If you work on a KVM or a server farm and use Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) a lot, you may often get confused as what machine you are seeing. The BGInfo utility will put system information on the desktop so it's harder to confuse which machine you are on.
Andrew Dugdell has used it for virtual machines to show the virtualization server the VM is running on. Very nice. Thanks Andrew.
For someone wanting to find out where we are headed in the Enterprise using virtualization, I highly recommend the Channel 9 "Going Deep" episode on Virtualization(video).
The episode host, not the techs, was making it clear that this will be core OS architecture in the future. The techs, however, confirmed this by saying that that was the reason that they are position as a Kernel group. Concepts discussed included:
- Legacy OS support
- Server Consolidation
- App Isolation
- Implications for Disaster Recovery
- Hypervisor technology
- Enlightened Guest OSs
- Dynamic, autonomous VM management, a kind of self managing VMotion.
However, the techs' vision went way beyond these to the point where different subsystems core can live on their own VM. The example given was an IP Phone stack that could keep running even if the host OS blue-screened. That's isolation with n the OS itself.
One big thing from a practice perspective, one tech mentioned a built in "undo" that virtual server has to move a VM back to a starting configuration. I need to investigate that further for integration machines.