The idea is catching fast. Previously I blogged about the virtualization hypervisor replacing the operating system and the primary driver in the data center, and the concept of the Virtualization Center.

Now Intel corporate Sudip Chahal blogger terms it the "Datacenter Operating System" of the Future. Here's an excerpt from Sudip's blog entry where he talks about demonstrations and comments at VMworld 2007 and VMware Chief Scientist, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum.

Per the VMworld demonstrations mentioned above, the hypervisor based virtualization capability and upcoming hardware assists for virtualization in combination with a "compute virtualization manager" that collectively enable policy-based management of the datacenter including virtualization hosts, VMs, storage is well on its way to evolving to the dynamic "Datacenter OS" of the future. This powerful Datacenter OS of the future - evolved from today's "tactical" virtualization capabilities - will dynamically manage compute, memory, power, storage and network resources of the Datacenter in an automated, highly efficient manner. Pre-packaged applications in portable VMs will be landed on these dynamic datacenters in a flexible and agile manner.

Not to be overly dramatic about it but I think the term Datacenter Operating System is much too short sighted. The datacenter isn't a place or location any more. Virtualization means the datacenter is itself a cloud and part of the bigger cloud. Some of it is physically owned and managed by the business entity, but much of it is moving into computing and storage clouds, enabled by virtualization and On Demand computing and management platforms.

As storage, networking, security and other elements become virtualized, the datacenter isn't a place any more, it's a virtual datacenter. Better stated, it's a... Virtualization Center.

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