Virtualization has taken the one-to-one relationship of the physical server to operating system and turned it into a one-to-many relationship between the physical server and multiple guest operating systems running on the hypervisor.  As the management frameworks for running these guest operating systems within the hypervisor mature, creating in essence the “virtualization layer,” we are seeing an increasing amount of choice as out-of-the-box virtual appliances and purpose-built virtual servers catch fire in the market.

What is key here is the shift to a focus on the workload running on the guest OS – not the underlying OS.  Despite some vendor prognostications / protests, I predict the shift to a focus on the workload, meaning the applications / services the business cares about will continue and the OS will become more commoditized.  The key to success in this shift is meeting expectations of customers that the appliance or virtual server should just work with their existing legacy systems and processes.  If I spin up a virtual appliance, it must support seamless migration from (or integration with) legacy systems.

What is Likewise doing to support this shift?  Today Likewise provides platform interoperability for improved authentication and access control in virtualized environments for more than 75% of the hypervisor market (if you combine market-share for VMware and Citrix). Here’s what we do for each:

VMware embeds Likewise Identity Services to allow Microsoft Active Directory users to log-in to ESX/ESXi hosts.  VMware notes in a recent announcement, “As customers continue on the journey to cloud computing, they need to leverage existing security infrastructure for their virtualized environments,”

Citrix embeds Likewise Identity Services in XenServer, noting in a recent announcement, “It’s critical to provision users, applications and computing resources so that our virtualization technology has the same high levels of security as actual physical hardware.”

Likewise Enterprise then goes a step further, allowing users to manage authentication, access control, group policy, and reporting for demonstrating compliance for audit purposes across the physical and virtual environment, including the hypervisor and guest OS.  That end-to-end control allows organizations to address security–one of the main impediments to virtualization adoption.

With our focus on platform interoperability, we’re helping those progressing down the virtualization path focus on the workloads they are running, and doing our part to make the choice of what operating system on which to run a workload ubiquitous.