libvirt users - Jan 2011 - The VM as a way of saving our digital heritage

Some of the discussion items I have seen about 
VM's failing under upgrades brings up a worrisome
point, for me at least.

I look at a VM as a 'forever machine'. A way in
which I can set up an environment with any old
OS and software and be able to boot and interact
with it now, or next year or 100 years from now.

It is the answer to 'how do we guarantee access to
our digitized cultural heritage?'

That puts a great burden on the team doing this work.
It means you have to guarantee that an archivist
in 2110 can take a VM created today and boot it up
and run it on their hyper-quantum-bio computer (the
one that you could mistake for a real penguin) under
Linux version 15.4.32... and still be able to run
a Mathematica file from 2005.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I think
this is a *very* important part of what should be
the spec for VM handling, perhaps one of *the*
most important ones.