Bare metal hypervisors aim to combine the best of both worlds. They will also allow companies to install two separate desktop images side by side on a PC, meaning an employee could have one environment for work use and another for personal use, said Andi Mann, a research director with Enterprise Management Associates, in Boulder Colorado.

"It really enables this fundamental and clear separation of the corporate and the personal, and that's very significant," he said. "From a usability point of view it makes my personal desktop environment really my own, and from the corporate standpoint it allows them to lock down their desktop. So it satisfies both parties' desires."

VMware dominates the server virtualization market, but Citrix may have an advantage on the desktop because it has focussed much of its efforts on application delivery, Mann said. "My feeling is that Citrix is better poised to manage the virtual client environment," he said.

Citrix believes employees will increasingly use the same computer for work and personal use, so having a way to keep work and personal environments separate on a PC will be a big benefit, said Calvin Hsu, director of product marketing for Citrix's desktop delivery group. "This sits directly on the hardware and allows each virtual machine on there to be totally isolated," he said.

Claims that a Type 1 hypervisor is inherently more secure because it runs independently of the host OS need to be tested, however, Mann said. A skilled hacker could potentially gain access a Type 1 hypervisor from another part of the machine. "We can't tell until we do some penetration tests how secure it really is," he said.