Dell hasn't decided yet whether the hypervisor will ship standard with the devices or be sold separately, Vega says.

Management benefits of having a hypervisor running on client machines include keeping desktop images centrally stored and encapsulated as virtual machines. As such, their security settings can be altered -- patches applied, security settings updated -- once on a server then deployed or synched to remote machines.

The virtual desktop model employing a hypervisor differs from the model where the laptop or desktop has a thin client that receives images of the desktop from a server shared by other virtual desktops. Because machines with their own client hypervisors have dedicated computing power, they can deliver better application performance and graphics, Citrix says.

Citrix says its client hypervisor will support multiple isolated virtual desktops per machine, making it possible to deploy a corporate virtual machine on a device that has a VM containing personal data and applications without risk of one corrupting the other.

Because these virtual machines are encapsulated, they can be readily encrypted, Bowker says, making them more secure if the machines being used are mobile or not managed by the corporation.