Windows 8 is not really my cup of tea. Mac OS X Mountain Lion is not what I hoped it would be. Google's Chrome operating system is not powerful enough for my purposes. What is a power user to do?

Use multiple operating systems at once, that's what! And with advances in desktop virtualization, that's easier than ever to accomplish.

With today's powerful multi-core processors and inexpensive RAM, it is easy to take advantage of a trend that has already swept the Fortune 100. It just needs a little tweaking for the home environment. Let me show you how it works for me.

What Is Virtualization?

First, a quick bit of background. Virtualization is all about separating the software from the hardware, creating virtual machines that act like real machines inside another operating system. Server virtualization is all the rage because it allows companies to create multiple "virtual" servers on a limited number of physical servers, boosting efficiency, adding flexibility and lowering costs.

Desktop virtualization, meanwhile, creates one or more virtual environments on a single piece of hardware. And it's hardly new. In the early '90s we used Soft PC to run Windows on Macintosh computers.

Early virtual environments were slow - and the extra memory they required was expensive. Today, a fussy operating system user like me can build a complex system at home with lots of memory for not a lot of money. And that lets me do some very interesting things.

Obviously it would be simpler to stick with one operating system. But I have developed a fondness for certain programs over the years and some of them are platform specific. I want to use all of them, and advances in virtualization let me have my cake and eat it too.

What Does My Home Virtual Environment Look Like?

I have three screens on my desk, driven by two powerful but inexpensive computers. One is a Lenovo tower PC driven by an Intel Core i5 chip with 8GB of RAM. The other is a Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM.

Total spending - including a new LCD monitor to join the two I had- was less than $1,500. That includes a very reasonable $50 for VMware Fusion, virtualization software. I also downloaded the free non-commercial version of TeamViewer to let me remotely control a desktop computer from another computer.

While all of this may sound pretty complicated, it's actually a fairly simple way to create just the environment that I want.

I love the Linux desktop environment. And AbiWord offers a good balance between advanced word-processing features and simplicity. 

But I don't want to live entirely in Linux. I don't to give up Pixelmator on the Macintosh for my graphics work or Rapidweaver for my websites. And I prefer Microsoft Excel on Windows for my spreadsheets. I also like Postbox on Windows for my mail and Adobe's Lightroom for my photos. I actually run Chrome and Firefox browsers in all three operating systems as needed.

The 16GB of memory in the Mac lets me easily run a virtual Linux environment using Fusion. Teamviewer lets me control my Lenovo PC from the Mac - and run the latest version of Excel and Postbox in a PC Window.

If I want to move files from one environment to the other, I use Dropbox. It is the only popular cloud storage tool easily usable on Linux by someone like me.

With my system it is easy to use whatever tool I prefer - no matter which environment it lives in - with the power of two modern microprocessors and plenty of storage. I can ignore the parts of Windows 8 that bug me while still getting access to Windows programs. I don't have to give up my specialized Mac programs like iMovie, but I can avoid the iOSified version of iPhoto for my daily photography work.

Getting It All To Work

Not surprisingly, there were some hiccups putting this all together. I never got Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client to work with Mac OS X Lion, but Teamviewer worked on the first try. Selecting the right version of Linux required a few tries, but with VMware's installation program you can install directly from a downloaded ISO image.

One of the neat things about virtualization is that my Linux environment is just a file on the Mac. Dedicating hardware to Linux is still not as easy as using a virtual Linux machine that takes advantage of all the hardware drivers that come with the Mac environment.

Cost-Effective - And A Built-In Backup System

I could have also installed a virtual PC environment on my Mac, but when you look at the $99 cost of a Windows 8 license, buying a whole PC got me another CPU, 8GB more RAM, a 1TB hard drive, keyboard, mouse and DVD burner for just $400 more.

I also could have bought a powerful Mac Pro system to run everything. But the economics of that approach make no sense. A Mac Pro with less RAM and about the same amount of storage costs almost $3,000. Would it be faster? Hard to say. It would certainly be more elegant and compact, but my virtualized setup works great for me.

Having two systems also lets me one as a backup. If necessary, I could upgrade to the Windows version of the VMware product and move over my Linux environment by just copying a file.

More to the point, I love having every piece of software I could dream of at my finger tips.

As consumer devices and services increasingly outstrip their corporate competitors in power, productivity and cachet, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has become the latest so-hot-you'll-melt trend in the world of corporate IT. But plenty of IT departments see it as a demon to be exorcised from the cubicle farms - or an opportunity to dump the responsibility for hardware upkeep on their internal customers. Rather than struggle with BYOD, some companies are turning the whole concept of BYOD on its head in favor of Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) policies.

