Citrix and VMware Plans

Citrix and VMware are both moving fast on products that would make smartphones and tablets good virtualization clients, but the rival firms are taking very different approaches.

VMware, as part of its Project Horizon mobile computing effort, is basing its mobile client on the Mobile Virtualization Platform -- a Type II hypervisor designed to run on top of an existing operating system to support one or more additional virtual-smartphone OS/application-sets on top of that. VMware's MVP is also designed to manage multiple profiles, to allow customers to switch from work to personal to other virtual environments -- without losing configuration or applications set up for each.

Its Project Horizon, announced in August, creates a cloud-based set of personal configurations, applications and data that users can access from anywhere, from any device. Though primarily a desktop virtualization product, it can also make BYOD setups far more flexible, by not relying on the phone to contain all the data and applications, according to VMware.

VMware's approach is to work with to build its hypervisor onto their devices, focusing only on Android at this point.