After reading Jose's blog
entry, I immediately had some questions about virtualization on the new
dual-core Itanium architecture. First and foremost, which software vendor
out there has a Virtualization solution that supports the Itanium? As far
as I know, the roadmap for Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 does not include support
for the Itanium. Longhorn's roadmap does not include any foreseen support
for the hypervisor on the Itanium either, so no luck in there as well.
Secondly, if some company indeed supported VT on the Itanium and allowed you to
say, run Windows XP 32-bit on a virtual machine, would that be faster
than running the a 32-bit application directly on Windows Server for the
Itanium? Also, how would the WoW64’s performance (which IMHO is the
Itanium's Achilles’ heel) be affected by the fact that there is VT support?
These are many, many questions for which I have no answer
for and hopefully will be addressed soon enough.