Virtualization has certainly changed a lot in the past few years. Not many years ago, virtualization was only used on servers to get maximum performance. Today, is a a fairly common consumer technology with support for advanced graphics. The big difference between server virtualization and desktop virtualization, though, is that the virtualized OS is the secondary OS on the desktop and the primary one(s) on the server. This will not necessarily remain true, though.

In a few years, I expect that we may seen the beginning of desktop OSs that only provide a thin shell upon which to run the user’s real OS. In the past, this hasn’t been realistic due to speed and graphics requirements, but those limitations are fading quickly.

With a virtualized primary OS, many possibilities would be opened up. For example, virtual machine snapshots could be used to create an undo/redo function for the entire OS, making the removal of a virus or recovery of deleted items easy. In addition, the virtual machine could fairly easily be synced across machines (if the rest of the world’s tubes every catch up to Japan), allowing you to have the exact same OS on many machines.

It’s hard to predict what the future of desktop computing will be, but virtualization taking a more prominent role seems highly likely.

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