Virtualization Daily

PC World is running a very short bit about the future of the OS wars and how in the future the OS won’t really matter any more. The PC World article doesn’t really have much in the way of content, but the point is spot on. Owners of Intel Macintoshes with Parallels installed have already realized the benefit of being able to run any set of applications that you want regardless of the operating system. It’s not perfect at this stage, but it has made the Mac the single most powerful computer that you can own.

On the server side this difference will be even more noticeable. I believe we’ll see the OS on the server replaced by a very thin layer that just manages the running of virtual machines as VMWare ESX does today. So when you buy a new server, you won’t be choosing between Windows, Linux or some commercial version of Unix, you’ll be choosing between VMWare ESX, Xen Enterprise or Virtual Iron and then simply dropping whatever virtual machine images you want on top of that. In fact things like Virtual Appliances will make the question of the OS, even at the virtual machine level, more or less irrelevant. You’ll simply buy the application that will ship as a preconfigured appliance and drop it into your VM manager. In that scenario you may not even know what OS is running the application, and the reality will be, that’s the way it should be. We accept this situation now for hardware appliances, virtualization and virtual appliances now bring the same benefits for purely software based solutions as well.