtualization will become a key component of creating the ubiquitous mobile device. But VMware isn’t alone in trying to deliver on this dream. Current competitors include VirtualLogix and Open Kernel Labs, but that list could easily begin to multiply if the market is as lucrative as some in the industry have predicted. VMware is quietly entering the fight, but Open Kernel Labs has been at this a while and claims to have more than 300 million devices already in the global marketplace. With so many other irons in the fire, we’ll wait to see how dedicated VMware really is to this market.