THE LONG-DELAYED VISTA RELEASE will be the last monolithic operating system release we'll ever see from Microsoft, according to Gartner Group analysts. To keep Steve Ballmer's promise that Microsoft "will never have a five-year gap between major releases," as it did with Vista, something will have to change, and these analysts think they know what that change will be: They predict that in future Microsoft operating system releases, functions of the operating system will be split into chunks that run simultaneously in virtual machine partitions. In particular, a legacy kernel for running old applications will be split off from, and run in parallel with, the newer functionality—through virtualization.
Meanwhile in another part of the computing universe, thanks to Parallels Desktop (www.parallels.com), Vista itself is already running with impressive performance on Intel-based Macintosh computers. Remarkably, Apple even seems to be promoting Parallels over its own Boot Camp technology (www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/) as a solution for running your favorite flavor of Windows on a Mac. Several other vendors, possibly including Microsoft despite its claims to the contrary, are making this Windows-on-a-Macintosh market competitive and lively, because this technology removes one of the barriers to buying a Mac—through virtualization.
In the first six months of 2006, Virtualization.info, a relentless tracker of all things virtual, counted no fewer than 65 significant virtualization-related software releases. These range from SWsoft's award-winning operating system-level virtualization product, Virtuozzo 3.0 for Linux (www.swsoft.com), announced in early February, to Parallels' virtual hard-disk management tool, Compressor 1.0, announced in late June.
These are just a few data points that demonstrate that virtualization is currently a hot technology topic. Not only is virtualization itself hot, but it impinges on other hot topics: server farms, Quality of Service (QoS), high-performance computing (HPC), and software portability, to name a few. Virtualization touches such a broad range of other technologies partly because the word encompasses a broad range of ideas: It has been an umbrella technology.