The idea behind BYOD is to let end users choose the devices, programs and services that best meet their personal and business needs, with access, support and security supplied by the company IT department - often with subsidies for device purchases.

But BYOD places new burdens on IT as it tries to deal with an infinite variety of platforms and profiles. COPE takes the opposite approach - instead of making corporate functions work on personal devices, it sets up a framework to support and allow personal uses of company devices. 

COPE essentially works like this: the organization buys the device and still owns it, but the employee is allowed, within reason, to install the applications they want on the device, be it smartphone or traditional computer.

For BYOD, the question for IT is "How do I secure information on a device that I don't own?" With COPE, the question becomes, "How can I loosen my grip for my employees to use their devices for personal use?"

That's how Philippe Winthrop, VP of Strategy at VeliQ, framed the questions for me. He's passionate about COPE, even though his work at VeliQ, the mobility Platform-as-a-Service company he recently joined, isn't even centered on it.

COPE vs. BYOD

According to Winthrop, COPE offers big cost benefits. Under BYOD, employees buy and expense the devices and services they need, while the employer may reimburse all or a portion of these costs, based on preset policies.

But that can leave companies paying retail prices. COPE lets IT departments keep their sweet corporate discounts.  With BYOD, Winthrop said, "CFOs see a way to save a couple hundred bucks on CapEx [capital expenditures]. They're missing an opportunity to save far more on OpEx [operational expenditures]."

Keeping data where it belongs is the other big problem within BYOD. Worries about misplaced and insecure devices or malware-infected machines keeps the IT folks reaching for the antacid.

Not only are employee-owned devices at greater risk, but sometime laws can hamper what a company can do to help itself. In the European Union and South Korea, for instance, laws specifically forbid a company from wiping data from equipment it doesn't own. So, if a smartphone gets left in the airliner's seat pocket, any data on that phone is out in the wild.

COPE neatly circumvents challenges like this. If the company owns the device, it can yank data back regardless of regulations. And, since they can preconfigure the device before handing it to employee, IT can easily insert security and application-management protocols.

"With COPE, it's all about balance," Winthrop explained. "When I said 'loosen my grip,' I didn't say 'let go.'"

COPE also eases support issues by deploying the same hardware to every employee. In the BYOD scenario, IT might not even be able to repair all the possible devices, and vendor or third-party support services may not be completely secure.

To be fair, there are ways of mitigating the BYOD issues. Many companies that support BYOD maintain lists of approved devices, and let employees choose only from lists of approved devices and engage trusted third-party service and support vendors. Others keep all secure company data and access in a cloud-based virtual desktop or profile, reducing the risk if the device is compromised. 

What's Keeping COPE Back?

Still, COPE has many benefits compared to BYOD, at least from the IT perspective. So why aren't more IT shops adopting the COPE model? It's those darn users. 

Winthrop attributes the fixation on BYOD to the GenY-ers, staffers who insist on wanting to do everything their way and their way only.

"You could call it the Frank Sinatra Syndrome," Winthrop joked. (Clearly not a Sex Pistols fan, then.) Faced with these attitudes, many IT departments seem to think their only options are caving entirely or completely stonewalling user requests.

It doesn't have to be that way. By embracing COPE, IT can reassert the control it must have to keep data and work processes secure, while still giving employees the shiny toys they so desperately want.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Certainly other manifestations of the desktop's evolution, such as in this interactive exhibit at the DDR museum in Berlin will appear in mass production eventually.

Projected screens and keyboards that can be used on walls and other surfaces are also a given. As are hologram projection screens and keyboards, both 3D and flat.

But smartphones and other mobile devices will also have the features below. What makes a desktop remain a desktop is not these physical changes to it and its peripherals, but the fact that some data will remain local and therefore some processing and storage capability must also remain local. The computing process has remained the same for many years, and the desktop PC is its best incarnation.

Yes, I know that smartphones and laptops and other devices of today are tremendously more powerful than desktop computers of just a few short years ago. Even so, the desktop has continued to provide more processing and storage muscle than any of its mobile brethren.

Eventually the silicon revolution will end and Moore's law will collapse. It is at that point that we will entirely change how we compute. Some people predict we will change over to quantum computing, change from bits to qbits (or qubits), and do our processing on electrons rather than on chips. American theoretical physicist Michio Kaku predicts that molecular computing will see widespread adoption before quantum computing does.

