http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1685761
This is really interesting from the perspective of integrated media devices, netbooks, palmtops (all served by Intel's Atom and Pineview), as well as the ‘hybridisation’ of richer processing platforms (Intel's vPro) - which is seeing potential in touchscreen media centres (a number of which were exhibited at CES2009).
A strong motivation for bare metal client virtualization is to separate the software from the hardware and support better IT efficiencies (less maintenance since the OS image can be refreshed easily and if something goes wrong with the OS or applications it doesn't require a personal visit from an IT tech to fix) and to enable separation of business OS (where corporate apps run) from personal OS (where Live, iTunes, etc., run). This model presumes a need for some kind of significant local processing capability for image manipulation, corporate apps, etc.
Notebooks are ideal for this cloud model since they can lend resources to the overall experience. At the same time, netbooks, integrated media devices and palm tops are well-suited for this model as they as they typically have lower local storage capacities (albeit not necessarily lower processing capabilities), thereby implying that the resources for those things should be in the cloud. Of course, as lower capability machines, the extra overhead of virtualization would be undesirable.
A more interesting potential for the symbiosis of bare metal client hypervisors and cloud computing would be to use the cloud as the provisioning server for the images, though that can raise issues of bandwidth and latency in certain environments. Yet, consider the value to IT, especially with an increasingly decentralized workforce. IT can push out a new desktop VM whilst the user is actively using the old desktop VM, when the download is completely some workflow mechanism recognizes that a new VM is available and boots to the new image, but keeps the older image to allow rollbacks. This is seamless for the user, painless for IT, nobody needs to travel to the Head Office to get their laptop imaged.
In the end, bandwidth shouldn't be that much of a problem, as in the near future, companies leveraging the cloud for production environments would usually have large dark-fiber connections from the enterprise to the cloud, also they would use WAN optimization with caching for branch offices. Therefore, deployment of virtual desktop appliances from the cloud wouldn't be more difficult than traditional desktop deployment. In fact, it would be easier and faster. If applications and user profiles are no longer coupled to the OS, and the OS image is no longer driver specific, companies can use a single generic desktop image for each & every user. When cached in every (branch) office the provisioning of the OS image is mainly limited to the speed of the device itself for disk writing.
