Install VMware virtualization on your mobile phones

**Gluteus** · 19-11-2008

After servers, storage and workstations, VMware wants to bring virtualization onto mobile phones. It uses the technology of Grenoble Trango Virtual Processors bought in October.

VMware's decision to explore a new area of virtualization, that of mobile phones. To do this, he simply bought the company Grenoble Trango Virtual Processors, specializing in this type of technology. VMware market know-how in his new Trango supervise MVP (Mobile Virtual Platform). Developed primarily for processors ARM (architectures 4, 5 and 6) and MIPS (MIPS32 and 64), it fits perfectly with constraints of mobile low energy consumption and limited internal memory.

Beyond the technical performance would be to run Windows Mobile on a Symbian phone, for example, virtualization has a practical usefulness in many societies where employees make personal use of their phone or vice versa. IT departments could use MVP to create two profiles: one purely professional business applications of the company and the level of security needed to protect the corporate network and the other made available to the employee for a purpose Private own risk (including downloading games and ringtones). Virtualization playing the role some kinds of insulation between the two.

**Gluteus** · 20-11-2008

What is VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform?

VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that is embedded on a mobile phone to decouple the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It is optimized to run efficiently on low power consuming and memory constrained mobile phones. The MVP currently supports a wide range of real-time and rich operating systems including Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.

VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform will help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones to market faster. In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple personalities—for example, one for personal use and one for work use on the same phone.

Benefits to Handset Manufacturers

* Accelerate Time to Market: Today handset vendors spend significant time and effort getting new phones to market due to the use of multiple chipsets, operating systems and device drivers across the product family. This means the same software stack does not work across all the phones and considerable time and effort is spent porting the software stack multiple times, once for each platform, a slow and expensive process which slows time to market. Because VMware MVP virtualizes the hardware, handset vendors can develop a software stack with an operating system and a set of applications not tied to the underlying hardware allowing them to deploy the same software stack on a wide variety of phones without worrying about the underlying hardware differences. At the same time, by isolating the device drivers from the operating system, handset vendors can further reduce porting costs by using the same drivers irrespective of the operating system deployed on the phone.

* Easy Migration to Rich Operating Systems: Increasingly handset vendors and carriers are looking to migrate from proprietary operating systems to rich, open operating systems so their customers can choose from the widest selection of applications. With this transition to open operating systems, protection of trusted services such as digital rights management, authentication, billing, etc. is becoming an increasing concern. VMware MVP allows vendors to isolate these important trusted services from the open operating system and run them in isolated and tamper-proof virtual machines so that even if the open environment is compromised, the trusted services are not impacted.

Benefits to Businesses and End Users

* Multiple Personalities: Companies are under increasing pressure from employees to support employee-owned mobile devices. However, managing a wide variety of devices is complex in terms of both cost and security. The risks for not securing and managing employee-owned devices, especially if they contain confidential information is significant. VMware’s MVP will allow IT organizations to deploy a corporate phone personality that can run along side the employee’s personal phone on the same physical device.

* Persona on the Go: Smart phones are quickly becoming a combination of a PC and a wallet rolled into one package. A person’s phone persona—applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank info, credit card information, PIM all put together—is becoming much richer and more valuable. Consequently, the ability to protect and migrate personas will become an important purchasing decision. VMware’s MVP saves the persona as a set of files so that all the applications and data on the phone can be managed as a collection of files. People can then easily move their persona to a new device for a virtually painless upgrade.