Wow. Sorry, wrong. The money in virtualization is in the data center, not on the desktop, we are talking several orders of magnitude difference.
Yes there are many use cases for desktop virtualization and you point them out, but they are all niche markets which specific products have been optimized to target.
The reason desktop virtualization lags behind and has not caught on is not because it is particularly painful to use, it is because the use cases don't generate as much money and therefore vendors are not putting as much effort into it. Server revenue is far more important.
These ad-hoc statistics we see quoted are absolutely useless. 70-80% of people on LWN is not a great market compared to 1% of corporate data centers.
Posted Mar 24, 2010 0:09 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
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The server virt market will be saturated in a couple of years if not sooner.
Are there more desktops in the world or servers?
If desktop virtualization were built in and the way you ran any OS, which is what client hypervisors are about, it will be a much bigger market.
I'm not saying server virtualization is going away or anything... just that it is going to get much bigger on the desktop.
KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management
Posted Mar 24, 2010 0:11 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
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Wow. Sorry, wrong. The money in virtualization is in the data center, not on the desktop, we
are talking several orders of magnitude difference.
So? The money is in the datacenter because they are willing to spend obscene amounts of cash
no matter what.
The users, almost every single one of them, use the desktop. If you follow the users they will
lead you to the desktop, follow the money will lead you to the datacenter.
KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management
Posted Mar 24, 2010 9:54 UTC (Wed) by till (subscriber, #50712)
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Desktop virtualization is also helpful to test new distribution releases in the FOSS community and therefore imho matters.