Post to Twitter |
Comments (4) |
Views (17081) |
I think that being in the tech industry for so long has started to make me a little jaded to new technology. But once and a while some new project comes along and I think it's just the coolest thing since sliced bread! Recently I've been lucky to be involved with a new technology we are working on here at Citrix and it's got me and anyone I show it to saying the same thing, "That's fricken cool, how can I get it on my system". It's our new bare metal client hypervisor we just announced based on Xen virtualization technology codenamed Project Independence.
I've been working with the Xen products both open source and commercial for over three years now and even in the very beginning I had people ask if they could run this stuff on their laptop. And at the time the story was yeah but it's not going to work the way you want. You see initially we were really focused on making a world class server virtualization platform so the focus was making everything work great for server virtualization. We were focused on making network and storage I/O fast and keeping the CPU overhead really low for server apps. This was all needed and it actually laid a lot of the ground work for what we are building now.
But running this stuff on a laptop opens up a whole new set of challenges. Building a client hypervisor requires supporting really fast 3D/2D graphics, you have to get sound in and out of the system, allow people to plug in USB webcams and printers, burn DVD's, plus you have to deal with undocking, power optimization, getting battery information from the hardware, I could keep going. It's a lot of work, but lucky for us we are not building it alone. Intel and others in the Xen community are all helping build an awesome client hypervisor. The goal in the end is that the user should not have to give up anything they do today with their laptop computing experience just gain flexibility.
Sure there are products on the market today that let you run a second OS on your laptop but guess what they are all applications that run on top of your existing OS. So you startup Vista or XP and then you launch an application to boot up a second virtual machine. And then it's slow, not everything works quite right, and it relies on your first OS working right. It's not the best user experience.
So here is the user experience with the Citrix client hypervisor. You hit the power button on your laptop and it boots up into Vista, XP or whatever you choose as your personal computing environment. What you don't see is that the Xen hypervisor actually came up first and then started up a primary virtual machine plus while you are watching Vista boot it's also booting up a second VM in the background. Once you load up in your personal environment everything just works same as usual on a personal laptop. You have your own apps, your own files (lots of music and movies for me), and I can do anything I want. But here is the cool part you hit a few keys on the keyboard and bam you're in a totally separate virtual machine running all your work applications. It's totally isolated from your personal setup. IT gets to lockdown the corporate setup and keeps everything nice and clean, and I get to have my own personal environment where I can do whatever I want.
I can tell you right now on my standard corporate laptop it's a nasty mix of my personal stuff and corporate stuff. Alongside Office I have iTunes and all my personal and business files are mixed in My Documents. It's not pretty, it's not safe, it's hard to manage, and there is a better way. And it's coming soon to a laptop near you.
You can check out this demo I made if you want to get a feel for what the user experience is like.
Comments (4)
Feb 14, 2009
Shannon Snowden says:
Very interesting and a really good demo on Youtube. Can't wait to try it out.Very interesting and a really good demo on Youtube. Can't wait to try it out.
Feb 21, 2009
Christopher Curatolo says:
Any time line when testing on the product will be available? Is there any news a...Any time line when testing on the product will be available? Is there any news as to whether or not MAC OS will be work with this technology?
As a support engineer working on the Xendesktop/PVS product linee, it is amazing to see how the product has evolved in such a short period of time.
Thank you,
Chris Curatolo
Citrix Tech Support Engineer
Mar 11, 2009
Anonymous says:
how can I be part of this demohow can I be part of this demo
Jun 17
Anonymous says:
This is awesome and will be very useful for me in I.T. I hope you take thi...This is awesome and will be very useful for me in I.T. I hope you take this in the direction of streaming desktops. I really need to setup my users so that they can load different desktops from a centralized network location. For example, instead of dialing in over a VPN and using RDP, they would stream their corporate desktop over VPN and have everything local. It would have to do some trickey just-in-time streaming so that the user doesn't wait for an hour before they can log in. Even better, allow me to give my users a live-cd where they can boot up on it and it will auto connect to a network server and stream desktop environments; thus allowing me to give guests a corporate desktop to work with, without compromising their local OS. Cache it locally and only stream changes. Allow the admin to allow the user to save only the changes to their desktop back to the network server (or not). oh what a wonderful world that would be.
Add Comment