No matter if we end up with molecular computing or quantum computing, we will radically disrupt the computing process -- processors, programming, storage and, yes devices -- all of what we use today will no longer fit into that new computing process and thus will all become obsolete. And then, the desktop will finally die.

And that, says Kaku, is as important to the world economy as it is to humanity's ability to compute. When we drive headlong into the silicon chip's dead end, devices will no longer sell at a fast pace simply because there will be no improvement in new models over old models. However, with the birth of a new computing process and all the new devices that it will spawn, the world economy will thrive.

And therein lies the answer to why hardware manufacturers are so eager to prematurely declare the PC dead: they need to sell more devices quickly before the silicon chip maxes out. And, they can already see that Moore's law will collapse entirely within the next 10 or so years. In other words, their desperation is showing.

Take for example the claims that radio would kill newspapers and TV would kill radio. It didn't happen. Why? Because each of these devices served a common purpose and although the mode changed, the process did not. Then along came the Internet to disrupt the process - in terms of dissemination and access. Sure, the Internet spawned new devices too but these were attuned to the same Internet-based process and thus it is the process and not the advent of these new devices that will kill the Big Three - newspapers, TV and radio.

But, these new Internet-based devices will not kill the desktop because the desktop is based on the same process. It belongs to the Web-ilk, that is, to the Internet of Things.

And so the desktop will live on in one form or another as long as the process, i.e. the Internet as we know it, does. Perhaps not this desktop, though (the Data General One):

But what possible advantage can process have over utility, one might ask? To which I would say, that is the wrong question. Utility is served by process too. For example, the radio was once a fixed object in the home. Later it became portable and even found a way to roam about in cars. It wasn't its form or its mobility that fully addressed its utility. Form and mobility merely augmented its usefulness. But its utility remained the same. This is true right up to satellite radio today. Access improved, but utility remained the same.

However, a change in process came about through the iPod and iTunes, Internet radio and MP3-capable phones. The change in the process was that music was no longer a one-way stream of sound. Now music can be selected from a variety of sources, played on demand, stored in various ways, owned or rented, commercial free or ad endowed and shuttled between devices. In other words, the listener commands the what, where and how of music enjoyment rather than passively receiving the music from a disc jockey's predetermined playlist.

With the new process comes a new utility. Once again, the new devices that are now slowly killing traditional radio are doing so because of their process and not because of their utility or newness to the scene.

The same holds true with the desktop - the much maligned CPU with monitor, keyboard and mouse configuration literally sprawled on desktops everywhere. Its utility has not changed and neither has its process .

The situation is similar to that of the QWERTY keyboard which is still around today because the process of data entry has remained unchanged despite the onslaught of new devices and Web advancements. In much the same way, the process behind desktop use remains static.

The desktop provides the muscle needed to handle large amounts of local data in the current computing process model. It is superior to all other Internet-based devices in offline data retrieval and use. There will always be people who want to keep their information on a CPU and out of reach of Dropbox- and Wikileak-style fiascos and warrantless government searches.

There will always be nerds and geeks who want to code in private and thus
want CPUs that can work offline. They will keep machines at the ready to test everything from hacking tools to new software, both online and off. They will have a pile of CPUs at their feet and a spread of monitors on their desks as long as life breathes
within man and machine.

There will be scientists with new discoveries, governments with secrets, and corporations with profits to protect who will always guard against leaks and spies by keeping information on-premise.

And this is why the desktop will never die. At least not until the the Internet as we know it dies and a new computing process takes its place.

Photo @ Creative Commons by kerplunk kerplunk

It may be surprising but they are also asking about virtualization. Businesses are starting to understand that they can leapfrog into a new competitive world by using virtualization to use multiple operating systems and to keep apps partitioned and protected.

It's that security question that is one of most critical importance. The question: How can the small business compete in the global market but also keep from losing the store?

It points to why virtualization is on the rise. If you can simply call your desktop from the cloud then there is a degree of security that the apps can be simply turned off if the device goes astray.

David Linthicum makes this point on Focus.com:

Cloud providers will eventually get into desktop virtualization. It just seems to be the logical conclusion of where we're heading right now.

In other words, we're providing all these very heavy-duty IT services, such as database, OSs, and application servers on demand. It just makes sense that eventually we're going to provide complete desktop virtualization offerings that pop out of the cloud.

The beauty of that is that a small business, instead of having to maintain an IT staff, will just have to maintain a few clients. They log into a cloud account and the virtualized desktops come down.

