We’ll be getting a steady stream of reports out of San Francisco as the virtualization zealots converge for the annual VMware VMworld confab. While virtualization is an exciting and adaptable technology, it is essentially just a tool in the chest of vendors and solution providers. It’s important to keep perspective that virtualization – in and of itself – is not the cure-all for technology woes, but rather the enabler of new systems.
I’ll be monitoring VMworld from the safety of my home office in New York, filtering out the noise of inevitable competitive jockeying of the big vendors. Here are six things I’ll be looking for in the conference dispatches:
- Virtual Desktops. After years of virtualizing servers and consolidating data centers, we’re finally beginning to see movement in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Enterprises are coming up on massive PC refresh cycle, so the question is whether to replace with another fat client or deploy something that is more flexible and manageable like thin clients and VDI. Several vendors, including VMware, Citrix, Wise Technologies and others are seeing increasing interest (which means requests for information) about VDI. Many vendors and analysts believe this interest will eventually translate into actual deployments.
- Virtual Security. Since the virtualization trend began in the mid-oughts, there has been concerns over securing virtual environments and controlling administrative access to the hypervisor. Several security vendors are releasing new tools to make the management and efficiency of protecting virtual machines against malware easier, decreasing the management overhead of malware scanning, and enabling more efficient distribution of patches and images to virtual machines.
- Virtual Storage. The Dell-HP bidding war over 3Par is about controlling the capabilities of managing large volumes of data in virtualized cloud environments. Storage is one technology where virtualization is having a huge impact since it enables easier migration and tiering of data volumes. The next step is providing users more control and visibility into virtualized cloud storage environments. It’s no longer about “save” and “open,” but rather understanding the dynamics of data at rest, deduplication across virtualized arrays, business continuity, and retentions and restoration.
- Virtual Encryption. This is a bit different from the security and malware aspects of virtual security. Virtual encryption is about protecting data at-rest and in-transit with crypto. This isn’t as easy as setting up virtual private networks or AES encryption. Virtualization brings serious challenges for key management, moving data across virtual environments and third-party clouds, and data access.
- Regulatory Compliance. There’s one breakout track on best practices for PCI in virtualized environments. As noted in the security entry above, security is a major challenge for virtualized data center managers. Add issues of compliance with industry standard such a PCI and government regulations such as HITECH and you have a recipe for huge management headaches. It’s bad enough trying to keep a handful of physical machines compliant; the challenge of virtualized machines holding dozens of VMs is exponentially challenging.
- Virtualization and Mobility. The world is going mobile, as evidenced by the Intel acquisitions of McAfee and Infineon. Just how virtualization will apply to mobile devices and the networks they connect with remains a matter of development. Smartphones, mobile computing systems and the emerging class of tablet computers are most definitely connecting to virtualized networks, but it’s still a leap before they start streaming applications and data to these devices.
For solution providers, these trends represent challenges and opportunities. The very forces that are inhibiting virtualization and cloud computing adoption are opportunities for creative problem solving, the development of new systems, and ongoing technical consultation and support. It will be interesting to see what comes out of VMworld and other industry conferences in terms of guidance for exploiting the next epoch of the virtualization era.
