VMTN Blog

Chris Wolf at the Burton Group with some very insightful coverage of VMworld 2007, and I don't say that just because he says "Last week's VMworld conference was arguably the most significant virtualization event to date."

Data Center Strategies: VMworld 2007 - What you may have missed.

To me, VMworld 2007 marked the coming out party for enterprise virtualization. x86 virtualization's past, present, and future were clearly on display. For IT architects, the challenge is clear - hedge your bets on virtualization's future and align today's technology decisions based on those assumptions. My future data center has the following traits:

• Is managed by system administrators that focus on business value supported by applications - IT as a service
• Utilizes standards-based management
• Supports all virtual machines regardless of the platform which packaged them
• Leverages embedded hypervisors or hypervisors that fully reside in
  memory (as with Virtual Iron) to ensure better security and power
  efficiency
• Pools hardware resources (server, storage, network) and uses them
  when needed to meet workload demand and dramatically save on power and
  cooling
• Includes a management layer capable of provisioning server,
  storage, and network resources and associated security settings on
  demand
• Includes rollback technology that empowers users to recover from system or application failures without IT intervention

VMworld showed me the future of server virtualization and data centers. What did it show you?

More from Chris Wolf:

• Open Virtual Machine Format
• Embedded hypervisors
• VMware Site Recovery Manager