The news is that Hitachi has announced a new level of hardware virtualization, which could possible eliminate the need for any Virtualization software in the enterprise environment. By moving the hypervisor completely to the cpu core, it will eliminate the base os. Most products, besides some base os solutions using a custom os, require either windows or linux in its full potential to be running underneath all of the virtual machines. By moving this processing to the hardware it will improve performance greatly. There aren’t any publish statistics yet but it will revolutionize the industry. Why pay for software which is prone to viruses, crashes, and extra cpu cycles when it can be done by hardware.

But the real question is….
Why are we virtualizing to begin with?

The power of running multiple systems on a single box is very powerful. It is awesome for testing and deploying multiple servers on a single rack unit. But before virtualization became popular, people where running database, webserver, ftp etc on just one system for many years. Why have we tried to get away from this, because new software is CRAP. Software is no longer written as well as it used to be, and really depends on allowing the operating system do too much of its error checking. It seems like the reason why people don’t run databases and exchange on the same box is if a virus comes through and eats up the cpu, it will have the effect of an D.O.S. attack, making the database unavailable to other users. If some company decided to start from scratch, building dedicated enterprise servers to provide database, email, and file server capabilities to the enterprise network I really don’t think they would look anything like what we have now. I like Suns idea of containers, which as I understand it, the services run independent of each other isolated, but while on the same host operating system. All applications should be running in isolation. Also, there would be a finer degree of control. Why do a huge, probably over 85% of servers are running process for no reason. I have heard that finally windows server will be able to run headless. Something unix has been able to do for a very long time. GPU don’t belong in a server. Thats all for now, more on this later.

Sources:
Can new server hardware make virtualization software obsolete?