So, it appears that the popular trend for IT is to "go green." Hardware that consumes less resources, in a smaller space, seems to be the future. With this comes the ever-popular topic of virtualization.

Virtualization in the telephony environment isn't as simple as it's application server counterparts, however. Timing is everything, especially in telephony. With shared compute resources, it's hard to scale any type of large production environment on a virutalized system.

Interestingly enough, Avaya has taken the "road to virtualization", and surprisingly, it has been doing so for a good amount of time. Avaya's S-series of communications servers utilize VMWare to virtualize Definity-like emulations, and Intuitiy voicemail applications. In fact, it seems to be working well for them.

The key is this - a virtualized telephony infrastructure requires lots of tweaks to ensure scalability, and even more, hardware compatibility. Down the road, virtualization should get easier.

What do you think? Are you running production telecom systems in a virtualized infrastructure?