Thursday, January 3, 2013

Virtualization, Gaming, and the Cloud

Welcome to 2013 and in this new year I would like to put together my own prediction of what should be a big year for Virtualization, Gaming, and Cloud convergence.
For the record I am currently a VMware Certified Instructor and Consultant.

In case you missed it here are the players and what they did in 2012:
-  Valve Corporation has released Steam ( http://store.steampowered.com/ ) for Linux gamers.

- VMware ( http://www.vmware.com/ ) has made it possible to have NVidia GPU  support in Virtual Desktops (VDI).
Press Release Here:
http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-vmworld-emea-nvidia-joint-10-19-11.html

- Gamers want to be able to play games without having to spend a lot of money on hardware/network connectivity and want to be able to play anywhere at anytime.

Here is what I would love to see:

A partnership between VMware and Valve that would create Virtual Desktops so that Valve would no longer need to develop for various platforms. The gamer logs into their Steam account which launches a virtual desktop. Think of a game library or portal that uses VMware Horizon to display what games you have access to and can launch them at the click of a mouse or a tap of a finger.
The game launches and plays on a virtual desktop and gamers can connect or disconnect at will and play from any platform from phone to tablet to desktop.
This would allow seamless switching between gaming platforms and eliminate an incredible number of support and development issues.

Who wins?

VMware will get to show the world how "The Cloud" really works beyond the Business Enterprise.

Valve will get to penetrate the gaming market in a way that makes the desktop obsolete and introduces truly mobile gaming the transforms the definition of the gaming platform and removes limitations based on location.

Gamers will get the benefits of running games on server class systems inside of an architecture that guarantees network/storage/graphics performance on any platform they choose to use to access their game library.

All I need to know is who do I/we need to call to make this happen?




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