Dell and The Virtual PCs

Virtualization softwares appeared out of the necessity of testing and running applications in different operating systems while having only a limited number of physical machines. Using such a an application enables software developers and users in general to run at the same time several operating systems on a single machine. As the technology behind the hardware components of a computer advances, it becomes easier to use several virtual machines on a single computer, thus saving hardware costs and using energy in a more efficient manner.

As the use of virtualization software expands from the enterprise and software developing companies to end users, Dell decided that machines with better support for virtualization are needed, as they would allow users to implement a better security policy, while being able to run and utilize a wider range of software products. The personal computer maker's chief technology officer from Dell, Kevin Kettler, confirmed that his company is interested in virtualization software and its applications and a line of consumer PCs that will be able to run different Microsoft Windows versions together with Linux at the same time in the development stage.

While Dell computers will surely be able to handle several virtual Windows and Linux machines, there is no word if they will be compatible with Apple's OS X operating system that is specially designed for Mac computers. "I can't speculate on that," Kettler said, who was cited by the news site technewsworld. "Virtualization is very powerful. It's an environment that would allow many different operating systems to coexist. You can interpret that however you would like."

Dell works with several partners to implement the virtualization technology into its computers. Among Dell's partners, there are EMC's Vmware and SWsoft. The virtualization software package from SWsoft called Parallels is already able to handle the Mac operating system, being one of the top selling programs aimed at Macs. Fusion is the latest virtualization product from Vmware that is able to run a virtual machine based on the OS X, so Dell machines running the OS X operating systems may not be far away.