Virtualisation for the home is a missed opportunity

Stan Beer
Sunday, 27 July 2008 08:57

Business IT - Technology

While enterprises focus on using virtualisation to cut costs through consolidating servers in the data centres, the home and consumer desktop space has been largely ignored. But is it important for home users to have virtualisation on the desktop?

Andre Kemp, VMware Asia Pacific product marketing manager, believes the answer is a resounding yes and for more reasons than purely cost savings.

"It's not from a pure cost cutting angle as predominantly was the reason why virtualisation was originally looked at for servers," says Kemp.

"Cost is certainly a factor but it's more about manageability, security and centralisation of your business processes.

"Those three areas are the main things that someone from a CXO position would be looking at virtualising their infrastructure."

But what about consumers - how does this apply to them?

"That's another angle that we haven't really explored as deeply as we could," says Kemp.

"My personal vision is that the consumer at home instead of buying individual PCs for the family, using a low cost hypervisor, could very easily set up a family mini data centre.

"Inside one of those servers is the entire family set of individual PCs. So you're no longer buying actual physical hardware boxes for each person in your family. You're just giving them a thin client device."  Are there other issues besides cost? Please read on to page 2