In an article published by iTWire, VMware has predicted that windows and other operating systems as we know them are on the way out, instead  replacing them are virtual appliances running on layers of Linux.

If you need a router and a firewall you go to Cisco, they provide with the appliance, if something goes wrong you call Cisco and they sort it.

Instead of buying a Microsoft commercial operating system;

“They use their own open source OS, a very thin layer of operating system. They take out all the unnecessary components that are in a large commercial OS because they’re customising the OS to optimise the use of their applications. They essentially package that up as an appliance, a running server or a running application, and they send it to you. If you’re running a VMware infrastructure, you just drop that on and there’s your server up and running.

If there’s a problem, there’s no operating system that you need to worry about because you simply call the software (application) vendor up, tell them there’s a problem with their VM, and they’ll snapshot the VM, patch it and send it back to you. So it’s an appliance but it just has no hardware around it.”

Paul Harapin sounds like the harbinger of death for Microsoft but what are the likelihoods of this actually happening? The interview also states that this will happen in both the business and consumer desktop markets. We already know that Microsoft released its own hypervisor product in Hyper-V last month, while Citrix, also bought XenSource.

In comments published by virtualization.info they

“..feel confident in saying that we are far, far away from the vision of a modular data center where the virtual appliance is the fundamental building block.”

There are many Issues affecting such an obviously different future of computing such as the lack of standardization and the complexity involved. Although the vision of Cloud Computing that VMware has is a noble one its a very long way off 10 years before we see changes like this.

If anyone disagrees or can describe how they think this could happen so soon please let me know.