Executive Viewpoint: Dr. Tim Marsland, Sun Microsystems

By Dr. Tim Marsland
published: Saturday, January 10 2009

Along those lines, here is my list of 2009 trends that will drive wider adoption of virtualization as well as some continuing challenges that must be addressed:

Successful clouds will use hardware virtualization as their core technology. More cloud infrastructures will be built as infrastructure-as-a-service on hardware virtualization technology. Many IT departments will want to build their own cloud infrastructure for regulatory and compliance reasons; these businesses will likely see open source as an advantage because of its flexibility, low cost of acquisition, and easy integration.

Expansion from a focus on Windows consolidation efforts to a broader view. While most virtualization vendors are centered on the problems of Windows consolidation, business will want to use the technology in compute-intensive, and network bandwidth-driven environments. As the raw capabilities of virtualization technology expand into these domains, management technology will need to become more abstract and policy-based to meet the level of flexibility these new environments demand.

Competition drives costs down, capabilities up. The battle between proprietary software solutions will drive the overall pricing of virtualization solutions lower. But open-source guests and hypervisors will be driving innovation. Developers will continue to turn to open-source desktop virtualization to increase productivity; they will thrive in a multi-platform world that allows them to use the right software for the job at hand. On the hardware side, both processor and I/O technologies from Intel, AMD, and the manufacturers of advanced I/O hardware continue to improve the performance levels that can be achieved, expanding the domains where virtualization can be used.

Done right, virtualization will save money. With the economy in a slump in 2009, companies will continue to look for ways to save money on energy. Virtualization adds a layer that makes the IT environment more flexible; for example, enabling Live Migration to concentrate workloads so that unused servers can be powered down. The trade off is that the more isolation a virtualization technology provides, generally the more hardware resources are used and thus more power is consumed. Many of Sun's customers have realized that zones-style virtualization is much more power-efficient than many hypervisor-based technologies.

The need for performance metrics and valid benchmarks continues to grow. As the use of virtualization technology increases, so will the need to measure and analyze the performance of our ever-more-complex infrastructures. Virtualization performance analysis is complex, and the resulting performance achieved is highly workload-dependent. Existing benchmarks and tools fall short of what's needed; we'll see user demand driving new metrics and new benchmarks.

Network virtualization will require greater security. In a virtualized environment, there is a potential for new attacks. Hypervisors managing multiple guest operating systems are very attractive targets. To prepare for this threat, CIOs will become more focused on securing their virtualized environments; for example, isolating service domains on the network, and carefully partitioning the storage used to host guests.

While virtualization can be implemented in a business' environment gradually, each new piece can broaden or narrow the technical and strategic options down the road. By looking at the long-term needs of the entire infrastructure (and the business it supports), CIOs can ensure that the choices they make in 2009 benefit their company for years to come.

Sun Microsystems

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