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Ron Oglesby's View On The (Near) Practical Future Of Virtualization

Tuesday, 29 August 2006 by Michel Roth

Ron Oglesby has published another excellent article on Brian Madden.com. In this article Ron talks about what he thinks will be the near future of virtualization in the real world...

"I sat down with a client the other day and was asked some pretty simple questions that couldn�t easily be answered. Those questions were, �So where is virtualization going anyway? Not in the next 12 months, but in the next 2-3 years? What should we know about virtualization that�s going to mean big changes like the first implementation we put in of our virtualization platform?�

This drove an interesting discussion with some follow up on my part in both research and some long thought over numerous cold beers and a whiteboard. Once I figured out where I thought it was going, I started putting my ideas into Word and figured more people than just me would be interested in where this is all going and why it�s important. Of course I have no crystal ball--this is just one guy�s opinion of where things are and where they will be going. (Feel free to comment with your thoughts.)

Right now you can talk to any company paying lip service virtualization or that considers themselves virtualization experts and they will begin to talk about the �future� of virtualization. Inevitably they all say some (or all) of the following:

� Virtualization will expand beyond just servers and into the desktop realm. (Mostly people are talking about VDI here, and of course about five different packages for VDI have been released this year alone.)

� Virtualization will take the next step into the enterprise expanding beyond server consolidation.

� Virtualization technology�s next step is to get better performance from VMs to assist the move deeper into the enterprise.

� Virtualization may act as a conduit for software vendors to deliver application appliances to you preconfigured and ready to go, You just modify some settings for your environment and you are up and running.

� Built-in virtualization technology at the hardware level will take it to the next step. (Here we�re talking about processors that are moving system calls for VMs out of Ring 0 and into �Ring 1,� or Network adapters and HBAs that have built-in hardware hypervisors to allow for better control and resource allocation at that level.

Read the entire article here.