There’s no question, virtualization has matured nicely over the past few years. Recently, with data center battle-tested products like VMware, it has become a key enabling technology for an even broader scope of markets. For the data center and enterprise, the benefits of virtualization are numerous and obvious. The need for high availability platforms that scale on demand has paved the way for larger, application-aware and multiple OS capable architectures. In addition, server consolidation to provide efficiencies in power consumption, maintenance and other overhead costs, has become critical. There are lots of other areas where virtualization reduces costs and provides efficiencies, including cooling, application/OS testing and associated man hours, as well as reduced backup, security and OS software licensing fees. For many in the enterprise, virtualization is a virtual no-brainer. In fact, many current business models in IT wouldn’t even exist without virtualization today.

On the other end of the spectrum, the mainstream consumer or small business has been living in a “maintain and upgrade every 2-3 years” paradigm for a very long time for their generalized computing requirements. It has been only recently that the average consumer end-user has seen the benefits of virtualization technology but they are becoming more apparent here a well. Though perhaps it’s not the be-all, end-all of general computing, virtualization has shown its merits to an ever-increasing base of end-user types. Though some may claim that cloud computing and virtualization are different, there are many commonalities between what the enterprise and data center markets call virtualization and what end users have at their disposal now for online application, backup, and synching services. From MobileMe to Amazon’s EC2, virtualization has now officially gone mainstream and there’s no end in sight with its numerous application potential and extremely low cost model. Though the computing enthusiast or gadget freak may not be comfortable with a reality where all of their processing and storage resources are handled virtually, let’s face, the mainstream end user simply doesn’t have much use for all that hardware.

A few years from now, many end users will be comfortable with a simple netbook or a thin client as their desktop and then the rest of all that technology will reside in the cloud. In short, from the data center to the enterprise and now the end user, virtualization is here to stay and it’s not just for CIOs and Senior Technicians anymore.