I suppose you can think of this as the missing piece of the desktop virtualization puzzle. A start-up company, aptly named Virtual Computer, has just brought technology to market which creates a “virtual PC” on a laptop. So why would you want to do that, given that a laptop is already a fully functional PC?

Managing the Mobile Computer

OK, I admit it, I cheated by asking the wrong question. The right question is “If we’re going to virtualize the desktop, what are we going to do about laptops?” The overriding issue is the cost of the desktop which, for the laptop, manifests in the following areas:

• Desktop management effort and cost: Distributing patches, application and OS upgrades and upgrading hardware.
• General (desk-side) support costs: For hardware failure and software malfunction and/or corruption. This includes data loss or user downtime.
• Security: Laptops are famous for being stolen and hence, sometimes losing highly confidential data. They are also famous for acquiring viruses because someone’s 14 year old son just couldn’t resist going on-line with dad/mum’s laptop.
• Back-up: Data backup is usually less than perfect.

Now you may have many of these issues bolted down to some degree, but the truth is you will not have them as well bolted down as they will be, when you protect the laptop by putting a purpose-built management  environment on it and run a virtual PC within that environment. To get a picture of what that means, look at the picture:

Virtual Computer installs its NxTop Engine which runs a hypervisor (based on the Xen hypervisor) and which also manages the whole device, in respect of drivers, patches, security, upgrades, etc. The “guests” shown in the picture are different virtual PCs that can run under the supervision of the hypervisor and, of course, there can be many; any version of Windows or even Linux. The guests are downloaded from a server and whenever the laptop is connected they are checked to see if they are still valid and corrected if any correction is needed.

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