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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."
I have yet to find a device that does not have one or more major annoyances.
And honestly, you never will. That's not a criticism of you, because I'm willing to bet all but a rare few feels the same way. This is to be expected with developing a single product with mass appeal. You can't make everyone happy or else there wouldn't be a new to constantly re-invent the GUI.
Life is not for the lazy.
10 paces, turn, and launch your operating system?
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
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...