The nation is waiting now as the deadline draws near and the copies of Microsoft Vista hit the shelves in late January. But many of us, who have been waiting for this since 2003 when it was originally supposed to be launched have to sit back and wonder, what is in store next for Microsoft.

Now looking ahead what is vista lacking? Native Virtualization.

I think the next version of Windows you see on store shelves after vista will have native virtualization support. As the variety of programs people use on a day to day basis increases, and not every program is going to be 100% percent forward compatible with newer operating systems you will see a need for virtual machines running older operating systems.

The next version of windows will have a live virtualization migration tool, which will take your current hard drive, copy it into a virtual machine and allow you to boot your “classic” computer on your new system. So you can go back and open Windows 98 with Aol 7 and get your mail from 6 months ago without a problem.
The multi user options will allow each user to have a virtual machine. When they choose logout, instead of keeping those processes running in the background it will halt the virtual machine, move that data to permanent storage and load up the next users virtual machine. This also means if the power flashes there is no loss of data for that user who is logged out, because their virtual machine is shutdown and stored to the hard drive.

Roaming virtual machines are going to become a possiblity soon. Now imagine in a school setting, a student logs into a machine, but what he is really doing is loading his virtual machine from a central server over a gigabyte Ethernet. Unlike current methods where his list of documents and bookmarks might move with him, now the whole machine moves with him. He can install software, delete software, modify the registry, update programs, all because the virtual machine is his own. At the end of the school year he could burn the virtual machine onto a dvd and bring it home with him and load it up on his home computer.

Thumb drive virtual machines, sure why not? If the computer has a standardize bootloader with usb support just enough files to get to the point of reading the os off a thumb drive and dropping it all onto local memory, where it will be much faster then a standard hard drive. With constantly dropping memory prices you may see a situation where IDE Flash drives become popular. If you need 2 to 4 gig of very high speed storage this is an option. Solid state ram drives will come back into popularity as the prices drop.

Those are my predictions in regards to Virtualization Technology and Microsoft Windows, please feel free to comment on these, contradict them or just let me know what you think.