...but that never has caught on widely. The greater challenge may come from an entirely different way of attaining the same centralised goals: cloud computing.
Cloud computing, in which applications run over the web in web browsers rather than natively on PCs, provides another way to access corporate resources. It cannot do everything, but it is gradually maturing as a way to run software. And it has the advantage of requiring only a modern browser rather than VMware's software.
Virtual phones
At VMworld, chief technology officer Stephen Herrod and Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of emerging markets, demonstrated virtualisation on a mobile phone. Specifically, they showed a mobile phone using Windows CE 6.0 run Google's Android operating system, too.
"Why not virtualise the phone itself?" Herrod asked. "It's really becoming more of a mobile personal computer."
VMware has two arguments why this would prove useful.
First is a mobile-phone version of the employee-owned IT vision, where a mobile phone could run corporate programs and access corporate resources in one mode and be used for personal tasks in the other. VMware touts two basic approaches — one in which the second operating system runs at the same time, and one in which the phone could switch between the two modes.
The second is programming. Coders face a minefield of complexity when it comes to writing software that can work on many phones. Visa, which demonstrated a mobile application for checking credit-card transactions running with VMware's mobile virtualisation technology, expressed support for VMware's help in this domain.
The variety of "handset manufacturers, infrastructure and telco restrictions... makes the mobile space, while exciting, very daunting," said Peter Ciurea, Visa's global head of product development. "Anything that opens the possibility of easy portability we're very excited about."
But here, too, VMware's ideas face complications. Offering a simplified foundation to programmers does not mean complexity vanishes — it just means VMware has to shoulder the burden through its software. And virtualisation takes computing horsepower.
Of course, hardware steadily improves. Krishnamurti's demonstration used a phone with 256MB of memory, but he said in an interview that VMware's technology also works with 128MB.
VMware also showed Wyse Pocket Cloud software running on an iPhone in conjunction with VMware View to give a view of a Windows PC desktop, though the demonstration showed nothing more than panning around the desktop view.
More expansion
So VMware will not have a simple time conquering clients, though it has a credible shot at it.
Fortunately for the company, it also has many other irons in the fire.
Many of these are closer to VMware's core server virtualisation business. The company is gradually expanding from its initial phase of adoption, in which virtualisation was used to increase server efficiency, to a more elaborate idea in which the technology leads to a more flexible datacentre.
For example, virtual machines can be moved off busy servers to idle ones during peak hours of activity, then moved back, and the idle ones can be shut down when demand slackens. Increasingly, that sort of optimisation is an automated process governed by policies set up in advance.
VMware is also trying to stake a claim on another facet of cloud computing, in which companies can shift workload from their own datacentre's virtualisation foundation to one housed at a remote datacentre operated by a third party.
At VMworld, the company announced that AT&T, Savvis, Terremark and Verizon Business all are offering that cloud service. VMware said it is trying to standardise its cloud-foundation interfaces through a standards group called the Distributed Management Task Force.
The upshot is that VMware is competing more than ever with Microsoft. That is not just because Microsoft offers virtualisation software, but because Microsoft is accustomed to being one of the primary software foundations of the computing industry.
VMware is usurping Microsoft's position with many of its products. It has relationships with those who make computer hardware for computers, storage and networking, and is building ever-stronger relationships with corporate IT administration staff.
While Microsoft's Windows and management tools for the operating system are not being relegated to the sidelines, VMware's approach can make them more peripheral.
The company has plenty of work to make its full vision a reality. But it is working from a position of some strength.
Talkback
Issue that all these up and coming projects face is unanimously is trust, will the people on the ground trust them to hold there data in any shape or form? and what happens when disagreements arise between the customer and the hosts?
These will be the real issues that make or break this technology when involving the people on the ground, so all those lies your sales teams have spun over the years will come back to bite you on the ass, when they start punting this one.