The term “virtualization” has been applied to many different aspects and scopes of computing--from entire computer systems to individual capabilities or components. The common theme of all virtualization technologies is the hiding of technical detail. Virtualization can make a single physical resource--such as a server, operating system or storage device--appear to function as multiple resources. Or it can make multiple physical resources appear as a single resource.

According to VMware, the leader in virtual infrastructure software, virtualization is an abstraction layer that allows multiple virtual machines with heterogeneous operating systems to run in isolation, side by side on the same physical machine. A definition I like more is: Virtualization is a framework or methodology of dividing the resources of a computer, a component or a cluster of computers into multiple independent environments.

Common uses of virtualization today include: server consolidation as a way to contain the growth of the server farms; legacy application re-hosting; rapid infrastructure provisioning; form-centric applications, like call centers; and enterprise desktops.

While many of these components are changing, the bleeding-edge activities are happening in a couple of these areas. As such, we will focus on the future of the hardware platform, and on the access device.

Although server virtualization is gaining momentum among commercial and governmental agencies for consolidating servers and data centers, it is only one layer of the technology. It can be applied across applications, desktop PCs, storage systems, network infrastructure and servers.

The technology industry is moving away from the physical into the virtual. The future of this industry is looking to build not just a better machine, but rather to take a better machine and make the software solutions it employs do so much more that the machine acts as if it’s more than the machine.

Virtualization is among the biggest ideas that will drive the future of computing in all areas. Cell phones, PDAs, desktop machines, servers and new appliances that haven’t even been conceived of yet will be driven almost entirely by virtualization.

The concept of virtualization is beginning to cross over to software. The possibilities that are enabled by virtualization hardware are becoming ubiquitous. Very few forward-thinking software designs today do not include the idea of support for virtualization. In many computer applications, there will be ways to increase performance through virtualization. If it’s a resource-intensive application, there will be support allowing the hardware to work cooperatively with multiple virtualized operating systems, which in turn work cooperatively with one another to share that resource.

It will even extend to networks, where we see bleeding-edge users who use “virtual local-area networks,” but on its wide-area network, it is implemented using Multiprotocol Label Switching (MLPS), which is not advertised as a virtualization technology but gives capacity on demand.

So what will the virtualized machines of tomorrow look like? Over time, we’ll be seeing an evolution away from the specific and into the generic. We’ll see the rigidity of hardware replaced by software protocols on very diverse platforms. Devices that today gain their high speed through direct, proprietary couplings in hardware will be supplanted by devices that gain extreme flexibility and far greater utility via the use of software protocols operating across high-speed open-source communication technologies. We will see virtualization take advantage of the wave of multi-core processors now being offered. We’ll see new approaches that dedicate each core of a processor to running its own operating system and clusters of these cores.

The future of virtualization will closely mimic the biological process and the tenets of Reed’s Law. The impact of the machine/device won’t be in its high speed alone. It will be in what can be done, and the flexibility provided for in software-based communication and collaboration will be the key components for the success of tomorrow’s hardware.

The Bleeding Edge: Virtualization