Comprehensive analysis of the four trends of virtualization development

When the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the IT managers are in the hands of shrinking budgets, and the business challenges it faces are intensifying, and the growing tension that makes virtualization stand out as a fundamental technology-not only helps CIOs meet these challenges, but, more importantly, It is changing the way traditional business computing works by reducing the cost of energy and hardware.

Undoubtedly, the advantages of virtualization technology has been widely recognized by the industry, and its popularization and popularization of information technology has become an inevitable trend of development. VMware believes that, as a "green data center", "cloud computing" deployed and built "secret weapons", virtualization technology in the future will present the following trends.

Trend One: Virtualization Technology "Embedding"

The virtualization Technology "embedding" here refers to embedding the underlying virtualization module into the hardware or operating system, enabling users to directly apply virtualization technology without having to undergo a cumbersome installation, configuration, and tuning process. (This article from: http://virtualman.blog.51cto.com/200540/118207 If there is reproduced without the identification of the source will be investigated after the legal liability)

Currently, VMware is taking the initiative to bundle the underlying virtualization software and hardware into one whole, and build a soft and hard virtualization platform. Starting in the second half of 2008, mainstream IT systems manufacturers, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell (Dell), and others, have embedded the latest 32MB ESXi 3 virtualization software in some of their server hardware. The advantage of this approach is that it will bring a lot of convenience to users and vendors.

Another virtualization technology is "embedded" by tying virtualization to the operating system, for example, by embedding Hyper-V virtualization modules into next-generation server operating system Windows Server 2008 in the coming year; network Granville (Novell) and Solar Microsystems (Sun) Xen virtualization technology will also be integrated in SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Solaris 10, respectively. However, from a practical point of view, many applications will support different operating systems, if the virtualization and the operating system bundled together, it will make the application of the software becomes quite complex.

Trend two: From virtualization to "cloud computing"

For some time, cloud computing (Cloud Computing) has been a dominant force of IT industry in the global financial crisis.

The rapid development of virtualization technology provides a technical guarantee for the implementation of "cloud computing". This September, VMware announced a new virtual data center operating system (Vdc-os) that can help organizations effectively assemble hardware resources, including servers, storage devices, and networks, into an aggregated "on-demand" internal cloud, when necessary, The enterprise can safely bulk transfer the workload to the external cloud for additional computational capacity.

Trend three: Building a green desktop

From the user's point of view, for a long time, desktop management is IT management areas of the "pain point": Endless application upgrades, operating system patches, anti-virus updates, different periods of procurement of PC hardware configuration, software installation and management of a multitude of, the cost of IT managers too much energy. The use of virtual desktops not only provides a new way to solve the problems of the customers about desktop management, but also effectively compensates for the deficiencies of the existing desktop management mechanism. It also spawned a new category of technology-desktop application Virtualization.

Trend Four: Virtualization standards are on the horizon

With the gradual maturation of virtualization technology and the popularization of application, the problem of virtualization standard also mentions the agenda. 2007 VMware, together with other virtualization technology vendors, tried to develop an interoperability specification, the so-called "open virtual machine format" (Open Machine format,ovf).

But the standard is far from ripe. Recently, VMware and Cisco have applied to IEEE 802 for the standard of Network interface virtualization (Network Interface Virtualization) and are currently awaiting approval.

Indeed, virtualization technology is transforming the situation in the IT industry, enabling organizations to dynamically improve the performance and efficiency of their IT infrastructures. According to the Yankee Group survey, more than 60% of enterprises now use this technology to reduce costs, control the number of servers and increase their operational efficiency. In fact, by the end of 2007, nearly 90% of companies will implement virtualization in their IT infrastructures.