VMware founder: Virtualization to transform IT

13.03.2006

There is a possibility that it could possibly shrink down. If you're just going to run Java programs, you don't need a huge operating system. The flip side is that some functionality, like resource management, has to be performed by somebody, and it's still a nontrivial bit of software.

Ten years from now, how will virtualization have changed the PC and server landscape? Virtualization will provide all the computation, all of the disks and all of the networks in your organization. You'll have decisions to make about when I buy more storage bricks or compute bricks based on scheduling of the workload I need to do. It might give me hints that I might need to buy more of this resource or the other, but it's all totally anonymous to me.

That's fundamentally different from the way we work today. Right now, people bring up a server and give it some name so they can personalize it. That will be gone in 10 years. You'll no longer think of a server as being something other than how you think of a disk in a disk array today.

Today, you put the world's most general-purpose operating system on [a server] so you can multipurpose it for anything you want. In a virtual world, you build virtual machines and just customize what you want to do. That' a pretty different way of thinking about how computing goes on.

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