Virtualization has rapidly become a mainstream technology with easily identifiable benefits such as improved server utilization, simplified management, reduced IT footprint, lower power and cooling consumption, and improved disaster recovery and business continuity. In fact, virtualization is generally considered the cornerstone of today’s IT environment, providing businesses of all sizes with a flexible foundation for key business applications. Virtualization is also the first step on the journey to a private cloud.

More than 80 percent of enterprises now have a virtualization program or project, but only 25 percent of all server workloads will be in a virtual machine (VM) by the end of 2010, according to Gartner Inc. Many IT leaders believe that they have virtualized their x86 servers, but Gartner said they have to plan for two to three times the growth of virtualization in their IT portfolios.

“Virtualization will continue as the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015, changing how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge,” said Philip Dawson, research vice president at Gartner. “Virtualization now drives efficient IT from all angles, including data center design, platform updates, and application and infrastructure modernization, as well as traditional and new delivery models such as infrastructure utility and cloud computing. However, virtualization does take investment; the savings are not a given.”

The Next Big Thing

Dawson said that as virtualization matures, the next “big thing” will be automating the composition and management of the virtualized resources. Storage has already been virtualized, but primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures. Networking is also virtualized, and the next challenge is server virtualization.

Gartner estimates that approximately 90 percent of the server market is composed of x86 architecture servers. Based upon a traditional model of one application per server, however, roughly 80 percent to 90 percent of the x86 computing capacity remains unused at any time. Virtualization promises to unlock much of this underutilized capacity.

As such, many IT organizations are approaching server virtualization as a cost-saving measure. It is saving money, but organizations that have a mature server virtualization deployment in place are leveraging virtualization for much more: faster deployments, reduced downtime, disaster recovery, variable usage accounting and usage chargeback, holistic capacity planning and more.

On the Desktop

From a desktop perspective, hosted virtual desktops (HVDs) transfer the thick-client computing environment that runs on a PC to a server, removing some management overhead from the desktop location and allowing administrators to centralize their activities. This centralization allows IT to move some of the management activities that sit on a PC to a server, enabling administrators to manage desktops in a central location. While this enhances flexibility for administration, it does require more computing and storage capacity at the data center level.

“HVDs are poised to undergo explosive growth, and enterprises are anticipating the flexibility and other benefits that these devices will bring. HVDs provide end-user flexibility, efficiency, energy savings and other benefits, enabling administrators to manage desktops from a centralized location and end-users to access their desktops from machines in any location,” said Dawson. “However, enterprises need to understand the strain this technology can place on their data center infrastructures and operations, especially when thousands of employees use this platform type.”

Gartner analysts said virtualized licensing continues to present a major stumbling block to widespread adoption of virtualization. As vendors change their software pricing and associated license provisions to accommodate virtual use, negotiators must plan to spend an increased amount of time per contract to understand the effect of such changes on planned software use. Gartner believes that organizations that do not diligently monitor the ways each vendor is responding to virtual use issues are likely to experience significantly increased costs and the unintended impairment of their current license rights.