arstechnica.com— VMware has announced a public beta test for a new version of its enterprise virtual machine program, which will allow IT managers to distribute VMs on USB thumb drives.
Mar 5, 2007View in Crawl 4
My guess is this will be the next big phase of personal computing. Storage has got pretty cheap in the last few years, and there's increasing hardware support for virtualisation in 64-bit processors. I suspect we'll all just carry around flash-drives in a few years and plug them into OS-less terminals.
Actually, enterprise companies have been looking for technology like this for a long time. It will alleviate a lot of strain on mobile IT maintenance. Why Deploy 1,000 laptops which you then have to keep secure and maintain, often remotely (which is often problematic) when you could deploy 1,000 usb keys instead and thus have secure virtualized environments and allow them to use (almost) any host hardware to function? Enterprises are already moving to stateful computing (thin clients at the desk). This only compliments the model more. This is especially attractive to SarBox - sensitive companies.I spent an entire summer internship researching vendors to achieve this sort of maintenance easy mobile computing. Good move by VMware.
It sounds like a great way for your customers to demo your product. Send them a pre-configured VMware ACE Virtual Machine (on a USB drive, DVD, whatever) and set the encryption self-distruct after 30 days....
don't know where that came from but i got you beat :)38,000 user profiles, 50,000 desktops/laptops with over 25 different models...all with a custom windows xp sp2 image we created :D, 1,200 servers, 35,000 network printers, wireless enabled to all 100+ buildings so users can go wireless anywhere, and over 200 applications which we custom repackaged to ensure we can push it to clients over the network. I love my job, but unfortunately we might be migrating all of these to Vista soon.....it was a pain to migrate all of these computers to Windows XP in 8 months with users complaining left and right on how they loved windows 98 and didn't want to upgrade *shivers*
djoverezMar 6, 2007
Is that a virtual machine in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
lgringoMar 6, 2007
[borat mode on] Mine is thick...like a can of pepsi [borat mode off]
omisolsMar 6, 2007
Living life pocket-size! Eh!!
lnomisMar 6, 2007
My guess is this will be the next big phase of personal computing. Storage has got pretty cheap in the last few years, and there's increasing hardware support for virtualisation in 64-bit processors. I suspect we'll all just carry around flash-drives in a few years and plug them into OS-less terminals.
rogerMar 6, 2007
Sorry I should have been clearer:"No, that's not a USB enclosure hard drive in my pocket."
rockchopsMar 6, 2007
Actually, enterprise companies have been looking for technology like this for a long time. It will alleviate a lot of strain on mobile IT maintenance. Why Deploy 1,000 laptops which you then have to keep secure and maintain, often remotely (which is often problematic) when you could deploy 1,000 usb keys instead and thus have secure virtualized environments and allow them to use (almost) any host hardware to function? Enterprises are already moving to stateful computing (thin clients at the desk). This only compliments the model more. This is especially attractive to SarBox - sensitive companies.I spent an entire summer internship researching vendors to achieve this sort of maintenance easy mobile computing. Good move by VMware.
mynameisnotbobMar 6, 2007
It sounds like a great way for your customers to demo your product. Send them a pre-configured VMware ACE Virtual Machine (on a USB drive, DVD, whatever) and set the encryption self-distruct after 30 days....
masterchiMar 7, 2007
don't know where that came from but i got you beat :)38,000 user profiles, 50,000 desktops/laptops with over 25 different models...all with a custom windows xp sp2 image we created :D, 1,200 servers, 35,000 network printers, wireless enabled to all 100+ buildings so users can go wireless anywhere, and over 200 applications which we custom repackaged to ensure we can push it to clients over the network. I love my job, but unfortunately we might be migrating all of these to Vista soon.....it was a pain to migrate all of these computers to Windows XP in 8 months with users complaining left and right on how they loved windows 98 and didn't want to upgrade *shivers*
alexhuyalegzzMay 7, 2007
Doubtful info... Nothing particular, but still interesting for me.
kraigdaemonMay 21, 2007
Quite doubtful. I've always liked posts like that. Dugg.