Virtualization Daily

Following up on my post “The OS is under attack” with some input from a few more people.

First Scott Lowe has posted his thought on the subject to his blog, in a post titled the future of the OS.

I guess that depends on how you define the operating system. I tend to agree that virtualization is the future. Operating systems as they exist today simply can’t take full advantage of the powerful hardware that is coming out of Intel and AMD, with even more powerful hardware just around the corner (think quad-core CPUs). This is especially true in the datacenter, where VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure shines. In the datacenter, where multi-socket multi-core CPUs, gobs of RAM, and terabytes of SAN storage reside, virtualization (in my opinion) is a given. But what about on the desktop? Is it a forgone conclusion on the desktop as well?

John Troyer also chimes in on the VMWare blog and wonders what the future holds for the idea of obsoleting the OS on the desktop.

But we digress a bit from the central question here — what about virtualization on the desktop? When two or more OSes are sharing your devices and now your display, what is the role of the OS? Who are the winners and the losers?

That seems to be the question of the day. I agree with Scott that virtualization on the server is a given at this point, five more years and the idea of deploying on raw hardware will be obsolete, but the desktop is a different beast and it’s not as clear cut what will happen. What we can see right now though, is a path away from Windows for many users. Mac OS X when combined with Parallels, or the under development, VMWare Fusion presents a pretty compelling platform for users looking for something different. With that combination, you can run all your Windows software, all your Linux software, all your Solaris software, all your BSD software and all the incredible Mac OS X software at the same time. That’s a pretty compelling advantage and something that just one year ago simply wasn’t possible. However the idea of not having a real OS like Mac OS X running on the hardware seems hard to imagine at this point. I clearly see advantages to it, but at the same time there are a lot more hardware access issues on the desktop than there are on the server. So it’s really hard for me to see replacing Mac OS X with a hypervisor, unless that was an Apple designed hypervisor that’s heavily optimized for the sharing of hardware. Today that doesn’t exist, but just a year ago, neither did the possibility of running Windows at near native speeds on your Mac.

Switching gears a little, we also have John Milan writing for ReadWriteWeb who says.

Except in 2007, it won’t be Bill Gates delivering the memo. The mantle of technical leadership, and compelling memo writer, has fallen on Ray Ozzie’s shoulders. His greatest test? Slowly defocusing Windows bound to a PC and refocusing on a portable, virtual machine ‘Windows’ fueled by .NET and online services. My company worked with Ray’s former company, Groove, for many years and while I haven’t had a chance to sit down with him, I know he’s very capable technically. But it’s the selling part - the clarity of vision, the sureness of direction, the respect of employees, the sheer force of personality - that is extremely difficult for 99.9% of the world. In that respect, Bill is an exceedingly tough act to follow.

You have to read the whole article, but basically he’s expecting Vista to be the last monolithic Windows and that in the future the OS will move away from the hardware. So yep, the question of the day is whether or not virtualization will take over the desktop space like it is on the server?