Executive Viewpoint: Dr. Stephen Herrod, VMware

By Dr. Stephen Herrod
published: Thursday, December 18 2008

 

Top 10 Predictions for Virtualization in 2009

As the woes of the world economy extend into 2009, governments and businesses will be increasingly forced to do more with less. Moving into 2009, organizations that have started their virtualization journeys with server consolidation projects will extend its use to the desktop, storage and networking areas, as well as to provide more flexible and economical approaches to business continuity, security, and application service level agreements.  For virtualization's money-saving capabilities as well as its transformative affect on the industry, we have another exciting year ahead. Here are the 10 top trends in virtualization that I believe are worth watching for in 2009:

1. Virtualization of the Enterprise Desktop Breaks Out.

New virtualization-based approaches will combine the benefits of thick and thin clients for employees - delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device while simplifying management and securing endpoints with virtual desktops hosted in the datacenter.

2. Storage Becomes Truly Virtualization-Aware.

Storage is a critical building block in the virtual datacenter, and new advances in virtual storage will dramatically increase the flexibility, speed, resiliency, and efficiency of the virtual datacenter in 2009. New virtual storage solutions will automate handoffs between the virtualization platform and the storage infrastructure, simplify storage operations, and maximize efficient use of your storage infrastructure.

3. Virtualization of High-End Applications Becomes Mainstream.

A combination of hardware and software advances will remove any remaining performance concerns over running the highest-end and most mission-critical applications in virtual environments.

4. Orchestration of Virtualization across Datacenters Arrives.

Global companies will increasingly use their virtualization platform to federate compute capacity dynamically across multiple datacenters.

5. Networking Becomes Fully Virtualization-Aware.

Networking vendors are optimizing for virtualization network traffic. Remote display protocols are becoming more effective. Networking management tools will see through the virtualization layer to monitor and manage at the virtual machine -level.

6. Virtualization Arrives in Smart Phones.

Ultra-thin hypervisors - a thin layer of software embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware, optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones - will both enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market as well as pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users.

7. Virtualization-Focused Security Solutions Becomes More Common.

Traditional firewall, Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and virus detection offerings are now shipping as virtual machines. Customers are increasingly utilizing trusted platform modules (TPMs) to attest to embedded hypervisors.

8. Management Tools Increase Focus on the Virtual Datacenter.

Additional APIs and integration technologies that facilitate the integration of management functions into virtualization platforms will enable end-to-end management processes spanning heterogeneous datacenter environments, a wide variety of application stacks, and physical and virtual use cases.

9. Requirements of Green Datacenters Drives Virtualization Further.

Power and cooling continue as a top datacenter issue. "Upward-spiraling infrastructure demands and increasing energy costs mean that the energy proportion of IT costs could double by 2012," said a recent Gartner research report ("U.S. Data Centers: The Calm Before the Storm," 25 September 2007). "By 2011, more than 70% of U.S. enterprise data centers will face tangible disruptions related to floor space, energy consumption and/or costs." Server consolidation, through virtualization, is one of the best ways to reduce power usage, as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

10. Cloud Providers Utilize Virtualization for More Open, Compatible Offerings.

The IT industry is moving toward a vision of cloud computing, and virtualization is the infrastructure on which it is being built. There is momentum on two fronts: in the enterprise itself, where datacenters are starting to evolve into highly automated private clouds, where the pooling of compute resources on a virtualization platform enables IT to essentially become like a single, giant computer; and at the same time the outsourcing of compute capacity over the Internet to public clouds, or cloud services providers, is becoming a just-in-time reality.

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