Where should virtualization vendors focus their efforts?

Summary: Virtualization vendors have lost focus on the most important aspects of computing and continue to focus on the one aspect that isn’t important. Security, applications and infrastructure should be their focal points.

Businesses have a high sensitivity to security right now with all of the hacks and attacks going on. Vendors need to do something about it. Towards a more secure hypervisor, VMware chose to use the ESXi model for their newest incarnation of vSphere: Version 5.0. It is a great idea to decrease the hypervisor footprint to deep down a running kernel.

If a company other than VMware is going to make headway in the virtualization space, they must focus on security–hypervisor security, virtual machine security, application security and service security. When a company purchases virtualization research, its officers and clients need to know that their investment is secure.

We need for hardware vendors to deliver virtualization-optimized architecture on every component. Yes, this means re-engineering and re-architecting currently available hardware however with all of the new cloud-based businesses and businesses wanting to leverage virtual workloads, it’s no longer an option not to do it.

The future of end-user computing

Application virtualization is the future of end-user computing. Users will purchase computers with lightweight operating systems, just as Android, iOS, Windows Mobile and rely on applications over the Internet. In a disconnected state, the operating systems saves data locally and synchronizes it in a connected state. Get on board. Applications, not operating systems is where it’s at.

These three out of the eight listed are the most important focal points. All however one is vitally important to the nearly and far future of computing: Desktop. If you’re focusing on desktop computing from an operating system point-of-view, “you’re doing it wrong.”.

Post-PC era

It’s not a post-PC era, it’s as a matter of fact a post-Desktop OS era. Stop messing with and blowing money on desktops. No one cares. No one’s gonna care. Unless you’re in the business of creating the then generation of lightweight operating system, stop it.

By devices, I mean phones, tablets and other mobile computers. We need security. We need native performance. We need applications. Anything else is yesterday’s news and a waste of money.

Full-time Windows

Kenneth 'Ken' Hess is a full-time Windows and Linux system administrator with over 15 years of experience with Mac, Linux, UNIX, and Windows systems in large multi-data center environments.