The potential of open source virtualisation for enterprises.By Max McLaren, Red Hat ANZ, General Manager.Open source is not for wimps. It has already penetrated the operating system and middleware layers of the IT infrastructure, and more recently, it has delivered compelling propositions for open virtualisation and cloud computing.As we enter a phase of economic recovery, open source offers organisations an alternative path to technological innovation that does not compromise their strategic IT goals. It enables users to leverage the latest, most robust standards-based software without the corresponding development investment. Leveraging open source cuts development costs while still delivering a robust product.Today, some of the most savvy technology users are embracing open source to meet their needs: from developing solutions faster, to reducing costs, to conserving energy and reducing maintenance. In doing so, they are applying open source in innovative ways to overcome data center challenges, avoid vendor lock-in and rediscover value.But, when it comes to virtualisation, it’s a different story. Businesses have been somewhat slow on the uptake and experts tell us that the minority, not the majority, of local organisations have adopted virtualisation – often only in non-mission critical areas or in development and test environments.The problem with this is that, particularly during times when cutting costs and saving jobs is high on the agenda, too many organisations are missing out on leveraging a technology that will help them drive capital and operational efficiencies in their data centers. The ability to create new systemsand services for competitive advantage, without having to install additional hardware, is a real incentive for firms to implement virtualisation strategies. Research firm Gartner identified virtualisation as top of the list when it came to strategic technologies in 2009, with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise.Being able to create virtualised disaster recovery environments assures organisations that they can sustain high availability in failover. What’s more, it can be achieved without the high costs of replicating identical hardware environments. For businesses, this translates into real cost savings. Equally compelling is the ability to create virtualised environments to test out different disaster scenarios at greatly lowered costs.In many cases performance, security, scalability and management issues are hindering the widespread deployment of virtualisation across the enterprise, with organisations looking for virtualisation solutions that are straightforward and which don’t require additional time and money investments to deploy and manage.Enter open source virtualisation – the enterprise has a choice.With a true alternative to VMware, data centers can take advantage of open source virtualisation that is integrated in the Linux operating system and delivers a slew of capabilities, which can be delivered to the CIO in a cost-effective manner. Virtualisation that is integrated into the operating system enables the same physical hardware to be used to host both the operating system as well as virtual machines, dramatically improving efficiency in the data center without compromising the performance of the bare metal applications.One step further along the path of virtualisation is the virtual desktop, which suggests the ability to deploy both Linux and Windows desktops in the enterprise.Enterprises will be able, for example, to have an inexpensive Linux thin client serving a Windows operating system or a Linux operating system from a remote server in the data center to users in the enterprise. This will resolve current management and scalability problems. Like server virtualisation, desktop virtualisation enables the consolidation of hardware resources and cost savings.But the greatest potential for exploiting virtualisation lies in cloud computing, which evolves from being able to have a dynamic, virtualised infrastructure.With virtualisation as its foundational technology, cloud computing offers a way to increase capacity or capabilities quickly, without having to invest in new infrastructure and new software licences. This, of course, diverts precious financial resources from capital expenditure to operational expenditure, which affords a more predictable and manageable cost structure. It also enables flexible, shared resource pools such as servers, storage and network connections.The potential for enterprise virtualisation – and in particular open source virtualisation – is undeniable. It’s already vital to today’s data centers, and in tomorrow’s operating systems it will simply be a standard feature, so the question is: how long can organisations afford to avoid it?