In three more years, the traditional operating system (OS) as we know it will not exist, said Chris Norton, VMware regional manager.
Virtualisation is transforming enterprise infrastructure, he added, at the ITWeb Technology Roadmaps 2008 Conference, held at The Campus, in Bryanston, this week.
“The role of the OS is changing and we are seeing a growing trend, where companies are running software as independent machines on the same physical device.”
There are five key phases that companies need to implement to become fully virtualised, Norton said. These are: separation, consolidation, aggregation, automation and liberation. Virtualisation is 99% planning and 1% execution, and the stages cannot be leapfrogged, he noted.
“The virtual data centre operating system delivers flexibility, speed, efficiency, and significantly cuts costs in hardware. By transforming the data centre into an Internet cloud, it becomes a flexible self-managing utility that can federate with the external computing capacity. This frees IT from constraints of static hardware mapped applications.”
Norton said a distributed resource scheduler automatically balances the workloads according to set limits, so if one hardware machine shuts down, so will the virtualised machine. However, within minutes it will restart on another physical host without any human intervention needed.
Norton predicted that, in the near future, virtualisation would be implemented on the mobile phone. This means a Windows mobile OS, with its own applications, could be run on the same device alongside a Symbian OS. “Virtualisation is going to become more applicable and is going to change the way people do business.”
Next year will see a significant amount of innovation, as well as an increase in virtualisation adoption, he predicted.
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