I recently had the opportunity to participate in a live Webcast focusing on The ROI of Virtualization, along with representatives from Intel and IBM. We had a lively discussion on the subject. The webcast is still available as an archive, if you’d like to check it out.

As usual, my favorite part of the event was at the end, where my co-presenters and I finish with our prepared remarks and take questions from the audience. I also had a few questions of my own. One of the most interesting points was regarding new innovations in hardware and software design, and where that will be taking the next generation of virtualization technology. I asked my copresenters – Bob Zuber, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager from IBM, and RK Hiremane, Senior Product Marketing Engineer from Intel “to outline some of those future directions that they see their respective companies pursuing. Here is a short excerpt from that Q&A:

Steve: What do you see in the future, what types of innovations can we expect, to help us achieve even greater efficiencies through virtualization?

RK: I think today, “virtualization 2.0 is becoming very important, based on the principles of consolidation and so forth. As we go forward, as many of the analysts have predicted, this is going to lead to further automation, and we believe it will lead to more service-oriented, policy-driven automation of the data center, and better efficiencies of the data center.

Bob: From a policy point of view, there will be certain things we look at from a power point of view. You may have workloads that are more performance-oriented or more energy-conservative, so you may have policies that say, “I want to direct that workload to the most appropriate platform to get the job done, in the most efficient manner. Today, when you look at power supplies, memory DIMMs, processors — you may come back and say, for this type of workload, I’m not going to have the ultimate performance from a processor point of view, but have better wattage from that point of view. You may forego and sacrifice certain attributes, and being able to have that policy director understand the underlying hardware attributes to direct the workload, that’s the promising piece that we see and the most exciting. It’s all about that automation and how we automatically move things around, but more importantly, how does a hardware provider build the most efficient piece of hardware that addresses a certain type of workload, but then likewise, can be adaptable to change, as the customer demands change, but from a workload perspective.

This is just one example of what you might call “virtualization 3.0, or the next generation of a technology that is already gaining a major foothold in corporate data centers. Since much of the appeal today is driven by cost and energy efficiencies, the policy-driven automation built into the coming generation of virtualization solutions will address those issues directly, and compound the savings.

From where I sit, that looks pretty promising. Is there a downside? I suppose extra processing power to automatically determine where to direct each task, bouncing it between machines that are more processor-intensive or more energy efficient, could potentially add to the overhead in the hypervisor, and adversely effect performance. As with anything, it’s all in the execution. If it’s implemented skillfully, there should be no discernible performance hit.

What do you think about new virtualized servers that think for themselves, and route workloads according to their own interpretations of the policies we set. Is it IT utopia at last?