VMware on your Cellphone? VMware aquires Trango
Will you soon be running VMware on your cell phone? That is a pretty general question. I mean, “VMware” takes many forms today and what you will actually “Run on your cellphone” is up for debate. Today, this is described as a “bare metal hypervisor” for your cell phone. I am trying to picture, in reality, how that helps me still. I mean, I am not going to run Vista, Linux, and Windows Server on my cellphone. Nor do I really want to run the PalmOS, iphone OS, and a Java VM. As I learn more about this, in reality, it appears that this hypervisor on the cell phone will benefit the cell phone developers, not really the end users of cell phones (or perhaps there is some indirect benefit to the end user like faster app development). VMware calls this the MVP, or Mobile Virtualization Platform and they predict that by 2012 over half of the smartphones shipped will be running a hypervisor. Still, with VMware’s aquisition of Trango, we get closer and closer to making “VMware on your cellphone” a reality.
For more information, read VirtualizationReview- VMware Acquires Trango, Brings Virtualization to Telecom Market
Casey Weltzin Says:
March 17th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Thank you for posting; I think this is a very interesting topic. I agree that the benefit of running a bare-metal hypervisor on a cell phone is likely on the development end, though users may gain from the outcome as well. For example, if the real-time call processing is handled by a dedicated OS, while the user interacts with a more general purpose OS hosing a GUI, there should be multiple benefits. The phone developers could make use of different operating system services to speed development time, while users could perform an intensive GUI operation without affecting call processing, etc. Separating the systems seems like a good idea.
Geoff Revill Says:
July 30th, 2009 at 11:39 am
A bare metal Hypervisor on a phone has now shipped. The Motorola Evoke QA4.
Like the enterprise space, the developers of the phone did indeed want to run 2 OS’es on a single processor. in this case Linux for the smartphone apps and an RTOS to support the wireless/RF interface. And somewhat like Enterprise, the objective was cost (Bill of Materials) cost reduction. All other smartphones use 2 processors, usually 2 ARM processors, one for the app OS and the other for the Real time stuff. Motorola cut out the cost of the 2nd processor.
However the real value of a bare metal hypervisor over an hosted hypervisor, particularly in the embedded/real-time markets are many fold, take a look at the wiki embedded hypervisor entry for a fairly clar overview of the way in which bare metal hypervisors are being used to deliver value.