Some time ago Citrix came with their XenClient product… only a few thousand lines of code and one of the first client hypervisors.
Naturally I could see some great possibilities with it… Forget VMware Workstation, just put all your VM’s on one device and because the parent partition only takes up a very small part of the resources you can run more VM’s then when you have a Windows installation, VMware Workstation and only by that point you can start by loading some VM’s… that’s like a humongous amount of resources that are being used and you’re not running any VM’s yet!
Note: Don’t get me wrong, I still think that VMware Workstation is a great products and has lots of features in it that I gladly make use of.
But with a small parent partition like XenClient a baremetal client hypervisor would be very nice

Then, XenClient v1.0 came out… and it only had a hardware compatibility list smaller then my Saturday-morning grocery list. Next to that, I did not own a laptop (or desktop for that matter) that XenClient could run on.
Although a was a little disappointed, I kept my eye on the product. On a second version of the product, they must have expended the HCL with a lot of new hardware, right? Wrong!
The next version did have an increase in supported hardware, yet still my own machines were not supported.

But the concept of a client hypervisor made me wondering about the possibilities so I started looking for an alternative… one that could run on the hardware I owned at that time.
I found my solution in MokaFive, a bare metal hypervisor that runs on clients.
What about it’s HCL you ask?
Since that was my main problem with XenClient, I asked myself the exact same question.. and found out that MokaFive supports just about any hardware client I could get my hands on… a HP laptop, a Dell workstation… even my Sony Vaoi laptop was able to run MokaFive without any problems.

Since I am a little (whahaha!) Microsoft minded, I was overjoyed when I read the news that Windows 8 will include Hyper-V… in other words: Hyper-V on the laptop/desktop!
Perhaps still not a bare metal hypervisor, yet it would be a very nice way for me to replace my VMware workstation installation on my laptop.
Now why is that?

Let’s say that I’ve got 2 x64 Hyper-V servers at home on which I’ve got a complete environment running… like Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 AD / RDS / WSUS, SCCM 2007 R3, Citrix PVS / XenApp/ XenDesktop and some other stuff.
When I would go to an event and give a presentation, I could just migrate some of those machines to the Hyper-V installation on my laptop(s), pack my bags and GO!

What about the HCL list you ask…again?
Simple, anything Windows supports, Hyper-V will support… HCL problem resolved!