Feature Articles

Tech Trends'08: Virtualization

By Vijay Anand - 22 Jan 2008

Virtualization's Impact

Virtualization's Impact

Over on the corporate side of things, virtualization is a serious affair. Large businesses may have a huge server farm dedicated to their various organizations' transactional needs, but like individual consumer PCs, they may be under utilized. Instead of going with the age-old thinking of building dedicated systems for every purpose and need, virtualization helps consolidate the backend infrastructure to a smaller robust array of systems that can be relied upon dynamically for better resource utilization. Imagine a few powerful machines designed with virtualization in mind to serve all the organizations needs by running multiple virtual machines to fulfill various usage models. This greatly reduces management and maintenance from the hardware perspective while being flexible in being able to deploy various OSes without having to acquire new hardware or inconvenience existing installations. Even testing and deployment of new software can be accelerated when the actual hardware for which the old software is currently utilizing. Furthermore, larger enterprises with more hardware resources 'on tap' can engineer to ready themselves for disaster recovery via instantaneous failover mechanisms (via manipulating virtual machines on standby). In every way you look at it, virtualization reduces IT cost incurred and improves utilization in the business world.

Server consolidation, ease of management, maintenance and deployment are key reasons why corporations have been and will be investing in Virtualization technology.


Virtualization is so important that processors from AMD and Intel these days have virtualization technology extensions built in to them that help accelerate the virtualization process. Moving forward, both have plans to improve virtualization performance further through architectural improvements to assist creating an autonomous and dynamic datacenter in the future. Not to forget, octal-core processors are not too far off in their roadmap to further boost the number of brains in the CPU. As such, virtualization is definitely a growing trend in the corporate world, but the degree in which virtualization would impact end-users is still an uncertainty. What Parallels and VMware did for the Mac users was to address a long standing issue of interoperability of Mac and Windows software - something desired by the entire community. However the examples we've shown to take advantage of virtualization with our current generation of hardware is not exactly a need for all PC users. Rather, it is how power users can maximize their systems to get more done reliably. Additionally, Microsoft has various EULA restrictions on which operating systems and versions are allowed to be run on a virtual machine (for which most home-centric versions are out of luck), thus creating a sticky issue to further progress virtualization to all realms.

Even though the crystal ball isn't quite clear yet for normal consumers, we are quite certain that virtualization is an important technology that would slowly but steadily shape the way we task/handle our systems. Who knows, one day it might just be integrated at the OS level and it could autonomously execute and manage various processes in virtual machines without us even knowing it. So meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for more synergy between the software and virtualization industry.

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