Sooner or later even the graphic cards had to be virtualised.

To achieve this task three components are needed: a chipset providing some sort of I/O virtualisation technologies, a virtualisation platform that can support it, and a display card that can handle the requests to access its GPU coming from different virtual machines at the same time.
The first three companies that made this possible are Intel, which provides the I/O virtualisation technology (VT-d), Parallels, which provides the platform (Workstation) and NVIDIA which provides the GPU (Quadro with SLI Multi-OS).
Looking at this from a virtual desktop perspective the day is fast approaching where the percived limitations of using highly demanding applications will soon be over. There are many vendors now that are reducing the gap, and the benefits to businesses once this occurs will be massive. It is possible today to run many 2D and 3D applications with in a virtual environment on specific hardware, but once virtualisation companies such as VMware can achieve this through software then we will truely be there.
With VMware’s next release of its View product many 2D applications will be supported to run in a virtual environment either using TCX from Wyse a software verison of Teradici PC-over-IP or the RGS protocol from HP.
As you can see things are really starting to change for the virtual desktop and with the economy as it is, VDI could now start to offer the savings it always promised.

For those of you who haven’t heard of  Virtual Computer they are  a relatively new startup based on the East Coast in Westford, MA.  Their product offering in the form of NxTop claims to simplify your PC lifecycle management.

Wading through the sales and marketing spin reveals that under the hood NxTop is a bare-metal hypervisor built on top of Xendesktop.  Which shouldn’t really come as any suprise when you look at their investors, Citrix has invested $15 million dollars in them.

The bare metal hypervisor is depending on your viewpoint a nice feature, gets rid of the bloat that you get with a traditional OS.  Then the features and functions that make up NxTop (some of which they claim are unique and in reality are not) give you a solution that uncannily resembles VMware View!

The race is on, it is just a question of who gets there first the tortoise or the hare!