Virtualisation: Opinions

Initially sold to customers as a server appliance replacement, virtualisation is quickly breaking out of its boxy cost and containment confines and becoming a key consideration across all manner of IT implementations.

During the Altiris user conference in April, I watched a lunch panel discuss the "consumerization of IT" and whether that's a good thing. My initial thought was that it was probably bad for enterprises that want to control everything, but may be good for smaller businesses.

You know a technology is getting some traction when imitators jump into the game. That's the case these days with cloud computing. Just this week, Amazon added Red Hat's JBoss to its EC2 cloud computing platform, and an established hosting service -- ServePath -- jumped into the fray with a version of cloud computing called GoGrid.

It seems about time - after a week that included the release of yet another beta of Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's release of sometimes-free desktop virtualisation, VMware announcements about desktop virtualisation and announcements from too many other companies to mention - to pick the winner of the fight for dominance in the virtualisation market.

Although virtualization is still used primarily as a means to consolidate servers, the technology's next big win could be in testing.

Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the high costs of maintaining and cooling servers: A mid-tier $2,500 server can cost as much as $2,020 to power and cool annually, according to the Uptime Institute. Thus, demand for ways to curb those expenses is rising as well.

While system virtualization - and to a lesser extent, desktop virtualization - has held most of the virtualization limelight, there is also a growing trend in network virtualization.

I have been a regular visitor to Interop in the US for nearly 15 years and have found it a reasonable guide to what is going to happen in networking and communications over the coming months and years. This show has both scale (over 500 networking and communications vendors exhibiting) and focus, something that events in Australia cannot match.

With Google's recent launch of its App Engine, and with the likes of IBM and Amazon having staked claims, cloud computing is clearly a major development in the IT landscape. The benefits are obvious, enabling enterprises to scale rapidly with a level of performance previously available to only the largest companies -- all without adding equipment, software or staff.

As with nearly every IT trend, including service-oriented architectures and Web services, just because we're all talking about cloud computing doesn't mean we're talking about the same thing.

There's been a lot of chatter lately about how Microsoft needs to start over with Windows. Many point to the (NT) code base's 16-year history and how the need to maintain backward compatibility is hampering efforts to move the platform forward. According to these critics, a clean break is necessary in order to stop the kind of bloatware madness that so crippled Windows Vista. Dump the creaking legacy that is the Win32 API/ATL/MFC, they say, and solve the compatibility riddle through VM technology.