The SearchServerVirtualization.com has a new post that offers an interesting and thought-provoking topic: What does the future hold for virtualization? The post, Thoughts on the ‘top five’ trends in virtualization includes editor Hannah Drake’s take on the subject. I chimed in with my responses:
It’s always fun to make predictions about the future. I’ll join in with a few of mine:
1) Desktop Virtualization/VDI deployments remain limited: Like “thin-client” computing before it, the idea of virtualizing entire desktop environments will fail to gain traction. Certainly, companies are doing this now. But, I think the potential drawbacks won’t be addressed quickly enough (if ever), and other solutions will help address security and manageability issues. Most importantly, though: What does everyone else think?
2) Other forms of virtualization gain traction: Presentation- and application-level virtualization will become much more common, and IT organizations will find that they have many different ways to address potential management issues.
3) Server Virtualization technology will start to become commoditized: Already, numerous companies provide useful Hypervisors and virtualization layers. It’s a cool technology, but many vendors have figured out how to do it. Moving forward, the real challenge will be in managing VM deployments, implementing backups and DR, HA, and dealing with storage issues. The virtualization layer will be considered the “foundation”, whereas management tools will receive the focus.
4) Virtualization Knowledge: For most IT people, managing basic virtualization functions will become a standard job function (like performing backups). There’s nothing shocking there. As virtual platforms get easier to manage, most organizations will need only a few “experts” (such as those that have the VCP certification) to work on design and troubleshooting. The rest of the IT crowd will adapt on their own. This might not be ideal, but I don’t see the VCP certification being as popular as the MCSE c. 1996 – 2000.
Some of this might be going against conventional “wisdom” (and aggressive marketing), but these wouldn’t be very useful predictions if I stayed with the safe bets. It will certainly be interesting to see how things pan out.
I have certainly been in IT long enough to see many fads come and go. I have also seen many genuinely good ideas become part of standard IT best practices. It’s probably safe to say that server virtualization fits in the latter camp. But, there’s still a lot of hype out there, and it’s good to keep things in perspective.
There’s probably a lot more to predict, so I’d be interested in hearing readers’ opinions: What are some other predictions, and what do you think I got wrong?
