Over the past couple of days, from the AMD launch of Barcelona to VMWorld, both in San Francisco, to the recent announcements by Microsoft, Citrix, and Sun Microsystems, it should be impressed upon you to a very obvious extent that virtualization is going to be a very large part of computing, especially server computing for the future.
To a lesser extent, desktop computing will also be positively impacted by virtualization, due to application virtualization.
What are the obvious benefits of virtualization in the short term?
Greater server utilization. Right now, we all have servers that lie fallow for periods of time due to various reasons. Those inactive periods are only going to get worse as CPU cores grow.
Application compatibility partitioning. The greatest pain IT managers face when moving between operating system versions is application compatibility. Virtualization would ease much of this pain.
Application virtualization and streaming. One of the investments Microsoft has made in virtualization occurred with the purchase of Softricity, and the SoftGrid product, which allows for application streaming. With Microsoft committed to bringing application virtualization to the desktop with the soon-to-be-released Windows Vista™ version of SoftGrid which would reduce or eliminate network traffic for the virtualized application, virtualization would seem to be, for all intents and purposes, here to stay.
Declining power requirements. Getting a higher capacity utilization from our current computing infrastructure would mean that we would not need to increase the number of systems in the data center, and might even reduce the number of actual servers deployed.
As a result, all plans going forward should include virtualization in any and all forms, especially on desktop systems. However, as pointed out to me by Michael Reyes, CEO of HardwareGeeks, desktop OS licenses are different than server licenses, and IT managers should check their EULAs in order to verify that whatever virtualization scheme they go with is in compliance with the licensing covenants of their operating system.
What do you see as the advantage virtualization brings to you? Chime in here or email me at john.obeto@absolutevista.com
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