Windows will be killed by virtual appliances: VMware exec

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 16 July 2008 15:34

Business IT - Technology

The very thin layer of operating system used for running virtual appliances will almost certainly be a version of Linux, according to Harapin.

"Generally, organisations will take a Linux base and they'll cut it to see what they want. Then they'll bundle and build an appliance and ship that out."

Of course, it's not only VMware that is angling to gain control over the bottom layer between the hardware and self contained virtual appliance applications. Microsoft last month released its own hypervisor product, while Citrix, also became a player when it bought XenSource which funds the open source Xen hypervisor project.

Whether one or all hypervisors prevail, in the long run the days of one computer running one operating system with one set of applications specific to that operating system may soon be a thing of the past.