Twitter update: Currently sitting in the Virtualization Lab at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. Watching some fun previews of the future of Virtualization.

Now my thoughts (note they may change by the end of the conference)

If you have been following what Intel and AMD are doing in regards to building the hypervisor into the CPU, then you will understand why Microsoft isn’t pushing Virtual Server. They are holding out for the CPU based Hypervisored supported longhorn Server virtualization. Is this going to give VMware too big of a jump start? Right now the only production ready product is from VMware (or SWsoft depending on your needs). Microsoft hasn’t even released a full version of Virtual Server, and supported it for production use.

The future of virtualization will be who can support the most diverse needs on the most minimum hardware. There are mentions that some versions of Longhorn won’t even require installing a gui (about time Microsoft). But as I see it the future lies is who has the most robust streamlined host platform. I would love to see basic server images, that are optomized for mysql (or MSSQL), mail server (or exchange), apache (or IIS), and file server (or samba). Then they can be tested and optomized further. There is no need to have each Virtual Machine contain full installation of Windows Server 2003. The security holes a complete operating system creates is not needed, and often too much overhead on a virtual environment.