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I’m not interested however, in the usual approach of employing VMware to run five different operating systems on a single PC to help me debug a piece of software that I’m developing. Instead I want to have the Operating System tucked safely away in a kernel with a controlling hypervisor that launches a Virtual Machine that contains each of my applications as and when I need them. This would separate my tasks so that the browser that I use for my banking wouldn’t also contain my Amazon password or details of the phone bill that I paid on-line. My firewall settings could vary depending on the task I was performing, so while I’m banking my browser would be locked down tighter than a drum but in the normal course of things when I’m surfing the net and have a gazillion applications carrying out their mysterious auto-update functions I could give in to the inevitable and accept that my PC is at risk from the outside world.

There are clearly big moves afoot in this department as AMD and Intel have been shipping processors that include hardware virtualization support and Microsoft has just made Virtual PC 2004 available as a free download.

A Microsoft spokesperson told me that Virtual PC 2007, (which will run on Windows Vista) will also be free of charge but VMware isn’t taking that lying down, and if you head to www.vmware.com, you’ll find that there are a number of goodies available for download, including the VMware player which enables you to ‘play’ with a pre-built virtual machine on your PC.

That’s neat but all of this software is intended to allow you to install multiple operating systems on your PC as a sort of compatibility mode, and I have no intention of doing that. Incidentally, should you install Virtual PC 2004 on a Mac so you can run Windows XP on a virtual machine alongside Mac OS X you’ll require a valid licence for your new OS. This sounds like a strong case for running Linux in one virtual machine as you can give it a go and if the wheels come off you simply pull the virtual plug on the virtual machine.

There is a strong rumour that Microsoft will include a hypervisor in a Windows Vista update in late 2008 or 2009 that will add virtualisation to the OS. I’d like to think that this is a way of radically overhauling the way that we use our PCs but I suspect that it’s actually a way of dividing Windows into virtual chunks so that businesses running Windows Vista desktop clients would only have to allow their office drones loose on a tiny virtual machine that ran their business applications. It will also allow the user to have access to one part of their PC while another chunk is being updated, much like having a mechanic working under your bonnet as you drive up the motorway, which would undoubtedly assist the Windows Update process.

You can’t blame Microsoft for using virtualisation to reinforce its own products but I am a little disappointed to find that Intel has forwarded its webpages on virtualisation for the desktop from www.intel.com/technology/computing/vptech to www.intel.com/vpro/index.htm, where it is clear that Intel sees virtualisation as a handy tool that will help System Administrators to use remote access to fix broken PCs. True enough, virtualisation can fulfil that role but it can do far, far more.

I feel that the rot set in when Intel dropped the codename Vanderpool for the more prosaic Virtualisation Technology, and similarly AMD dumped the Pacifica name for AMD Virtualisation. This is both evidence of a stunning lack of imagination in their marketing departments and also a sure sign that virtualisation is now aimed squarely at the corporate sector where fancy product names are a complete turn-off.

Me? I’m going to wait for someone to come up with Virtual Computer White Hot Phosphorus Edition! for Windows XP, but in the meantime I’ll take a quad-core processor, just to tide me over.

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