On September 10th, 2008, Mendel Rosenblum, VMware's chief scientist, resigned, but just before he left the company, there was an interesting patent application filed which is still not issued. It has to do with Virtual Appliance Management.
US Patent Application No. 2008/0215,796
Title : Virtual Appliance Management
Publication Date : Sep 04, 2008
Application Filed : Mar 06, 2008
Abstract Text
Various approaches for virtual appliance management are described. In one approach a virtual appliance repository stores one or more virtual appliances and is coupled to the host computer via a network. A storage device stores a transceiver program capable when executed on said host computer of requesting and receiving the virtual appliances, and generating for each received virtual appliance a respective local copy on the host computer of each received virtual appliance. The local copy is private to the host computer. The transceiver program further binds the virtual appliances to the host computer and obtains user data relevant to the virtual appliances. The transceiver program runs each of the virtual appliances from the respective private local copies on the host computer.
Sounds like Cloud Control......
