Virtualisation: Opinions

Growing up in a family with a strong work ethic, I often heard variations of the phrase "keep your head out of the clouds and your feet on the ground." To my parents, if you had your head in the clouds you were a dreamer wasting your life on fantasies and unrealistic goals. The successful were those who had their feet firmly planted on the ground of reality.

There are very few things bloggers or analysts can do to erode their credibility with experienced IT managers than to say some new technology is going to change every aspect of computing within a very short time. IT people have just heard that way too often and know that even when it's true, the change isn't always an improvement.

Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons for companies to go green. The first is to reduce energy costs, thereby saving the company money. As one IT executive put it to me recently, "Green computing is all about saving greenbacks."

Last week, Microsoft released its virtualization product, Hyper-V, to manufacturing. Previously, the company had promised to make a production-supported version of Hyper-V available to Windows Server 2008 customers within 180 days of the official release of the operating system itself. By releasing Hyper-V in late June, Microsoft beat its self-imposed deadline by about a month, although delivering less than was originally promised.

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.