The primary consequence of the termination of Moore’s Law was that chip vendors chose put multiple cores on their chips to deliver more computer power. First they put two cores (i.e. distinct processors) onto each chip, and then 4 and now 8 and soon who-knows-what. There is no shortage of space on the silicon for these processors, so it’s hard to know when this multiplication game will end. The chip vendors need to keep upgrading their chips in order to make older ones obsolescent, so when the game of multiplication ends they’ll look to something else.

The multiplication of cores has given a big boost to virtualization, because the typical PC CPU was already over-powered for most of the work it did. It’s true, you can saturate a PC CPU with the aggressive use of Photoshop or CAD software, but for most PC applications, it doesn’t even get out of bed and put its slippers on. So there’s plenty of power available to fit 2 PCs onto one – running Windows Vista as well as Mac OS X, or Windows XP or Linux.

You might want to do that at home, if you have an abiding affection for more than one operating system – OS polygamy is legal in most countries – but it doesn’t go down well at work.

In the corporation, virtualization provides an opportunity to exploit the extra power of multicore CPUs by running more than one PC on a server (or server blade) and putting little more than a screen and a keyboard on the desktop. This goes by the name of client virtualization or, to use VMWare’s chosen terminology, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). (I’ve touched on the financial justification for this in Why The Desktop Is Broken, which examines ClearCube’s approach to this problem).

This is good news for VMWare, the virtualization juggernaut. The curious thing is that it was a few of VMWare’s customers, rather than VMWare itself, that first saw the possibilities of VDI. VMWare had a rapidly growing business anyway in server virtualization, consolidating sever farms that had grown wild. When you rationalize a server farm, you can retire some of the older servers, or you can wait for growing resource demands to consume the free resource pool, or you can immediately find something for those freed up servers to do. And VDI is something that the freed up servers can do.

When VMWare discovered some of its customers in the UK and Europe doing this, it naturally saw the opportunity. It started to cater for it directly by enhancing the VDI capability. You can do VDI raw – by linking “dumb clients” to servers directly, but it’s more efficient if you put a “broker” in the middle, which looks for free resources when you “sign on”. It’s even better if you have management software which manages the whole pool and automatically restarts a session if any server suddenly dies. So VMWare now has a managed and more compelling VDI capability.

A curious aspect of this is that VMWare’s virtualization software neither knows nor cares whether it is a virtual client or server. Consequently, VMWare doesn’t actually know how many of its customers are implementing VDI with VMWare – only the number that are doing it using brokers.

This, by the way, constitutes a major trend in motion. The corporate desktop PC and the home PC have always been different devices by virtue of usage, but have had close or even identical specs. Client virtualization is changing this irrevocably, and it’s changing it fast.

This is a posting in the Virtualization Focus Series. Click here to see an index of such postings.