VMware predicts the death of the OS. Well, sort of.

If you’ve gone to one of the recent VMworld events, you might have heard once or twice that VMware predicted the death of the operating system. I’ve heard something to that effect, and found it quite interesting. Predicting the death of something so ingrained into my every day IT life for so many years really makes me take notice and ask more questions. I’m a virtualization freak, everyone knows that. But come on, the death of the OS? That’s huge! I need to know more.

InformationWeek ran with a story last August, “VMware Predicts Death To Operating Systems“. The article reads:

In the view of Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware, today’s modern operating system is destined for the dustbin, a scenario unlikely to please Microsoft or any of the Linux vendors. Rosenblum’s keynote on Thursday wrapped up the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, preaching the virtues of virtualization, which he believes will eventually make today’s complex, some would say bloated, operating systems obsolete. “It’s just going to go away,” Rosenblum said.

eWeek was also fortunate to have time with Mendel Rosenblum and wrote up an interesting Q&A piece only a few days ago called “The Hypervisor’s the Thing for VMware’s Rosenblum“. Again, the question was raised about the death of the OS. “Will the hypervisor eventually replace the operating system?” The article reads:

Clearly, the answer is no-the hypervisor is not going to get rid of the operating system.

The hypervisor that we are exporting is still a pretty low-level abstraction. Most programmers would much rather have a hierarchical file system that they can deal with instead of a raw disk, or the sort of raw memory of a machine versus the kind of nice virtual memory that we get on a modern operating system. Clearly, you want to have some kind of operating environment that makes that level of interface nice for the application that is going to be programmed for it and do the useful work.

I think the error of the one operating system that will be used for everything-[where] you buy a machine pre-installed with an operating system, and that operating system has to be as general and supportive of anything you might to do with it-is going to go away. Now, the operating system will be chosen by the applications.

Since I was no closer to figuring out whether or not my OS was going to be killed off from underneath me, I dug deeper. And since I use a Microsoft operating system, I figured I should ask someone at Microsoft if I should be worried.

I had the opportunity to speak with Zane Adam, Senior Director of Virtualization at Microsoft. Adam told me that the company hasn’t seen a drop in operating system sales and that they don’t anticipate that this will happen either. Ok, others are still buying the OS, so what else?

Adam said, “Microsoft has always viewed the hypervisor as a feature of the operating system and believe it will eventually become the default setting in the OS. The idea of the hypervisor as a separate, expensive offering is a barrier to customer adoption.”

He continued, “Our goal is to make Hyper-V broadly available, easy to adopt and cost-effective while delivering powerful systems management capabilities for customers’ physical and virtualized IT environments with the Microsoft System Center products. This combination of Hyper-V as a feature of Windows Server 2008 and the management tools that enable the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments through a single console, will help customers realize the full potential of virtualization.”

So then I checked in with an independent thinker and found a whitepaper and blog discussion by Dan Kusnetsky from the Kusnetsky Group titled, “Top 10 Virtualization Myths”. The number one virtualization myth in the paper – “OS is Dead?”

Kusnetsky writes:

Some of the statements made at VMware’s VMworld event convinced some people that operating systems are becoming an endangered species and that shortly they’ll be replaced by virtual machine software. This is a very unlikely scenario and let me address the reasons why this is so:

• Hypervisors are small operating systems or components of general purpose operating systems, such as Windows, Unix or Linux. Replacing one with another doesn’t mean that operating systems have gone away only that functions have been “re-hosted” to run on the hypervisor directly.
• Most applications have been written to use the facilities of an operating system and related system software. Until hypervisors offer all of those features, applications would have to be rewritten to internalize those functions. Who’s going to save money doing that?
• Hardware suppliers offer support based upon a well-tested list of hardware and software options. It is not at all clear that these suppliers would support an application stack running directly on a hypervisor. This is something the organization would have to discover on a case-by-case basis.

What seems far more likely to me is that virtual machine software, and all of the other layers of virtualization technology that the Kusnetzky Group has examined will take its place in the toolkit of a developer. When appropriate, such as when the organization wants to consolidate

applications from underutilized older machines onto a smaller number of newer machines, virtual machine software or a related technology, operating system virtualization/partitioning software, will be deployed.

Other virtualization technology will be deployed if high performance, scalability, agility or a unified management environment is needed. In these cases, virtual machine software either isn’t the right tool or needs help from another tool. Let’s not be overwhelmed by a single suppliers marketing hype and be driven to make short term decisions that have negative long term effects.

I’ve got my virtualization and I’ve got my operating system. Does that mean I have some sort of insurance policy? What do you think? Is the operating system doomed to die? Or is this marketing hype?