Check out this article on IT-Analysis.com from Clive Longbottom, Head of Research at Quocirca.
After a good overview of the current virtualization market, he asks himself and readers if there is a need for a ‘supravisor’ on top of existing hypervisors, by which he means a way of providing a high-speed, ultra-transparent means of abstracting the abstraction layer, giving a fully standardized platform under which different hypervisors can operate.
Well worth the read, here’s an abstract:
“What it all points to is the likelihood that an organisation will end up with a heterogeneous virtualised environment, with 2 or more main virtualisation technologies creating issues for management, provisioning and auditing of the environment.
One of the main needs here will be for image management. A function or application that is needed has to be provisioned into the virtualised environment. The best way of doing this is from virtual images. Unfortunately, a virtual image saved on a VMware platform (often known as a virtual appliance) cannot be easily deployed under a different virtualised environment, as the images are dependent on the proprietary form of the specific virtualisation engine.”
…
“This supravisor need not be massively intelligent itself—it may be that all that is required is a means of carrying out fast V2V image translations and ensuring that a management console understands what the underlying environment is before provisioning. It may be something more—something that means that a single image can be used directly on top of a standardised layer. It may be that as time goes on, a supravisor subsumes the existing virtualisation technologies already in use. The ones who could do this are the systems management vendors—the likes of IBM Tivoli, CA, HP and BMCs and Microsoft—but will they?”
Read the full article here.