Microsoft is co-developing their Longhorn hypervisor with XenSource. Will this impact SVS on Longhorn?

Q:
Juice user pobrien asked, "Anyone have any insights or comments on the MS press release that stated they will be co-developing their Longhorn hypervisor with XenSource? Will this have any effect when running SVS on Longhorn?

Also, can SVS sit directly on an ESX kernel with no Windows OS in between?"

A:
This is good news for SVS; the more ways people have to spin up Windows, the greater need they will have for rapid, policy-based provisioning of applications.

The emergence of Dell SmartClient/Ardence, HP CCI and IBM Virtual Client/VMware VDI are all increasing demand for SVS. All of these technologies, and the Longhorn/Zen combination, just deliver the OS. An OS is useless w/o apps and data. Altiris SVS delivers the apps and data.

SVS 2.0 is a Windows-specific implementation. While we may have Linux and/or Mac versions in the future, I think the use cases will still be for virtualizing applications, data and patches within a production operating system. I haven't thought of a reason yet to do software virtualization in a utility/embedded OS like ESX Linux, but VMware is certainly welcome to use it if they need it (with proper agreements in place, of course, and a Linux implementation of SVS, which doesn't exist yet).

As our VDI integration matures, SVS may have some need to interact with the environment outside the individual VM's on ESX Server. But still, that would be to facilitate whatever we're doing inside the client Windows sessions, not virtualization of what's happening within the ESX underlying OS.