Intel Showcases Virtualization Technology At Forum

At this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the company and its partners are trotting out numerous solutions designed around the show's multicore theme. But if there's a secondary motif for the show: the emergence of virtualization technologies.

Intel is showcasing its Virtualization Technology (VT) in a number of presentations, and on Wednesday the company staged a panel discussion with some of its partners about the benefits and potential growth of VT.

To this point, virtualization has been used primarily in enterprise servers as a way to lower IT management costs and distribute workloads without sacrificing performance. The first "killer app" has been IT managers' using virtualization to consolidate an organization's servers.

"Virtualization is a better way of deploying management systems, and it's a matter of when, not if, most or all platforms are running some form of virtualization," said panelist Karthik Rau, director of product management for VMWare. "We currently have about 10,000 enterprise-server customers, and about 10 percent of all new workloads are getting virtualized, with the number expected to grow quickly, with the number expected to grow quickly."

Virtualization's advantage is that it shortens crisis response time and saves money when problems do arise. It also enables emerging technologies, such as grid computing and parallelism.

"It enables us to create more robust platforms that can keep systems up and running and recover quicker when there is a problem," said Lee Highsmith, program manager for Lenovo's ThinkVantage Technologies division.

Despite the focus so far on enterprise servers, all the panelists agreed that virtualization will be deployed by all users eventually, including consumers, though they may not realize it.

"There's a better case right now for virtualization in the server space, but we do expect it to eventually have a much broader role across the whole ecosystem," said Mike Neil, product unit manager for Windows virtualization at Microsoft. "Users shouldn't know they're dealing with virtual-machine technology. Today it's targeted at enterprise customers who can deal with a certain amount of complexity, but moving forward we want to make sure that complexity is masked."

He said Microsoft's virtualization technology, known as HyperVisor, does not yet have a release date, but that it should roughly coincide with the rollout of the Longhorn operating system. "We have to be very careful because we're literally building a new foundation for Windows," he said. "It takes time for that to occur, but we're sure customers will be very happy with it."

Among the hurdles virtualization will have to clear before it disseminates broadly is alleviating any security concerns, but even that could become one of its strongest selling points.

"Security is an obvious part of any architecture, but that wouldn't be visible to the user because virtualization gives an IT department the leverage to solve problems without swapping out machines," Highsmith said. "The average cost of a desk-side IT visit is about $180, so you don't have to have very many of those to save a lot of money. