VMs and future potential

Déjà vu again. Last night as I'm lying there in bed trying to find sleep. My mind is wandering about my own futuristic wish list again. Now, fast forward to today. I see an article on News.com about MS opening up its virtualization format. I had been pondering the possibilities about running several VMs on a single machine, ie Windows, OS X, Solaris, Linux. I know you can do this today, heck, I've been running VMWare since its early beta days back in 1997, but I want to run each OS with native capabilities and performance, but without a host operating system. I look at what Sun's done with Solaris and the new silicon, and I'm really jonesing for a Niagara machine, but I would be satisfied just running Solaris.

I digress. I know, everyone is a skeptic and most will see this as more of a gesture than for what it really is, truly making the spec Open Source. Now I should say right now, that I know nothing about our relationship with the Xen project. I don't have answers nor will I speculate.

However, I also love the potential of paravirtualization but unfortunately it doesn't fit in with my idea for the future. I want each OS to boot off its own hardware without a host Operating System. I want to be able to replace any of the Operating Systems at any time without disturbing another OS. I also want the OSs to boot almost instantaneously. We have the technology today and with rapid advances in multi-core technology, hopefully someone will make my dream a reality soon.