Samsung and VMWare Bringing Virtualization to Android

jbrodkin writes with an interesting article in Ars Technica about virtualization and phones. From the article: "VMware's mission to bring virtualization to the mobile market gained a major supporter last week when Samsung pledged to use VMware software to build business-friendly smartphones and tablets. The project known as Horizon Mobile will let Android phones use virtual machine technology to run a second instance of Android, in much the same way virtualization works on servers and desktops. The user essentially has two completely separate phones running on one device, and can switch from the personal one to the corporate one by clicking a 'work phone' icon." There are others pushing alternative approaches to virtualization on mobile devices.

Wiping phones etc

[phorm]

One of the big issues in IT departments is that many people want to use their "personal phone X" as their work phone. I can somewhat understand this, as having two phones on my own belt-holster is quite irritating.

The big issue becomes, when a company's important data may be linked to the phone, who manages/owns the phone. If you have a corporate blackberry and an employee is terminated or loses the phone, you can wipe the phone via BES etc. It that phone is not necessarily a corporate phone, then you're going to have a pretty ticked off user (and possibly a lawsuit) if you wipe his/her personal stuff along with the phone. Also, what if the user jailbreaks the phone, etc

If personal/corporate space are separate, then your work space can be safely wipe the work VM. Similarly, an individual VM may have an entirely different privacy/security setting, jailbroken personal VM (and unbroken work VM) etc etc

My main concern would be performance. VM's nowadays are pretty efficient, but phones run on batteries and any overhead isn't cutting into what's already a fairly thin line.