In our last newsletter we began the discussion of how virtualization is making application and service delivery more challenging and how IT organizations are responding to those challenges. We will use this newsletter to continue that discussion.
As is well known, one of the advantages of a virtualized server is that a production VM can be dynamically transferred to a different physical server, either to a server within the same data center or to a server in a different data center, without service interruption. The ability to dynamically move VMs between servers represents a major step towards making IT more agile. There is a problem, however, relative to supporting the dynamic movement of VMs. A large part of that problem is that today the supporting network and management infrastructure is still largely static and physical. So while it is possible to move a VM between data centers in a matter of seconds or minutes, it can take days or weeks to get the network and management infrastructure in place that is necessary to enable the VM to be useful. Almost half of the IT organizations that we surveyed indicated that it was either very or extremely important that over the next year that they get better at supporting the movement of VMs between servers in different data centers
When you use the term virtualization it normally refers to server virtualization. However, over the last six months there has been a lot of discussion in the trade press and in analyst reports about the growing adoption of desktop virtualization. Our market research indicates that over the next year that the majority of IT organizations will implement a little bit of server virtualization.
The two fundamental forms of desktop virtualization are server-side virtualization and client-side virtualization. With server-side virtualization, the client device plays the familiar role of a terminal accessing an application or desktop hosted on a central presentation server and only screen displays, keyboard entries, and mouse movements are transmitted across the network. This approach to virtualization is based on display protocols such as Citrix’s Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Our research indicates that by yeaer-end, the vast majority of virtualized desktops will be utilizing server side virtualization.
In the next newsletter we will begin the discussion of how cloud computing impacts application and service delivery. In the mean time, we encourage you to download for free the first couple of serialized publications of the 2011 application and service delivery handbook. They can be found here.
