Virtualization technology has made great strides in allowing the creation of the next generation of efficient, easily manageable, highly available, and dynamic data centers. Future developments in virtualization as a technology, the processes involved and hardware technology employed will be impressive and ground-breaking.

Desktop virtualization is a very hot topic these days as companies try to get even more efficient and consolidate resources, make better use of IT administrative hours and deploy desktops based on the needs of individual department tasks and computing requirements. Virtual desktops can be maintained centrally and are versatile when it comes to the end user access. The same virtual desktop used within the building can be accessed remotely.

Virtualization will be explored as an option in areas previously not considered feasible. Cell phone companies are already investigating its applicability in providing multiple phone environments on the same hardware. In the future you could choose your handset and then specify whether you wanted blackberry OS, Windows Mobile, or both.

A different mindset will have to be embraced to fully make use of the benefits inherent in virtualization. Steps normally applied to the flow of a project will either be shortened or removed all together. The use of virtualization will continue to spur increased ingenuity as the path from concept to testing, to production, is greatly shortened when virtual environments can be rolled out within minutes. When you remove the step of having to acquire physical computing assets before you can test your ideas, you take a great chunk of time and budgetary needs out of the equation towards the quest for a refined business solution.

Hardware technology will better enable the use of virtualization as components and will be designed to better facilitate the virtualization process, hypervisor, and interaction of data I/O between the software and physical layers. Advancements are already being made in these areas that will revolutionize the way data is accessed and manipulated. In the future I can see servers being purchased with the hypervisor already included in firmware, which will then be easily updated and managed with an even smaller foot print.

The future of virtualization means a refinement in the way people interact with technology and above all, better efficiency on all levels.

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.

Is there something IT professionals can do that has the potential of addressing this triple threat of social, economic and environmental ills? The answer could be virtualization. Proven technologies that allow a single server to take on a variety of unrelated tasks that would normally require the use of multiple dedicated servers offer some obvious benefits in the areas of cost savings and efficiency. Can those benefits also translate into improved fiscal performance, reduced consumption of energy resources and a lower carbon footprint? The consensus seems to be in the affirmative.

In fact, these are among the reasons Gartner Group recently anointed virtualization as the No. 1 strategic technology for 2009, topping trendier tech topics such as Business Intelligence (#2), Cloud Computing (#3), Green IT (#4), and Unified Communications (#5). In his blog on the unveiling of this year’s Top 10 list, Gartner’s David Cearly cited virtualization’s “significant potential to reduce IT costs” as the primary business driver, noting that widespread IT belt-tightening in 2009 would prompt popular server virtualization technologies to be augmented by an uptick in virtualization techniques applied to storage and client devices.

Next to the promise of cost reduction, energy savings is among the biggest perceived benefits of virtualization. A study performed last spring by independent Washington, D.C.-based research firm KRC Research asked 205 IT decision makers in the retail industry to name their reasons for deploying virtualization in their data centers. Thirty-one percent pointed to energy savings as a major factor in their decision. According to the authors of the report, “The rising awareness of ‘green’ energy initiatives, as well as the increasing power required to run and cool data centers, likely factored into this response.”

So can making each server do the work of several actually reduce a business’ impact on the environment, as well? According to a recent McKinsey report, data centers contribute a substantial amount of greenhouse gases – potentially climbing to a whopping 1.54 metric gigatons by the year 2020, which is 3 percent of all emissions. “The fastest-increasing contributor to emissions will be growth in the number and size of data centers, whose carbon footprint will rise more than fivefold between 2002 and 2020 as organizations in all sectors add servers to meet rising demand,” the report states. Virtualization is one of the primary tools businesses have for reducing data center sprawl and its accompanying carbon footprint.

Given the current economic climate, as well as the new priorities that are expected to be ushered in by the next administration, companies that are “lean, mean and green” will be the most likely to survive and prosper in the year ahead. Organizations that have not yet deployed virtualization need to take a long, hard look at the technology and assess what it can do — not only for their bottom line, but for their country, and even their world.