Originally Posted by
ohliuw
You keep thinking in terms of desktop OS
No, you mistake Linux, the true swiss-(err, finnish-)army knife of OSes, which can scale from the embedded code running your microwave or toaster to some of the largest machines in the world, as purely being a desktop OS.
I will tell you this about Linux. Vmware used to have 2 versions - ESx and ESxi. Starting version 5, they scrapped ESX as it has Linux service console, and they figured out that 95% of the patching was due to the Linux stuff. Now they only run the VMKernel, which is very short, yet very powerful code ^
...and essentially single-purpose code, at that, that gets used -- basically -- to provide an environment for your choice of two "desktop" OSes (although neither one is by any means restricted to the desktop anymore, even if Linux scales both up and down a lot better than Windows does.)
Meanwhile VMWare is losing market share to Xen (which uses Linux for a console and to handle some I/O tasks) and KVM (which runs as part of the Linux kernel) and Hyper-V (where I'm not sure how to describe the inter-relationship between the hypervisor and Windows kernel/console.)
