Executive Viewpoint: Ken Berryman, Symantec

By Ken Berryman
published: Thursday, December 18 2008

Virtualization is certainly a hot topic right now, and for good reason. By separating important information from underlying systems, virtualization can deliver more business benefits from the use of that information at lower total costs. As a result, many different virtualization technologies-for servers, storage and endpoints-must now be considered a critical part of any modern IT infrastructure.

In fact, thoughtful deployment of virtualization can allow the information resources that businesses depend on to be protected more completely, managed more easily and controlled automatically-all with greater visibility, increased cost savings and more confidence.

As a result of this, in recent years we have seen IT truly begin to embrace virtualization technology in order to optimize the information resources that really matter-including data, applications, images and user configurations across server, storage and client infrastructures.  Virtualization has certainly become mainstream, but we expect even more deployment and innovation in 2009. Here are the virtualization trends and developments Symantec expects to see in the coming year:

Protecting virtual machines and managing virtual storage becomes a priority

As server virtualization growth continues, with double-digit growth over the past two years setting a pattern for similar expectations through 2009 and beyond, management and protection of virtual machines will become more of a priority. IT professionals are well aware that virtualization is a promising business tool, helping organizations not only improve hardware resource utilization but also consolidate physical servers and enhance application availability, but these benefits can be potentially negated without a targeted approach to both protecting and managing these environments.

When planning virtualization initiatives in 2009, IT will increasingly need to look beyond physical servers to consider the impact virtualization will have on the entire IT infrastructure, including backup and storage. By following best practices for implementing data protection and storage management strategies, organizations can be sure their IT environment is positioned to contribute to business success today and tomorrow.  These two key considerations will become priorities for virtual environments in 2009:

• Data protection: Data is often a company's most valuable asset. As such, information-from an entire volume to a single file-requires constant protection against loss. Regardless of whether the data is on a physical or a virtual server, information must be protected and remain available.

• Managing Virtual Storage: Although server virtualization solutions have built-in storage management functionality, these offerings have not been proven as have those in the physical world. It will be increasingly important to have visibility into the interconnections between virtual machines and physical storage in order to manage virtual environments.

Simply stated, standard backup technologies that have been used for years in physical environments create significant overhead when applied to a virtual world. In addition, because it adds a layer of abstraction, virtualization also makes storage more challenging by obfuscating visibility into the IT environment even as it increases the amount of storage to be managed.

In 2009, IT will increasingly be forced to manage environments made up of a heterogeneous mix of hypervisors as offerings from Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle, Sun, and others take their place alongside VMware in data centers around the world.  Consequently, best practices for ongoing data protection and storage also include leveraging backup and recovery and storage management solutions that work in truly heterogeneous environments-including physical and virtual solutions from multiple vendors.

An increase in virtualization pilot programs will highlight security and management challenges

In 2009, we will see the number of enterprise pilot programs increase in number as multitudes of new technologies around endpoint virtualization and general virtualization enablement continue to come to market. As IT begins to explore these new approaches to implementing virtualization technologies, potential complexity risks, both for security and for manageability, will become ever more apparent.

Many IT managers are already building up internal labs to test new products and push ideas back to vendors in order to drive point products towards becoming enterprise-ready solutions. Based on current industry trends, it's easy to imagine every enterprise in 2009 having at least one virtualization pilot program running internally across multiple vendors with a variety of use cases. With this will come major concerns over such things as controlling where an organization's virtualized data is going and how to diagnose root cause problems when an application may be moving from place to place more fluidly.

A unified set of endpoint virtualization management tools takes precedence

A primary goal of endpoint virtualization is to simplify IT management, as this is where the majority of endpoint cost currently resides. Unfortunately, most management solutions that have been brought to market thus far are only capable of managing either traditional or virtual environments, but not hybrid environments. So, in order to effectively manage their infrastructures, IT administrators who have implemented endpoint virtualization have had to use a mass of diverse tools to keep all the environments in their infrastructure-traditional, virtual and hybrid-in check.

IT administrators do not want to have multiple tools, using multiple management methods, to provide coverage of their full environment. Ideally, they want and should have one solution to manage all aspects of endpoint computing, from the physical to the virtual and from the endpoint device to the data center back end.

At this point the industry cannot claim to provide a full solution to this obstacle. However, 2009 will bring with it great advancements in this area. As the economy continues to struggle into the new year, multi-vendor infrastructures will continue to be the norm as IT seeks to provide every ounce of value and make the most of every dollar. These multi-vendor infrastructures will consist of arrays of solutions, ranging from Virtually Hosted Desktops (VHD), Software as a Service (SaaS), terminal services and cloud and local computing. With all of these solution types existing alongside each other, the drive towards the development of systems that have the ability to manage cross platform, multi-vendor and heterogeneously will increase significantly.

Preliminary steps leading towards this unified management console are already being taken. Many companies are signing on to support non-traditional approaches from vendors, such as packaging solutions that create virtualized applications. Some vendors are including application virtualization, streaming and lightweight local virtual machine support in their larger management frameworks, in some cases by way of OEM agreements, while they determine their own long term strategies.

IT embraces virtualization as a green initiative

Making the most out of what an organization already has is not a new trend in and of itself, but in 2009 we will see virtualization weave its way into green initiatives much more so than we have in the past. While server consolidation has obvious green benefits, even projects like license compliance, a major endpoint virtualization driver, will transition from liability reduction efforts into capital reduction efforts-using solutions like application streaming to create more perfectly adapted infrastructures based on real business needs. Just as server virtualization has allowed for datacenter consolidation and reduction of hardware resources, endpoint virtualization will bring innovations to the physical endpoint and reduce the need for costly new datacenter builds to support ever-changing end-user computing needs.

In addition, we will see more use of application virtualization to reduce application conflicts, eliminating much of the need to use expensive server-based sandboxes. Also, the more advanced automation that will accompany the maturing of virtualization management systems will have a great impact on reducing IT overhead.

In 2009, IT will also place more value in bridging solutions and virtualization middleware to connect disparate underlying infrastructures so they can add new functionality. This translates into being able to take full advantage of the technology enterprises have already purchased and implemented.

A move towards a standards-based approach to endpoint virtualization

One of the characteristics of a new technology is that it typically falls outside the realm of established standards; such is the case with endpoint virtualization. In time, however, this becomes a major complexity issue as the technology becomes more mainstream and vendors begin pitting their standards against those of other vendors, usually leaving IT with a confusing mess of incongruence to sort out.

The good news is that many of the major endpoint virtualization vendors are starting to realize the need for a standards-based approach to accomplishing such things as the formatting of application packages, and they are beginning to move in that general direction. It is important to note that as this happens, everything possible should be done to comply with existing standards instead of creating new ones. This may mean the road to endpoint virtualization standardization is more difficult, but in the end it will keep complexity, and therefore total costs, to a minimum. A real movement toward standardization is also what will drive convergence in local computing and cloud-based services, allowing IT and end-users to have the best of both worlds, instead of being forced into a single, less than ideal, computing model.

In conclusion, one final prediction: As the struggling economy continues to under-perform moving into the new year, organizations will need to begin leveraging new technologies to address the challenges that accompany simultaneously reduced IT budgets and increased user demands with much greater urgency. No other technology has as much potential to meet these needs as virtualization does. In 2009, we will see virtualization more than ever before have the opportunity to deliver on its promises to help companies to have their information protected more completely, managed more easily, and controlled more automatically.

Symantec

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