Application Virtualization, Quad Cores and beyond

May 18, 2006
Rumor : Microsoft to buy the 2nd largest application virtualization vendor

2003
Microsoft promises to end the DLL hell

2005
Windows Vista to end the need for reinstalling due to "WinRot?"

2005-2006
Application Virtualization matures. Altiris, Softricity, Appstream and IBM are some of the players.

Application virtualization climbs higher in the value chain. Application packaging and deployment is easier, OS installation and deployment across 1000's of hosts is possible, checkpointing and moving applications across hosts is commercial, network based instant application provisioning is available, Virtualized file and registry sandbox works and licensing compliance makes sense.

2005
Citrix unveils big plans

2003
Rumor : Citrix to buy Softricity

2008
Quad core enters the market

1974
As per Goldberg & Popek x86 is not virtualizable.
Sensitive instructions should be a subset of privileged instructions.

1998
VMware virtualizes x86.

2009
Major hardware vendor declares the new 8 way (quad core) machine as the modern *mainframe*.

2009
Customers enjoy instant OS provisioning + application provisioning +
a lot more (i really mean a lot more) from a single dashboard.

2011
Microsoft releases *bare-metal* partitioning software.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to guess which z/OS will run x86 mainframes in year 2009.