Virtualization’s definition broadens, and so do management technologies

VMBlog's David Marshall has begun a series titled "Prediction 2009: The future of Virtualization" and has been polling industry representatives on their perspectives.

In my contribution to the series I believe that during 2009, we will see the market for virtualization finally evolve. It will expand from the current myopic perspective of hardware virtualization to include realizations that:

• There are many types of hardware and OS virtualization, each appropriate for different uses and environments
• For true flexibility, IT operations will also need to leverage virtualization of I/O, networks and storage.

Ergo, we'll see many more attempts to orchestrate infrastructure, chasing Egenera's approach where the underlying HW, Network, I/O and storge is part of a highly-reliable fabric -- on top of which virtualization (or, simply native HW/SW) can be placed.