2010 Prediction: George Pradel, Vizioncore
Stars Align for a Year of Change
Last year, Vizioncore used a virtualized crystal ball to predict how virtualization would change during 2009. This year we need the Hubble telescope, because the virtualization universe is expanding so quickly. The universe is growing through new capabilities and solutions available for virtual environments, through new uses for virtualization technology, and of course through the continued influx of new users. Our virtual space telescope has also discovered alternate virtual universes where everything does not orbit around VMware—emerging hypervisors are appearing as shooting stars and may have the gravitational pull to change the tide.
The telescope tells us that in 2010 there will be many more virtual stars in the sky. Let's start by focusing on the big stars: hypervisors. VMware and its new flagship vSphere will continue to burn brightly in 2010 and put the heat on competitors. The competition and pressure to innovate is helping other hypervisors shine too. We're seeing more of our customers adapt multi-hypervisor environments, often integrating Hyper-V and/or XenServer to augment their virtual environments.
Specialization is also coming into focus. As users are moving beyond server consolidation and doing more things with their virtual environments, they are discovering a one-hypervisor-fits-all approach doesn't always optimize the virtual infrastructure. Besides VMware, XenServer and Hyper-V, specialized hypervisors, such as Oracle VM (OVM) and KVM, are getting more consideration as organizations seek to improve specific systems.
Hypervisors are like the suns of the virtual solar system, and the various virtualization tools and solutions represent the stars and planets that orbit around them. With more hypervisors will come more tools. There already has been an explosion in solutions for enhancing virtual infrastructures, and we expect this will remain one of the fastest-growing areas of the virtual universe. In 2010, organizations will be able to choose from many more tools for going beyond basic hypervisor capabilities and delivering disaster recovery, high availability, data protection, backup, recovery, chargeback and reporting to the virtual environment.
System administrators will also benefit from mature options outside the hypervisor vendor for provisioning, monitoring and managing their virtual environments. The best of these tools and solutions are scalable to support large, mature, mission-critical virtual infrastructures and multi-hypervisor environments. They give administrators a single, integrated command center that provides visibility and control for all virtualized systems.
With these new platforms in place, where will virtualization users go? Our telescope into the future shows server consolidation will continue, but other uses of virtualization will gain momentum. Business continuity is first on the horizon. Many of our customers have already developed disaster recovery programs that use some combination of virtualization solutions for backup and recovery as well as replication and physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion. Because virtual backup solutions can capture complete OS and application settings in addition to the data held in the VM, they are ideal for disaster recovery because they provide administrators everything they need to get systems up and running again without having to actually rebuild a server first. Advances in backup speed and file compression also support disaster recovery and business continuity programs because they make it practical to back-up large populations of VMs and transfer them over WANs to secondary locations.
