What does VMware MVP provide for VDI in the Cloud, businesses and users?
November 11th, 2008 | 
Author: The virtualization blogisphere exploded yesterday with the news of VMware’s plans to bring virtualization to mobile phones with the announcement of the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). Regular readers of VM /ETC will know I am a fan of the idea of the handheld evolving into a device that can consolidate everything from the wallet to the laptop, so I wanted to add my two cents, not only about VMware’s MVP, but about what this can mean for businesses, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and you and me.
First, here’s some information from the official VMware news article about MVP.
“What is VMware MVP?
VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It will be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP is planned to enable handset vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.”
It should be clear that MVP diversifies VMware’s customer base with a brand new market. MVP is a product for handset manufactures. It doesn’t appear to me that I will ever have to install MVP personally, and I doubt I will have to learn how to P2V a desktop to a Blackberry, for example. In the future, when I buy a new handset MVP will already be on the device. Alex Barrett expands on this in his post VMware MVP does not equal Windows XP on your phone.
Thinking about why VMware would aquire Trango and develop this product is where it gets interesting,
and some exciting possibilities for both businesses and users are revealed on the VMware VMware Brings Virtualization to Mobile Phones web page.
“Persona on the Go: Smart phones are quickly becoming a combination of a PC and a wallet rolled into one package. A person’s phone persona—applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank info, credit card information, PIM all put together—is becoming much richer and more valuable. Consequently, the ability to protect and migrate personas will become an important purchasing decision. VMware’s MVP saves the persona as a set of files so that all the applications and data on the phone can be managed as a collection of files. People can then easily move their persona to a new device for a virtually painless upgrade.”
Is it a stretch to have visions of never having to worry about transferring my address book to a new phone? What about my company being able to restore an exact image of my PDA on a new device the next time I dribble it on the concrete like a basketball? I’ve previously explored replacing my wallet in my post Can my Blackberry ever replace my wallet?
Finally, VMware’s own Mike D. provides some great insight into what VMware has in mind for MVP and how it will fit into VDI and cloud computing in his blog post Ring, Ring…It’s VMware on the Phone.
“Now why would VMware do this? Well, if you were at VMworld then you heard all about VMware View. Basically it’s the thought that once you put an app on top of a virtualization layer then the layer actually stretches all the way down to the end device so you don’t have to worry about which app works with what. This is really key when you start looking out at cloud. Cloud is just the middle glue that gets the user to the data. In order for that to work you really need a layer on every possible device that the user could come from.”
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