Intel and the virtualisation software maker VMware have recently joined their hands to offer virtualisation for individual laptops and desktops. The two IT giants are looking forward to bringing virtualisation straight to PC hardware. At the VMworld Europe Conference 2009, the company announced that it will ship bare-metal hypervisor for desktops and notebooks running on Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors and vPro technology.

VMware will make use of Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors and Centrino 2 platforms while dealing with laptops. This covers a gigantic array of laptops, such as the Sony Vaio VGN-AW11M/H, the Acer Aspire 5735, the HP HDX16, and many many more. The virtualisation technology will allow every individual play different roles perfectly. Employees will be able to demarcate their personal and professional logins on the same PC or notebook. Moreover, the IT department will be able to control and manage the different virtual environments through Intel’s vPro technology. Using different virtual environments is a great idea to filter out personal data from corporate tasks without maintaining more than one PC.

VMware’s hardware virtualisation platform will enable workers isolate different working domains from each other. This will not only make data management easy but also makes it easy to scan malware, viruses and trace other malicious activities for an individual client. The graphics processing and overall performance remains unaffected. Each virtual environment will be capable of utilising CPU resources, GPU capabilities and RAM at its best.

Untill now the virtualization technology was confined to PC operating systems and servers only but now VMware, the pioneer in virtualization softwares has announced that the smartphones too will get the benefit of it. The company has developed a new Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) which is basically a thin layer of software that can be infused on mobile phones.

The underlying advantage of MVP is that it makes the phone data and applications independent of hardware. This will allow the phone makers to pace up the manufacturing as well as the marketing of the phones. From the end users perspective the benefit is that they will get hands on the newer models faster than ever before. They will also get freedom to migrate their data from one phone to another easily. The MVP is optimized to use with any old mobile phone. It can be used with even those ones having low power consumption and small memories. MVP reduces the time that is devoted to produce device specific applications because it allows the developers to use a pre-existing stack of software on different handset’s hardware.

Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware said, “VMware is excited to extend the benefits of virtualization, which we pioneered for x86 hardware, to the mobile phone market. By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, we expect that smartphone virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users.” However some could say this is no different from the Google Android operating system recently released.