The first generation of virtualization has really focused on decreasing the hardware footprint required by IT staff.  However, the lasting value from virtualization will not be savings from hardware, but the savings from manageability and other higher level features.  Virtualization is already pretty good for a single user – both VMware and Hyper-V are very easy to use for an individual and can probably address most real needs there.  However, there are tremendous opportunities to save real time and money by making it easier to manage groups of VMs across an entire enterprise.

This has certainly been the talk of the industry for a while, focusing on management tools above and beyond the VMM itself.  To a large part, this a response to open source VMMs (like Xen or KVM) and free VMMs (like Hyper-V). If the VMM is free, then vendors must somehow make money elsewhere in the
stack – for Microsoft and Linux vendors, it’s obvious how this works, but VMWare is clearly driving to differentiate in other ways.  Products from VMware are looking at high-availability, disaster recovery and backup as ways to add value by bringing formerly high-end server features to standard x86.

To some extent this creates a bit of tension though.  One of the reasons why virtualization is necessary is that modern operating systems have grown incredibly large and perform a lot of complex and non-essential work inside the kernel.  This additional complexity can result in instability and security vulnerabilities.  For VMMs to really add value, they need to stay lean (like VMware ESXi – which can be as small as 32MB) and avoid the temptation to throw in every feature and the kitchen sink.  That just will result in another bloated software layer – and then someone will come along and try to put yet another layer of indirection beneath the VMM, or perhaps remove the VMM entirely!

This obviously creates an interesting paradox as virtualization vendors will have to tread a fine line between adding features and compactness and efficiency.  Perhaps one area that has yet to see a lot of overlap with
virtualization, but is a natural candidate is security.

Security and virtualization are fundamentally very similar.  Virtualization focuses on ensuring that multiple operating systems ‘play nice together’ and share the same hardware safely.  To some extent, security is one aspect of ’working well together’.  It’s easy to imagine how virtualization could improves security – high risk activities, such as browsing the web, file sharing, etc. could all be done in one VM (with limited access to data), while more important and secure activities (taxes, peresonal documents) could reside in another VM. Of course, this assumes that the VMMs don’t inherit some of the existing security vulnerabilities – which would be yet another reason to keep a VMM slim and compact.

These are just some thoughts on how virtualization might evolve over the coming years, but here’s an opportunity for you to chime in.  How would you like to see virtualization evolve?