Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Bring your own device (BYOD) is now entrenched deeply into even the most standards-
oriented enterprises, and the need for regaining control of enterprise IT is increasing. To pro-
vide a quick refresher, BYOD refers to the use of personal mobile devices for work. We all
take our smartphones to work, and most of the time, they are not provided by our company;
they are our personal phones. We access company apps, email, and sometimes sensitive data
on our personal mobile devices. This is what BYOD means. A lot of solutions have sprung
up to streamline the use of personal mobile devices for work within enterprises, but no sin-
gle solution has succeeded in regaining the control that was a cornerstone of enterprise IT.
So how do hypervisors get into the enterprise IT equation? The answer lies in the very defi-
nition of what a hypervisor does—it abstracts physical hardware from software, making the
hardware agile and hence liberating IT administrators from directly managing every single
piece of hardware being used within an enterprise.
Mobile hypervisors aim to virtualize the mobile devices the same way traditional
hypervisors have virtualized workstations and servers. With an “instance” of the mobile
OS running on a personal mobile device of an IT worker, security risk can be minimized
without compromising the level of service for all enterprise apps being consumed within
an enterprise regardless of the device on which they are accessed.
VMware's yet-to-be-released mobile hypervisor was initially announced as a Type 1
(bare metal) hypervisor. This would mean that VMware would have to support all the
mobile processors, or at least a set of the most popular mobile processors, networking
chips, GSM processors, and a host of other components that make up a mobile device
out of the box. This is a tall order given that the current mobile device, most of which
are smartphones, is a mess to say the least. Mobile devices are refreshed several times a
year, with each device often introducing a host of entirely new hardware components that
power new features. The workstation and server markets are very different because new
releases are announced at least a year in advance, giving software companies enough lead
time to plan for supporting the new platforms.
A Type 1 hypervisor would itself yield enough technical challenges of its own, such
as, for example, the support for non-x86-based ARM processors, to start with. With often
little or no lead time, it would be difficult for hypervisor companies to support every new
smartphone hardware refresh. Therefore, VMware abandoned its plan for building a Type
1 hypervisor very early on. Building a Type 2 hypervisor is relatively less challenging than
building a Type 1 in the sense that the hypervisor can make use of the host OS's support
for every smartphone hardware refresh. Because every major smartphone OS, including
Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows Phone, readily integrates sup-
port for every new ARM processor as well as the host of other components that go into the
smartphone, it becomes much less risky for hypervisor providers to readily enable support
for new hardware releases.
There are, however, other, smaller companies offering Type 1 hypervisors for mobile
devices. Red Bend Software is one such provider; it offers VLX Type 1 mobile hypervisors
for smartphone manufacturers. VLX puts itself between the processor and what it calls the
high-level operating system (HLOS). It already has support for single- and multi-core varia-
tions based on ARM Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A17. This way, mobile device manufacturers
can enable support for new hardware without the need to upgrade HLOS because VLX
manages that by virtualizing the underlying processor.
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