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Android Phones Get Virtualization
bednarz writes "VMware is teaming with LG to sell Android smartphones that are virtualized, allowing a single phone to run two operating systems, one for business use and one for personal use. A user's personal email and applications would run natively on the Android phone, while a guest operating system contains the employee's work environment. The devices would also have two phone numbers."
Although I'd appreciate a phone that, for once, did the basic things right first. Like with car stereos, I have yet to find a device that does not have one or more major annoyances.
This actually sounds... Like a great idea to have two numbers reach the same phone. My worry is the battery consumption will go through the roof (on a piece of technology that already doesn't have the greatest battery life times) and that computing resources will be in short supply on a mobile device (which brings us back to power consumption).
While, obviously, virtualization is the technology that VMware is going to throw at any use case, since "when all you have is a hammer, etc." It seems like a really hackish approach.
.1 second. Allows you to skip some of the really expensive "zOMG this particular piece of hardware must never, ever, ever die even once in the next decade" add-ons without compromising uptime. 2. Near-perfect compatibility with legacy software: Barring really esoteric stuff that is depending on being right next to the metal of some specific archaic box, all the legacy crapware out there needs to know absolutely nothing about virtualization in order to virtualize. Virtualization aware OSes can make life a bit easier; but there is nothing stopping you from running almost any obsolete crap you need to run on a virtual machine that looks exactly like something from 1995, only with a 3 GHz processor and loads of RAM. 3. Isolation and rollback, particularly for workstations, being able to call up, experiment on, roll back, and delete OS instances makes doing potentially dangerous things safe.
Virtualization, in my server/workstation experience, has three major benefits: 1. Migration: Assuming a decent SAN setup and some fastish interconnects, your VM can float merrily from physical server to physical server with periods of unresponsiveness under
However, all these things are either irrelevant to cellphones(unless your cellphone has SAN storage and a GB link to the redundant cellphone in your other pocket...) or artefacts of the fact that legacy software largely sucks at things like isolation and versioning. Virtualization, like the AMD64 instruction set, is massively popular because it allows the power of architectures that don't suck without giving up legacy software that runs on architectures that do. With something like Android, though, an almost-totally-new OS is being built from near-scratch to suit a new set of requirements. Virtualization seems very heavy handed compared to something like having isolated namespaces and URI "domains" into which programs can be confined...
Isn't this a little overkill? I mean the only thing that sounded good about it was the whole "two numbers" thing - but you can do that without virtualizaing complete operating systems.
Two numbers is good...
But if you virtualize an entire second phone you can have entirely separate calendars, phone books, apps, all of it. You can keep your personal life genuinely separate from your work environment.
And when you get a new job, and leave your employer, they can wipe out the virtual environment without deleting everything in your personal environment.
Sounds like a great idea to me.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I wish I thought of it first!
Fact is, one of the nicer things about virtualization is the removal of dependency on hardware. The OS, Applications and data can all be packaged neatly in one or a few files that are transportable to other hosts. These can be backed up and recovered. Lose your phone? No problem! Get another one and restore your phone image to it! That virtualization might enable the existence of more than one phone running concurrently is nice and interesting, but having even one phone virtualized is awesome.