It provides disaster recovery based on the architecture. It provides great scalability, because basically you're paying for each desktop instance and you're not paying for more or less than you need. So, you're not buying a data center or an inventory of computers and having to administer the users.

It has been noted recently that people are quite cavalier with their smartphones and other mobile devices. They just don't think about what can happen if they lose one. You can see from this infographic that small businesses are using apps of all varieties.

How will these kinds of apps be administered in the future? That's the big question which you can see start to surface when looking through an infographic such as this one from Formstack.

Most of this was due to the poor experience people had. You could clearly tell the difference between it and your standard desktop. But we are now seeing a new level of understanding about how to manage virtual environments that is translating into better experiences for the end user.

We better understand the storage issues and the other problems that can affect application performance.

So why is VDI in particular still not getting adoption in the enterprise world?

5 reasons are cited in a post by David Marshall of InfoWeek:

• VDI requires the desktop, storage, network, virtualization and data center guys to work together.
• The nature of desktops has changed, but many IT organizations are at a standstill, unsure how to respond.
• Some people believe VDI is too costly, complex, and ineffective.
• Companies are still looking to squeeze efficiencies out of their current investments.
• VDI has been slow to promote successes.

It's the confusion in the general market that has to be affecting adoption rates. Tablets are just hitting the market. Smartphones are gaining mass adoption. The choices are enough by themselves to cause a general lack of initiative. If the desktop market is already vexing, then there is not much else that can be done. That seems like the primary issue to resolve before considering a VDI solution.

This year, without a doubt, it's talk of the mobile enterprise and the idea of BYOC (bring your own computer) to work. This is an undeniable trend, but we also have to look at the issue objectively. We see a race emerging for the next platform to virtualize. Desktop virtualization is coming to the mobile landscape.

With that in mind, here are five advantages and disadvantages to adopting mobile virtualization in your enterprise environment:

5 Advantages of Mobile Virtualization

1. A strong desktop virtualization solution can wall off important data but still allows for ubiquitous use across the enterprise.
2. Mobile virtualization means you can access applications that are also on your desktop.
3. It can be less expensive than equipping people with a laptop.
4. Easy to work anywhere, any time,
5. People can use their own devices, which they often prefer to do.

5 Disadvantages of Mobile Virtualization

1. Switching between the OS and the virtual environment can cumbersome and unwieldy.
2. The OS can consume a lot of resources leading to poor performance of the virtualized applications.
3. There are actually few people in the enterprise who have smartphones or tablets capable of running a desktop-style virtualization environment.
4. Battery performance is still quite poor on most smartphones and tablets, limiting mobile capability.
5. New security policies and device ownership policies need to be established.

What do you think? Are there other advantages or disadvantages to consider?

The concept now appears to be spreading. A post on O'Reilly Radar points to emerging pilot programs that allow people to bring their own computers to work.

The story cites another reason for the interest besides letting people use the equipment they want to for work. And that's the cost issue and the amount of work it can take to manage hundreds if not thousands of devices.

The cloud is cited as a reason why it's possible for people to use their own equipment. But desktop virtualization also can come into play. We are seeing the rise of mobile virtualization and services that allow for remote devices to run hosted virtualization environments.

Won't that be a factor as well in the BYOC to work movement?

According to Virtualization Review, there are five approaches to desktop virtualization.

Operating System Provisioning: Deliverable to virtual machines in the datacenter or the physical computer at the desktop. An always-on network is required.

Remote Desktop Services (RDS): Virtualization is done in the data center. Requirements are minimal on the client side. Scalability is considered a plus with RDS.

Client Hypervisors: The hypervisor is on the desktop, allowing it to run multiple virtual machines. Brian Madden writes that running multiple virtual machines is a benefit but the real value is in the potential to run one master image. "If we can figure out how to provide a single, generic master Windows image to our users no matter where they are, their apps, data, and personality can be applied on-demand once they load the shared master image."

Client-side Hosted Virtual Desktops: The virtual machine runs on top of an existing operating system. It allows the user to access the desktop any time, anywhere. The virtual desktop is managed on a hosted basis.

Application Virtualization: The application is virtualized so it runs independently on the user's operating system. The application is isolated from the underlying operating system.

Of these, the hosted services are proving most popular. But what is right for you? What desktop virtualization environment have you found that is most viable for your organization?

If cloud-oriented OSs catch on, will desktop virtualization still be relevant?

