Virtualisation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

New Zealand, one of the earliest adopting countries of virtualisation technologies, has turned a once foreign idea into a commodity. Infrastructure virtualisation has given way to desktop and application virtualisation; and as the foundation of the cloud, virtualisation opens the door to incredible new possibilities around mobility and user personalisation. IT Brief explores the history, present and future of virtualisation.ThenLooking back five years ago, x86 server virtualisation was an emerging technology, with adoption predominantly in the testing and development arenas. It is fair to say that the past five years have been predominantly about the virtualisation of infrastructure, driven by consolidation, and that it has taken time for the commercial benefits to be realised and accepted by the mainstream. Initially the technology was seen as too risky, compared to tried and tested physical deployment."When I started with VMware in 2006, we used to talk a lot about our role as ‘suspending disbelief’,” recalls Tim Dacombe-Bird, VMware’s New Zealand manager. "Customers were generally in a position of skepticism about virtualisation. But our customers have gone from a position of disbelief through acceptance, and finally to embracing virtualisation as their default position. Some of New Zealand’s largest companies adopted virtualisation technology quite early on, and we were able to leverage the success of those large customers, showing the way forward for the customers in disbelief by demonstrating the benefits of virtualisation.”Early naysayers questioned the security and reliability of virtualisation, and negative predictions spoke of job loss and reduced control. None of these has proven to be true. Instead, virtualisation has created a new ecosystem, through the development and change of IT skill sets in New Zealand. The number of companies specialising in virtualisation that have been started within the last five years have done much to increase the number of jobs available.The IT landscape in New Zealand is today vastly different than it was five years ago, both externally and inside the organisation. "The GFC drove some significant changes to the business scenarios organisations needed to plan for, which put plenty of pressure on IT. At the same time, technology and delivery options—read: virtualisation and cloud delivery models—gave IT significantly more options with which to deliver business outcomes,” says Craig Neilsen, NZ country manager for Red Hat. "Over the last five years, organisations have used virtualisation technologies to take big steps forward in terms of delivering computing, storage and network capabilities as pooled resources.”NowAccording to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualisation Tracker, released in April 2011, 19.4% of all new servers shipped in the fourth quarter of 2010 (4Q10) were virtualised, up from 18.4% in the fourth quarter of 2009. And after declining 4% year-over-year in 2009, new server shipments virtualised experienced 28% year-over-year growth for the full year 2010. Virtualised server end user spending increased 23.3% year-over-year in 4Q10 and 13.5% for all of 2010, reaching $16.8 billion for the year. And today, a year later, just fewer than 70% of New Zealand organisations have adopted some level of server virtualisation, says IDC Australia senior analyst, infrastructure group, Trevor Clarke.IBM, for example, is seeing that the majority of new server deployments are virtualised. Says Stephen Thomas, systems architect for IBM NZ: "We have seen widespread adoption of server virtualisation across large, medium and small enterprises in New Zealand, and in all environments. Server virtualisation is now the default deployment environment for the majority of applications. The primary driver for server virtualisation has been mainly to improve service levels and responsiveness to business requirements. Virtualised servers can be deployed quickly, enabling businesses to provision new services to their customers in a more timely fashion than with standalone servers.”There is an expectation, now, to see more integrated appliance-like solutions from the major server vendors, which will come pre-built with integrated virtualisation and management, to reduce deployment and management effort."As we see virtualisation spread its reach within an organisation and become more integral to how the organisation operates, it becomes more driven by the business itself. For example, with user-centric computing, it becomes the user who drives demand as people are influenced by the wide range and availability of new devices. This leads to what we are seeing today—the emergence of more user-centric application and desktop virtualisation,” explains Chris Lockery, enterprise relationship manager – Wellington, for Citrix Systems.The world is now witnessing the commoditisation of virtualisation, over a relatively short timeframe. No longer available only to oganisations with access to large budgets, it is now a mainstay for smaller businesses, as well, those that want and need to implement virtualisation with shorter payback periods.The future is cloudInformation technology research and advisory firm Gartner has made some bold predictions about the future of virtualisation and its partner, cloud computing. By 2013, says Gartner, the cloud computing market will be worth $150 billion. Indeed, Merrill Lynch research puts the figure at $160 by the same year.In just two years’ time, by 2014, Gartner estimates that 60% of server workloads will be virtualised worldwide. Just four years ago, the figure was a mere 12%.Additionally, research vice president for Gartner, Jennifer Wu, reports that server virtualisation is well established and will continue to supersede most (but not all) use of non-virtualised technologies in the next two to five years, increasing density and modularity of servers. In 2015, she writes, Gartner estimates that 20% of servers shipped will be running virtualisation, supporting 84% of workloads.New Zealand is, in many ways, a leading country in terms of virtualisation maturity. "This implies that there is significant operational maturity in terms of buildingand running private cloud infrastructure,” says Red Hat’s Neilsen. "As UFB delivers more capacity to New Zealand businesses and consumers, businesses are likely to be well positioned to leverage more cloud offerings in the future.”While cloud computing has been part of the IT landscape for more than a decade, its meteoric rise can be tied directly to the widespread adoption of virtualisation technologies. Cloud is relevant and affordable, even to the SMB business market, which happens to be the largest growing segment in cloud computing today."Cloud computing is, without a doubt, the hottest thing in IT,” says VMware’s Dacombe-Bird. "Customers are leveraging their virtualisation infrastructure to gain the benefits of the cloud, including elasticity, scalability, disaster recovery, resilience and security. Virtualisation is the engine powering the cloud, and Kiwi customers have a great head start due to their existing virtualisation deployments.”"In the next one to five years,” predicts Citrix Systems’ Lockery, "we will be seeing more cloud convergence, bringing together not just public and private clouds, but personal clouds too. These clouds will be delivering personal applications, desktops and users’ personalities, and driving initiatives like BYOD. The idea of cloud-bursting, in which an application in the private cloud bursts into public or consumer cloud services when capacity is high, will become more mainstream.”A business virtualising their workload into the cloud has multiple benefits. For one, virtualisation has driven solid disaster recovery capabilities and improved services by enabling companies to respond quickly to unplanned situations. Companies who have virtualised and enabled cloud services can recover systems and resume productivity more rapidly than was previously possible.Ultimately, virtualisation has been a positive for New Zealand businesses. "New Zealand is not a rich country,” observes VMware’s Dacombe-Bird. "We don’t have the ability to keep throwing money at problems. Therefore, when something new and efficient comes to the market, such as virtualisation, New Zealanders are quick to adopt it. It’s about finding better ways to do things."