Citrix unveils new XenClient bare-metal desktop hypervisor

Citrix has moved to unveil a test version of XenClient, the company's bare-metal desktop hypervisor before rival VMware. Both Citrix and VMware planned initially to ship separate bare-metal desktop hypervisor products last year, but suffered delays attributable to the complexity of the project.

Also known as client hypervisors, the idea here is to bring the power of bare-metal virtualization directly to the client desktop, where they were traditionally run on top of an existing operating system layer. The immediate benefit is better performance as the virtual machines no longer have to contend with working through a host layer.

There are other advantages too, one of them being a far more secure environment as multiple operating systems can be running in complete isolation on the same hardware. One idea would be to have a corporate VM run with the usual security policies and restrictions, while a "personal" VM can operate with unrestricted access. Toggling between them could be as simple as flipping a switch.

Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf, noted that client hypervisors is still a maturing technology that won't even attain widespread adoption until 2011 or 2012. In a nutshell, Wolf is saying that though Citrix might have announced a product first, it's still far too early to say who will eventually come out ahead in this race.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Network World
- check out the article at Ars Technica 

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