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VirtualLogix VLX Now Supports Symbian OS

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VirtualLogix today announced that its virtualization software product, VirtualLogix VLX, is the first to support Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for advanced data-enabled mobile phones. VirtualLogix will demonstrate a prototype configuration of the Symbian OS running simultaneously with Linux on several mobile platforms at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, on 21-22 October 2008.

The first product to support Symbian OS on a virtualized mobile platform, VirtualLogix VLX provides new opportunities to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and semiconductor vendors to leverage the benefits of virtualization in their phone product designs. As a member of the Symbian Partner Network, VirtualLogix is committed to developing ground-breaking solutions based on the Symbian platform for the benefit of the mobile industry.
VirtualLogix VLX for mobile handsets separates hardware management and application management on mobile platforms, allowing an application running on the Symbian OS to access a peripheral device managed by another operating system kernel, such as Linux. With additional security for financial and other high-risk transactions, VirtualLogix VLX for Symbian permits handset manufacturers and wireless operators to deliver more reliable mobile phones with advanced features to the mass market.

Preinstalled Hypervisors And The Future of Operating Systems

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Jay Lyman from The 451 Group (also check out the interview we did with John Abbott, Chief Analyst & Research Director at The 451 Group) wonders about the future of Linux distributions in the virtualization arena.

Now that VMWare announced that it will embed its ESX 3i hypervisor in different server platforms from HP, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and IBM, the question pops up how Operating System Vendors will deal with this change of platform.

VMWare certainly isn’t the only one with those plans, since Ian Pratt from XenSource mentionned exactly the same during his Fosdem talk.

How do the OS vendors react to this new feature ? According to Lyman’s blog post, Red Hat claims

it is hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel that will create that standard virtualization layer and capability.

and

Novell indicates VMware may be taking somewhat of a risk, though, since OEMs like HP will look to upsell to their own software to create and manage VMs, which ESX 3i can’t do.

A hypervisor still needs management tools, so that the guest OS’s can be initiated, stopped and migrated. Applications aren’t running on hypervisors (yet); they need an operating system for IO, Memory Management and Network stacks at least for the foreseeable future.

On a longer term, we’ll have applications running natively on the hypervisor for sure. But today Operating System vendors are hoping for a uniform and better way to support different available and upcoming hypervisors and off course those lightweight systems will also benefit from these improvements.

If I were in the Operating System market I wouldn’t worry yet at this pointis , just as with all other features that hardware vendors are selling it is still ‘only’ a feature. When ordering a Dell you can choose between different CPU’s, different hard disks, different Operating Systems and most likely in the near future, different hypervisors as well.