VMware's CTO, Dr. Stephen Herrod, recently contributed a piece for VMBlog.com that describes VMware's vision of the top 10 trends in virtualization as we head into 2009. Herrod describes how many organizations started out on their virtualization journey with server consolidation to immediately save money on hardware expenses, and on power, cooling, and facilities. But moving into 2009, he believes these organizations will extend their use of virtualization to the desktop, storage and networking areas, as well as providing more flexible and economical approaches to business continuity, security, and application service level agreements.
A summary of Herrod's list of the 10 virtualization trends to watch for in 2009 is below:
1. Virtualization of the Enterprise Desktop Breaks Out.
The business choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees will begin to be solved in 2009. New virtualization-based approaches will help to solve the decision process, and better remote display protocols and the use of the local machine's compute resources will ensure a better end user experience. Creating an online and offline mode will also address part of the virtual desktop challenge.
2. Storage Becomes Truly Virtualization-Aware.
Storage is a critical building block in the virtual datacenter, and new advances in virtual storage will dramatically increase the flexibility, speed, resiliency, and efficiency of the virtual datacenter in 2009. In particular, look for solutions that offer native array support for common storage operations on virtual machines such as replication and migration; thin provisioning and de-duplication capabilities to optimize storage usage – which is particularly important for the desktop use case; and virtual machine-based storage (virtual storage arrays) solutions.
3. Virtualization of High-End Applications Becomes Mainstream.
New chip advances such as Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT) and AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) will allow for memory-intensive applications and high-performance computing to be virtualized.
4. Orchestration of Virtualization across Datacenters Arrives.
Global companies will increasingly use their virtualization platform to federate compute capacity dynamically across multiple datacenters.
On the user level, it enables virtual desktops to follow users as they travel. On the enterprise level, it enables workloads to be automatically redistributed to meet capacity needs and take advantage of eco-friendly locations where electricity can be tapped at much lower costs.
5. Networking Becomes Fully Virtualization-Aware.
As an example, VMware and Cisco are collaborating to deliver joint datacenter solutions designed to improve the scalability and operational control of virtual environments (The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch is expected to be an integrated option in VMware Infrastructure).
- Networking vendors are optimizing for virtualization network traffic.
- Remote display protocols are becoming more effective.
- Networking management tools will see through the virtualization layer to monitor and manage at the virtual machine level.
- And other vendors, following Cisco’s lead, will begin shipping software-based network switches.
6. Virtualization Arrives in Smart Phones.
Ultra-thin hypervisors will both enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market as well as pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users. Virtualization will enable vendors to deploy the same software stack on a wide variety of phones without worrying about the underlying hardware differences. And end users will be able to run multiple profiles, ex. one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone.
7. Virtualization-Focused Security Solutions Becomes More Common.
Traditional firewall, Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and virus detection offerings are now shipping as virtual machines.
And VMware VMsafe will allow for a new generation of virtualization aware security products to emerge that will continue to drive security advances for virtualized environments.
8. Management Tools Increase Focus on the Virtual Datacenter.
Going forward, additional APIs and integration technologies (e.g., user interface plug-in architectures) that facilitate the integration of management functions into virtualization platforms will enable end-to-end management processes spanning heterogeneous datacenter environments, a wide variety of application stacks, and physical and virtual use cases. This is coming quickly, as leaders such as BMC, CA, HP and IBM have all announced products in this space.
9. Requirements of Green Datacenters Drives Virtualization Further.
Power and cooling continue as a top datacenter issue. Going forward, customers will leverage virtualization for even greater power savings through dynamic management of resources. When a cluster of virtual machines needs fewer resources, VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) consolidates workloads and puts hosts in standby mode to reduce power consumption. When resource requirements of workloads increase, VMware DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.
10. Cloud Providers Utilize Virtualization for More Open, Compatible Offerings.
The IT industry is moving toward a vision of cloud computing, and virtualization is the infrastructure on which it is being built. Standards are key to the success of public clouds – standards that allow compatibility at the virtual machine layer for easier entry and exit from the cloud, and standards that enable applications to be migrated in and out of public clouds without modification. In 2009, these advances will accelerate to enable companies both large and small to safely tap compute capacity inside and outside their firewalls – how they want, when they want, and as much as they want – to ensure quality of service for any application they want to run, internally or as an outsourced service when additional capacity is required.
You can read Herrod's original Top 10 Predictions for Virtualization in 2009 on VMBlog.com.