iTWire published today a more than hazardous prediction coming from VMware: the end of Windows and other monolithic operating systems by the next 5-10 years.
The source of such statement is Paul Harapin, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, who predicts the virtual appliances as capable of replacing the existing OSes.
Harapin adds that the change is already happening:
According to Paul Harapin, managing director for Australia and New Zealand at VMware, Windows and other large operating systems are already starting to be replaced by virtual appliances running on thin layers of Linux.
VMware launched the virtual appliance concept in February 2006 but in over two years virtualization.info couldn’t record a single customer that confirmed a full adoption of the technology (if there’s any we invite to comment this post and give an extensive feedback).
The feedbacks we got in these months confirm that at today the virtual appliance are seen as no more than another distribution vector, comparable to DVDs and USB keys.
We 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.
And this partially depends on the many issues that hinder the evolution of this technology: the lack of standardization (a challenge that the new OVF format is attempting to address), the many security risks that VA imply (at least in the current implementation), the complexity of the fine tuning, and much more.
While data center modularity (which doesn’t necessarily imply the disappear of Windows) certainly is a key milestone to reach the cloud computing infrastructure that VMware envisions, the timeframe to reach it seems much longer than mere 10 years.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.