The old-fashioned PC paradigm has run out of gas. Conventional Windows systems are too hard to manage and pose too much of a security risk -- and sales are declining. For lack of a better alternative, you may need to live with Windows for the foreseeable future. But now that the sins of Vista and the antiquarian vulnerabilities of Windows XP have been corrected by Windows 7, what could possibly induce you to upgrade to Windows 8?
Why? Because that could yield the best possible solution for desktop virtualization. Today's prevalent model for desktop virtualization is VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), where Windows clients run in virtual machines on a server in the data center. VDI delivers centralized management and security, but it also demands heavy-duty server hardware, sufficient network bandwidth, and a constant connection between server and "client" (typically a dumb terminal), which rules out mobility.
A client hypervisor, which is what we think Hyper-V's role may be in Windows 8, runs a virtual Windows desktop on the client rather than the server. This would give you the ability to run without a connection to the server, so users can take their Windows virtual machines with them on a laptop or tablet, and IT still enjoys all the manageability and security benefits of VDI. In this scenario, the server component can be much less powerful than a VDI server farm, since it's basically backing up files and end-user configurations rather than running desktop virtual machines. More
