By separating a user's persona from the underlying desktop, it can be freely migrated to another physical desktop, or ideally, to a virtual desktop. This is the same approach used in application virtualization where a given application is packaged via ThinApp for example, and is now untethered from the underlying operating system.

The following figure is an illustration that shows the decoupling of the user's persona from the physical desktop:

A few of the options to untether the persona from the operating environment of the physical desktop are as follows:

In this state, a physical desktop still contains installed applications, but customizations and other details that comprise the user's persona reside outside of the guest OS.