I attended VMware CTO Steve Herrod's talk on VMware's roadmap today. Some of the more interesting information presented was already published on VMware's web site.
Open Virtualization Interfaces
If VMware and/or other vendors supporting the open standards can deliver on this then the deployment of complex software packages becomes a lot easier. Packaging, deployment, upgrades, tracking and other software management chores make up a substantial fraction of the total cost of software. Third party vendors who can do this in a consistent way for all software packages will be able to achieve economies of scale that will allow them provide current levels of service at much lower costs than are currently possible.
Management Interface
Monitoring
Discovery and inventory of virtual machines and host operating systems
Associations between entities
Synchronous and asynchronous performance monitoring
Virtual Machine Lifecycle
Create/delete
Configure (assign virtual devices, setup networks, assign resources, etc.)
Clone (create a copy of an existing virtual machine or virtual machine template)
Migrate (move a virtual machine from one host to another)
Snapshot/revert (checkpoint of virtual machine/revert to checkpoint)
Power operations (on/off/suspend)
Multi-host Virtualization
Virtual infrastructure is the ideal foundation on which to build 'utility' or 'adaptive' solutions. Thus, models for virtual infrastructure must address questions such as how to represent a collection of physical servers acting as a single compute resource and how to understand resource allocation in the form of flexible and hierarchical resource pools.
Storage and Networking
It is important that management solutions not break into incompatible silos of storage, network, and server. To this end, emerging standards for managing virtualized servers need to leverage and interface with existing work on network and storage management.
Host Management
As new hardware devices are developed and introduced to virtual infrastructure, the relation of those devices to other components - both virtual and physical - must be clarified and the models for virtual infrastructure extended accordingly.
Microsoft's Approach to Virtualization
Microsoft's Virtualization Consolidation Announcement says Microsoft Application Virtualization, formerly known as SoftGrid Application Virtualization, is a more fine-grained virtualization solution that complements Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Instead of virtualizing an entire operating system, Microsoft Application Virtualization virtualizes only the applications. Microsoft Application Virtualization allows any application to run alongside any other—even applications that normally conflict, multiple versions of the same application, and many applications that previously could not run in parallel.
MS Open Virtual Hard Disk Spec
Further Reading
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