(By Info-Tech Analyst John Sloan- Printed with permission from Processor magazine www.processor.com)
Desktop PC virtualization promises a win-win solution to an age-old tug-of-war between centralized PC management and end-user experience. But while solutions such as VMware's Virtual View (formerly Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Citrix XenDesktop grow in popularity, there remains an important missing piece to this picture: bare-metal PC hypervisors.
On a server, a bare-metal hypervisor is the software that allows one physical server to be partitioned into multiple virtual machines. It is called “bare metal” because the hypervisor sits between the “metal” of the machine and the operating system software. This offers better performance because the individual virtual machine operating systems each access the hardware more directly.