Of all of the things I saw and heard at VMworld 2011 this past week (and I saw a lot as I spent much of my time going from booth to booth,) it was Paul Maritz’s discussion of the impact that mobile devices were going to have that resonated with me the most and it does not take a genius to understand why. All I have to do is look around my own home and observe how my three sons (literally, not the old 50’s TV show) and their friends interact with and access the Internet.
Every one of them now has some type of Apple device. Whether it is my youngest son who has the iPod shuffle or my two older sons who have the iPod touch, they are plugged in almost all of the time. Further, they would not be caught dead with the 17″ Dell laptop that dear old Dad lugs around (who primarily does so because his eyesight continues to deteriorate and likes to be able to read without using a magnifying glass.)
Instead they walk around with probably as much or more computing power in the palm of their hand as I carry around in my over sized laptop bag. So when Paul Maritz says that individuals under 35 will expect to interact with the world and the Internet in a much different way that many of the individuals sitting in the audience at VMworld, it certainly rings true with me and, needless to say, VMware does not want to be left out of that experience.
That in large part explains why VMware is going mobile with its vSphere mobile hypervisor so individuals can fire up virtual machines on whatever type of mobile device they are using. While I did not have the opportunity to verify what mobile device platforms it supports, I did stop by the LG booth at VMworld where it was demonstrating the first generation of these new (what I call) vPhones.
Now you can have multiple virtual phones running on a single physical mobile device. As such, individuals can more easily combine their work and home cell phone numbers on a single device and still secure each environment. Further, they can have applications that are specific to work and home on each vPhone without compromising the integrity of the other and, in observing the model that LG Electronics had on display at VMworld, a simple touch enabled a user to switch from one vPhone to another.
However the real appeal of this device had to do with the recoverability of a specific vPhone. Just a few weeks ago my colleague Jim Nash wrote a blog entry about what happens when you lose your Android, iPhone or Blackberry. All of the information that you have on that mobile device is toast (or in the case of the phone mentioned in his blog entry – soggy blue goo.)
However using this emerging vPhone technology made possible by the vSphere mobile hypervisor, you can now backup and recover individual vPhones in much the same way organizations backup and recover their VMs. You just backup the entire vPhone image and then recover it to another mobile device.
That aspect particularly struck home with me at the conference as I, at one point, needed to text someone and reached down to grab my Blackberry only to find it was not in its normal place. After a few frantic minutes of looking, I finally realized I left it in my rental car and went back to get it. But if I had my phone virtualized, even if I had lost my physical Blackberry, all I would theoretically had to do is purchase another mobile device and recover the vPhone image to it.
But it was then that it hit me about what such a change means to the back end infrastructure. All of these primary and backup vPhone images have to be stored somewhere other than the mobile device in order for these types of recoveries to occur. This has the potential to become very problematic as it will necessitate an entirely new type of storage cloud infrastructure to be put into place that responds dynamically by putting data near where people are physically located.
Consider my situation. I normally live in Omaha, NE, but at the time my Blackberry went missing, I was in Las Vegas, NV. So even if I had lost my Blackberry, it is questionable as to how quickly I could recover my data in Las Vegas even if I purchased another Blackberry. The only way that could occur is if the telecommunication provider in Las Vegas had some mechanism in place to recognize that when my cell phone signal lit up its network that it knew a backup copy of my vPhone image resided with my Omaha provider and could retrieve it from there.
Everyone is talking about the VMware’s new mobile hypervisor and what new possibilities it opens up for the end user. But what too few are talking about is what this means for the back end infrastructure and the dramatic changes that will need to occur to support the demands of this next wave of mobile computing. Of these changes, possibly the most dramatic change that needs to occur is the creation of an infrastructure that is as mobile and nimble as the users that will be accessing it.
If you like this blog entry, you may like the more recent blog entry that DCIG Senior Analyst Ben Maas wrote on how to secure vPhones once you have them deployed.