VMware announced that it plans to give cell phone users the possibility to run multiple virtual machines, with a small hypervisor program. The virtualization platform is called the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), which consists of a small, bare-metal hypervisor, about 20 KB to 30KB that will work with a number of mobile devices based on an ARM processor.

In order to perform this task, VMware acquired a company called Trango Virtual Processors, in October. The financial details of the acquisition were not released by the company, which kept quiet about the deal until Today. In addition to Trango, OK Labs and VirtualLogix are some of the other vendors looking to create hypervisors, the thin layer of software that makes virtualization possible.

When Xen.org released the 3.3 version of the Xen hypervisor earlier this year, there was talk of allowing this open-source hypervisor to work on smart phones as well. VMware did not provide technical details about the MVP, except the fact that it will support guest operating systems that include Linux 2.6x, Symbian 9.x and Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0. The Trango virtualization technology supports PowerPC, ARM and MIPS platform, with target devices ranging from mobile phones to networking equipment.

Even if the hypervisor is targeted at phone makers, VMware says that virtualization will provide benefits to consumers, and that’s because many people have a work phone and a personal phone.

MVP will allow them to have one phone with a work profile and a personal profile, and they will be able to transfer their profiles to a new phone. Furthermore, virtualization will let users download any application to their phones. VMware has not yet announced how much it will be charging for the hypervisor. The ability of the virtualization is an important step towards the transformation of smartphones into computers.