Virtualisation for the home is a missed opportunity

Stan Beer
Sunday, 27 July 2008 07:57

Business IT - Technology

The problem for the virtualisation concept is that it's an idea whose time hasn't yet quite come. This is partly the fault of the virtualisation product vendors and partly that of resellers.

The fact is that the consumers most aware of virtualisation for home use are now Mac users because of products like Parallels and VMware's Fusion, which enable them to run alternative operating systems such as Windows and Linux distributions as virtual machines on Mac OS X. Ironically, this not the market who would benefit most from true bare metal virtualisation, with thin clients around the home running multiple virtual images.

"Most consumers aren't aware of VMware as a home use platform other than Mac users," says Kemp.

"There is significant revenue for resellers who sell to the general community if they start thinking outside of the box about how they can provide a very low cost and robust virtualisation platform for home use. It's quite viable."

The problem is of course that the average home user who may wish to employ virtualisation in the home as a cost saving measure, let alone managing the security and manageability issues still does not know where to start.

A quick visit to the VMware website does not provide much help unfortunately. It's all about either desktop virtualisation for the enterprise or running multiple operating systems on one computer. It doesn't address the issue that homes these days are becoming networked micro-enterprises, who face similar issues as business sites. We all want to cut costs and rationalise our hardware.

Kemp stresses that his vision for the virtual networked home is personal and he can't speak for his employer on the issue. The question is, why not?