I just guffawed out loud.\u00a0 My co-workers are giving me funny looks.\u00a0 It’s kinda the same reaction I had when Steve Ballmer proclaimed in his TechEd NA 2010 keynote that MS wanted nothing to do with you if you weren’t into cloud services (shareholders everywhere probably spat up their coffee).<\/p>\n
OK: I have a pro-Microsoft stance on a lot of things and you may have noticed I criticise them too (see above).\u00a0 You can see what my favoured virtualisation solution is with too much difficulty.\u00a0 But, I do recognise there is a place for VMware (whcih I have used), Citrix (who have done some cool stuff), and Linus as an OS.<\/em><\/p>\n I’ve just read<\/a>\u00a0“VMware CEO Paul Maritz has questioned the relevance of the operating system … is a clear indication that operating systems such as Windows and Linux are no longer as important as they once were”<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 The general jist of the pitch is that the OS is dead.<\/p>\n Huh!\u00a0 OK …\u00a0just what exactly is installed in all those VMs that are running in your Fortune 1000 customer sites?\u00a0 It is fair to say that Platform-as-a-Service has given developers more options.\u00a0 The problem with PaaS is that it’s a lockin mechanism.\u00a0 Marketing people call it stickiness<\/em>.\u00a0 The idea is your customer cannot leave because its too difficult.<\/p>\n Cloud computing such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Amazon E2C, etc) are based on virtualisation, such as VMware ESX, MS Hyper-V, and (primarily) Xen (variants).\u00a0 That’s traditional VM technologgy that requires an OS.\u00a0 That OS needs to be installed, secured, managed, updated … all the stuff you do with physical machines.\u00a0 That workload goes nowhere.\u00a0 The OS is critical.\u00a0<\/p>\n If cloud computing takes off (and I really don’t think it’s going to have the full impact that evangelists are proclaiming – see terminal services\/Citrix in the late 90’s) then it’s going to be a combined solution…. PaaS and IaaS.\u00a0 But the OS and associated management are going nowhere.<\/p>\n By the way, I’ve seen some tweets where VMware are pitching View as a complete VDI solution.\u00a0 OK, so you have some machines that users will log into (more operating systems!!!).\u00a0 You’ll not that Citrix take a different view: those operating systems require some form of management and automation.\u00a0 It just so happens that these are usually the same mechanisms that are available for managing physical PCs.\u00a0 Without that … can you imagine a PC network of hundreds or thousands of machines with no management?\u00a0 No centralised patching of the OS.\u00a0 No application deployment.\u00a0 No software\/license auditing.\u00a0 And so on and so on.\u00a0 That’ll lead to a real happy user base \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n My advice: don’t burn your WIndows\/Linux books just yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just guffawed out loud.\u00a0 My co-workers are giving me funny looks.\u00a0 It’s kinda the same reaction I had when Steve Ballmer proclaimed in his TechEd NA 2010 keynote that MS wanted nothing to do with you if you weren’t into cloud services (shareholders everywhere probably spat up their coffee). OK: I have a pro-Microsoft … Continue reading “VMware’s Paul Maritz’s Keynote Comments”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[195],"class_list":["post-10835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtualisation","tag-virtualisation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t