July 18, 2008 - 7:16 P.M.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Seriously.
In an ITWire tale, Paul Harapin, VMware's managing director for Australia and New Zealand said Windows is already being replaced by virtual appliances running on Linux. In ten-years, there will be no more Windows.
OK. I know people at Red Hat who would say that that's exactly what will happen. That's right out of the new Red Hat KVM-based virtualization playbook. But, someone from VMware saying this? Wow.
Harapin went on to say, it is reported that "When you go to Cisco and say you want a router and a firewall, they provide you with an appliance."Inside that appliance is probably a bootstrapped Linux operating system that they manage themselves, there's memory and all sorts of devices. If something goes wrong with that appliance, you don't open up the router and try to determine whether it's an OS problem or a memory problem, you simply call Cisco and tell them that's there's a problem with your appliance."
Of course, what he describes here isn't new. People have been building and selling server appliances for years.
Harapin's not just thinking servers though. He's thinking the end of all "large commercial operating systems." Instead, we'll use special-purpose computers that are customized to run a particular application or set of applications. "They essentially package that up as an appliance, a running server or a running application, and they send it to you."
Sound crazy? I don't know. Notice how many applications we're putting on the 3G iPhone? He may be on to something.
But, again, why is someone from VMware saying this? VMware, I've predicted, is going to get ran over by Microsoft Hyper-V on one side, and Linux with KVM and Xen on the other. The only role VMware plays in this is as a smear on the IT super-highway.
