Dell plans to embrace virtualisation

THE LOW-COST PC assembly business Michael Dell started in his college dorm seems poised to plonk virtualisation into both servers and consumer boxes. Speaking at LinuxWorld, Dell CTO Kevin Kettler let slip that the company plans to sell machines that will boot a hypervisor from flash memory.

Virtual machines have been around for a long time. IBM mainframes have had its hardware assisted VM operating system, now Z/VM, for over twenty years. Big iron shops routinely use Z/VM to run multiple images of IBM's Z/OS, or hundreds of Linux instances, on a single hardware complex.

Virtualisation can enable running two or more OS images simultaneously on one hardware system. This is an advance over dual-boot systems, which have also been with us for quite a while. If an OS is also burned into flash memory, a system can boot faster and install with one less hard disk.

The attraction for PC consumers will of course be the capability to run multiple versions of Windows at once, or Windows and Linux together, or... well, you get the idea.

Dell's is working with leading virtualisation technology vendors VMware and SWsoft, Kettler said. XenSource is also rumored as a potential virtualisation software vendor.

Kettler would not confirm that Dell plans to support Apple's OS/X as a virtual machine guest OS, though whether that hesitation is due to Apple's unique hardware specifications or its tendency to sue poachers at the drop of a lawyer's leash is open to speculation. µ