Virtual computing goes mainstream for all

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 19 September 2007 12:20

Opinion and Analysis

Around since the 1960s, virtualization has finally gone mainstream, with businesses and consumers are taking advantage of the power of today’s computers and servers to run more than one operating system, if not many, with all the associated software – at the same time, saving big money on operating costs and electricity.
The virtualization of operating systems and software has vastly matured over the last decade, and has today resulting in benefits that are hard to resist. Each server can now reliably run several virtual machines, lowering operating and maintenance costs and making recoverability much easier and faster.

New abilities in virtualization software are allowing companies to much more easily manage existing resources, providing an on-demand capability to add more server capacity – or to reduce it as required – without ordering new hardware or getting out the screwdriver.

Even business desktops are starting to become virtualized, giving employees the ability to log into their desktop environment from any Internet connected computer and a web browser, while also enjoying the benefits of much easier patch management, backup capabilities and recovery from crashes.

The ability to ‘play’ virtual machines and treat them like appliances that can be easily turned on and off has also become quite popular, allowing users to easily download, for example, a simplified version of Linux with enough power to run the Firefox browser, letting users surf sites in a safe, sandboxed environment that is separate to the rest of the user’s main operating system and desktop environment.

On top of that, virtualization technology has made great strides in the Mac world, letting Mac owners with Intel-based machines run Windows XP, Vista, Linux and close to 60 other operating systems in a virtual environment while the Mac OS is running, offering cut and paste and file copy facilities between operating systems, while also allowing Mac users to run just about any software written over the last 20 years – all on the same desktop – and depending on just how much is being run at the same time, with little performance penalty.

Much progress has been made over the past couple of years, and a great place to see this in action was at VMware’s ‘VMWorld 2007’ conference and expo, held last week in San Francisco.

Boasting nearly 11,000 attendees, alongside nearly 100 journalists from 70 countries, VMWorld 2007 is billed as the industry event for the entire virtualization ecosystem – not just as an event for virtualization market leader VMware.

Although VMware have been around for a decade and effectively own the virtualization space, they are not without competition, with the two big names being Microsoft, who are busily trying to catch up to VMware’s multi-year head start, and Citrix, who just purchased XenSource for US $500m, showing just how important virtualization is to the computing industry.

In addition, both Microsoft and Citrix were also at VMworld 2007, showing that, while the conference did indeed have a strong focus on VMware’s latest announcements and technologies, the conference was inclusive of as many market players as possible, with signs that the three players are showing signs or working together in certain areas, such as a standard format for storing virtual machines which all companies' software can read natively, while competing fiercely in other areas.

VMware’s big announcements revolved around an upgrade to their ESX 3i server virtualization technology, new hardware partnerships with the big names in the hardware server business to deliver ESX 3i, new technology to help companies virtualize desktops more efficiently, and new technology to help data centers fail over to a secondary backup site quickly and easily, called site recovery manager, to keep businesses running even when their hardware isn’t. That’s pretty amazing.

So, what else did I learn at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco last week? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion...