I just read the following on SearchVirtualDesktop:
“Microsoft France’s technical and security director, Bernard Ourghanlian, mentioned in a French publication this summer that Hyper-V 3.0 will run as a client hypervisor on the desktop along with the MinWin version of windows”.
Wait; there are three things to note from that:
- Another Microsoft employee on the continent is talking out loud when they probably shouldn’t be (Amsterdam is the usual leaky dam).
- MinWin is a name that’s bounced around in the rumour mill for a while. It’s thought to be a completely stripped down version of a Windows desktop OS, similar to Windows PE but not intended just for deployment tasks.
- A client hypervisor.
It’s that latter bit that’s interesting. A new client-based hypervisor that is based on vNext of Hyper-V. Almost every Windows IT pro has wanted that since day 1. Right now we compromise with Windows Server & Hyper-V on the laptop or use VMware Workstation (or similar). Virtual PC just hasn’t been able to compare in the past, and the current release is focused on application compatibility rather than virtualisation for demos or labs.
A new MS client hypervisor that is a part of Windows 8 would probably bring an end to Virtual PC, I guess. And MED-V would see some sort of shift into being purely a VM distribution system … kind of a VMM-lite for client virtualisation.
Who knows! I guess we’ll have to wait for someone in MS Netherlands to feel like they’ve been scooped and blurt out some more information. I’ve a funny feeling that they might get hunted down by someone in Redmond 😉