From ARS Technica: ”Citrix has announced the first public release of its XenClient virtualization platform, formerly known as Project Independence. Built on top of the Xen hypervisor, the new product offers high-performance virtualization for corporate desktops and mobile users.
Hypervisor-based virtualization is commonplace in the server room, but thus far the technology has not made it to the desktop; desktop-based virtualization products like Microsoft’s Virtual PC and VMware Workstation run virtual machines on top of a full OS. This makes virtualization a heavyweight solution for those wanting to use desktop virtualization to provide a consistent, easy-to-manage environment, which has limited its acceptance.
Citrix is also promoting the use of the product as a way for organizations to allow users to run securely locked-down VMs alongside less secure—but more user-friendly—environments, even to the extent of giving a “corporate desktop” on a privately-owned PC. The corporate VM can have all the security policies, virus protection, VPN software, and other corporate tools, safely protected from any damage by software that the user might run in the unrestricted VM.”
ARS Technica – Citrix shows off new XenClient desktop hypervisor
