I read an interesting post, The Future Of Virtualization And What That Means For CIOs, that painted an intriguing, but rather limited view of the future. In this post, the author, John Soat, discussed the importance of BEA's Jrockit® 6 Java implementation that can run directly on a hypervisor without requiring another operating system.
In the author's view, this single innovation will lead to everyone consolidating their efforts on deploying many virtual environments, each of which is tuned precisely to the needs of a single application or application component. While the vision presented is certainly attractive, it doesn't account for the fact that CIOs tend to honor the Golden Rules of IT in their planning.
It also doesn't account for the fact that organizations adopt virtualization for many reasons other than consolidation. Some are more focused on high performance, increased levels of scalability, greater agility, higher levels of reliablity or availability, or managing all of their resources in a unified way.
I suspect that a blog post's limited space contributed to this limited viewpoint rather than any lack of vision on the author's part.
Here are some areas that were not addressed that mean that the BEA's technology is likely to end up adding complexity to the environment.
What's your view? Would your organization move in this direction if their application development and deployment environment ran directly on a hypervisor?