Porting desktop applications to the Web a great solution to compatibility issues. But there are some situations when it's not practical. Not all legacy applications can be ported to the Web effectively. And though modernizing old desktop-based enterprise applications is a great goal, it's not always financially feasible. In some cases, it's cheaper and easier to use virtual machines. In these cases, running virtual desktops that are accessible from the Web could combine the two paradigms.

In some cases you might want to run Web applications within a virtual environment. Caching data locally, through HTML5 offline storage or by other means, can create security issues. You need to be able to encrypt and remotely wipe disks containing potentially sensitive data. Enterprise device management tools provide this capability, but there are some scenarios in which you may not want to wipe all the data on a device.

For example, employee-owned devices are becoming more common in the enterprise. Consider this scenario: employees using iPads they purchased themselves to access company Web applications. They use secure connections, but cache data offline. What happens when someone decides to leave the company?

You may want to wipe the employee's device, but that would mean wiping all the personal data from the device as well as all the company data. Perhaps you could make it a company policy that employees who use their personal devices for work have to agree to having their personal information wiped if and when they leave the company. But this could be bad for morale, and discourage staff from bringing useful devices to work.

If you're running a VM on the device, however, you can remotely wipe just the VM and leave the rest of the data on the device intact. It may make sense then to use a VM even when only accessing Web applications, so that all cached data can be selectively wiped. In this case, you'll want to run a local VM that includes features such as a VPN client and Web browser. VMware is working with LG on a solution along these lines.

Desktop virtualization has many uses. Even as new devices proliferate and applications move to the Web, running local or remote VMs will remain a relevant technology for years to come.

Photo by Yasunari Nakamura

It's a different world. Before, people kept their data on their own desktops and laptops. Now the data sits in shared storage environment.

George Crump, an analyst with Storage Switzerland, writes in Information Week that in many respects it comes down to thin provisioning and image management.

He writes that you can take advantage of thinly provisioned volumes so you do not have to allocate all the potential capacity, thus saving resources that you may need later. Thin provisioning limits the allocation to the initial storage. It means you do not have to use the full storage capabilities. In turn, that frees storage can be used when needed.

Crump:

"Additionally the amount of virtual desktop storage that is going to be needed is often difficult to predict, since so many optimization techniques will be applied. Having that space allocation dynamically eases this burden."

The second part has a lot to do with what is known as the "boot storm." A boot storm occurs when there is a sudden surge in demand across a virtualized network. This can happen, for instance, at the beginning of the work day when everyone logs in at about the same time.

The solution may be in creating master images that can manage hundreds of virtual desktops. The question becomes what is most efficient? Space needs to be optimized. And that means it's important to eliminate as much duplication as possible.

Crump maintains that by following these principles, a company can decrease its capacity requirement as much as 90%.

That's a considerable reduction.

Boot storms lead to a number of complex questions. Storage on a desktop or laptop is pretty inexpensive. It can lead to questions about why to use virtualization at all. That's a good question but the overall reasons for adopting desktop virtualization are far more numerous, especially in terms of security.

Photo by RobinUtrac

Desktop virtualization can provide non-PC devices with access to desktop resources. Through virtualization, we can carry our desktop applications with us across several devices.

One common way to handle desktop virtualization is to run the desktop environment as a virtual machine (VM) on a central server. The user will then access applications from the desktop remotely. This approach is sometimes called virtual desktop infrastructure or VDI. VDI enables admins to maintain a single environment for several users, and for those users to have a consistent experience from whatever device they use to access the desktop. This is helpful not only for access on non-traditional devices, but for scenarios when employees may use more than one desktop or laptop for their jobs.

Companies like Citrix and VMware offer products for remote access to virtual machines from iPads and other devices. Health care, thanks to electronic health records, has emerged as the leading vertical for post-PC use of virtual desktops. But other verticals will likely follow suit. iPads are popular in finance, and 26% of large enterprises plan to support tablet computers.

Another approach to desktop virtualization is to run VMs locally on a device instead of on a server. This makes sense when you want to run multiple desktops from a single high-powered machine. Does it make sense in the post-PC era, where many of the devices that we use are significantly less powerful than a typical desktop PC?

Possibly. Many smartphones and tablets now have CPUs that can meet or exceed the requirements of virtualization. Bitzer Mobile is already bringing virtualized applications to mobiles, and VMware and LG are working on a tool that will create virtualized instances of the Android OS that can run on top of an existing Android installation. These are steps towards bringing desktop virtualization to mobile devices, and tablet are particularly well suited for it.

In the meantime, remote connections to virtual infrastructures remain the most viable way to provide desktop resources to mobile devices.