Linux

Food for thought from David Berlind at ZDNet… This goes back to what I talked about at LinuxWorld in April where I articulated a vision along these lines.

Up to now, enterprise needs have driven virtualization. I believe this will change with the move to client virtualization—unbinding the OS from the platform opens up cool new opportunities on the desktop.

In a virtualized environment, multiple virtual machines run different environments on the same platform. One could be running a secure Web browser so that viruses or malware can’t trash the rest of the system; another could run a dedicated gaming environment with a software stack optimized for gaming; and yet another could run Media Server to serve up video content over a home network.

A fourth scenario is the segregation of work and home applications. Let's face it… even though most IT shops mandate that laptops are for business use only, the reality is that they are used for work and personal efforts. I have yet to run into a business traveler carrying two laptops—one for personal use and one for business use—to comply with their IT policies. Now imagine: as a mobile user with virtualization, you could maintain a home virtual machine and a work virtual machine on the same laptop. This certainly better segregates usage and is a more realistic approach to IT policies for our ever-increasing road warrior population. One other client opportunity is having a dedicated virtual machine to help with diagnostic or support services on a system.

David points out how valuable this concept could be when, say, migrating to a new computer where you would merely create a new VM for your new OS/applications and maintain a VM of your legacy OS/applications.

Returning to the scenario of a single application per virtual machine… what if you could purchase these preconfigured “personalities”—customized VMs—that plug into your virtualized client system. There is a clear opportunity here for the industry to seed the market with a variety of purpose-built VMs. I think this vision around virtualization is key to driving Linux adoption on the client. In fact, I challenged the Linux community in my April keynote to seed the market. In this new world, we will find Linux co-existing next to Microsoft on the same platform.

VMWare has already done work here on their Virtual Machine Technology Network (VMTN) where people have posted prepackaged VMs for general consumption. This is an early indication of where I think that things could move. However, software licensing will probably be the gating issue for these prepackaged VMs.

One of the biggest values of virtualization is the fact that it abstracts the operating environment from underlying platform. However, for this to be effective, we need some industry standards that minimize the associated snags. Watch this space… : )

Virtualization—it’s been around for years, so why is it suddenly so hot? Big changes are underway that will make it mainstream in servers and even client systems. What has changed?

First, the industry has started a transition from single- to multi-core processors… and on the horizon are similar trends in I/O. These trends will continue. So what do we do with all these extra processing units? Virtualization is a natural fit for all of these processing elements. One option is to partition a multi-core system—and dedicate a processor core to a specific “guest” OS.

Second, native support at the processor level will be standard… both Intel and AMD will have native support for virtualization. This will accelerate adoption, drive common instruction sets, and improve memory management.

Perhaps the biggest change will be in the lower cost of implementing a virtualized system. Virtualization software is more and more common—some is even free open-source. Moving forward, this means two things: lower cost of implementation, and more software options for customers... both of which are good for virtualization.

Virtualization will not be a passing fad. What will be interesting in the coming years is to watch how software licensing will need to change and how virtualization will lead to new ways to package and distribute software. With virtualization, a software developer can do some pretty creative applications in the contained virtual environment.

This is all pretty exciting stuff and it’s got us brainstorming new ways that virtualization can solve problems and advance the industry in both the client and the server. I’d like to hear where you think this is going. Expect to hear more from me on virtualization soon.

Update: Direct2Dell reader Fred asked for this video in a Linux-friendly format... you can download the Ogg Theora file here.