Continuing on yesterdays theme of vrtualization supplanting operating systems,
I came accross an article today on Information Week titled
Hypervistors May Replace Operating Systems as King of the Data Center.

I’ve written for some time now that the role of the operating system is changing, as I noted in yesterday’s post. However, I have trouble with the author’s premise in this story. As I commented there:

“Hypervisors possess neither of the two factors make the OS strategic. First, software applications are not written directly to APIs specific to the hypervisor. Instead applications still run on Windows, Solaris, Linux or FreeBSD. Since all the development tools come with the OS, that seems unlikely to change. Second, users are beginning to understand that managing a data center full of VMs is a nightmare, prompting one blogger to refer to virtualization as the ghetto of the data center. This has created a market for VM management tools as the acquisition of Xensource yesterday points out.”