My sister-in-law drives me crazy because she is the type of person who skips to the end of a book and reads the last chapter first before proceeding to complain about having spoiled her own fun as she works her way through the book from the beginning. With that said, I'm going to "spoil the fun" and tell you right from the start where all this Virtualization stuff is heading. Its heading straight up into the Clouds. I'll discuss the part that Virtualization plays in the Cloud in a later posting, but for now, I want to focus on the current state of Virtualization at the end of 2010 and why cloud computing is its direction.

First, it's important to dispel some common misconceptions about Virtualization. I would love to take credit for these misconceptions, but they actually came from Tom Bittman, a very seasoned Gartner Analyst with a focus in this area.

1. Is Virtualization still hot? - There will be more VMs deployed during 2011 than 2001-2009 combined.
2. Virtualization is for large enterprises - within a year, the penetration in mid-size companies will exceed the Global 500.
3. Virtualization saves money - Done badly, it will cost you more in staff and software costs.
4. Virtualization is a commodity - Virtualization choices now influence your path to cloud computing
5. Virtualization is an IT thing - CIO's consider Virtualization to be the number 1 technology trend, the business impact is huge.
6. VMware dominates - In 2005, VMware's installed base was 100%.  By 2012, it will be 65%.

Keeping these misconceptions in mind, its clear that Gartner believes Virtualization is here to stay. In fact, in a study done this year, Garter also says that "out of 127 midsized companies surveyed in North America, these enterprises are 30% virtualized as of mid-2010". The interesting question to ask is "why are they only 30% virtualized?". Pepperweed wrote a whitepaper with HP on this very subject called "How to Break the 30 percent Barrier " where we validated misconception #3 from above and discussed how companies continue to under-estimate the cost and challenge of virtualizing their workloads. Some of the primary struggles exist when companies underestimate their Virtualization Management strategy as well as Change Management. Monitoring and managing the health of your VMs is similar, but somewhat different from managing your physical infrastructure and whereas you may have had 100 physical servers, virtual servers can quickly grow to number in the hundreds. You need tools and a strategy that can scale along with your server growth.  Change Management is another key element of a Virtualization strategy.  Without Change records for your virtual server and application deployments, its very easy to lose track of the "authorized" state of your infrastructure as opposed to the "actual" state. This can quickly lead to a common term you have probably heard, VM Sprawl.

So we agree that Virtualization comes with its struggles, and we understand the apparent short-term value of providing better utilization of your existing server hardware, lower power and cooling costs for the data center and new and interesting disaster recovery options, but what are the long-term benefits of Virtualization. I believe private, hybrid and public cloud computing are the wave of the future and will use advancements in Virtualization as its stepping stones. The 5 year vision is that virtual infrastructure (operating systems and applications) will be provisioned in an on-demand manner via self-service portals and leveraging Virtualization software under the covers. However, the Virtualization software will be able to dynamically provision not only the operating systems, but also the network, storage and applications.  We aren't that far away from this reality today, although it hasn't quite caught on main stream just yet. HP has a strategy called Converged Infrastructure which brings these very features to the data center today.  Leveraging specific HP Insight and HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO) solutions along with the HP BladeSystem Matrix platform, dynamic provisioning of data center infrastructure is a reality. The truth is we have a ways to go before its baked enough to deploy universally, but there are some successful pilot programs out there that show this concept can work and you can trust that Pepperweed will be right in the middle of the journey given out deep expertise in the HP BTO software portfolio.

So in summary, Virtualization is not new, but its also not done. VMware will continue to dominate the industry, but other players such as Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer are slowly gaining market share. While Virtualization typically means "Server Virtualization" today, through 2011 and 2012 we will find ourselves having to distinguish more between server, desktop, application and mobile virtualization to be clear to our audience. Finally, Virtualization is headed straight for the clouds, specifically enabling private cloud in a Converged Infrastructure strategy.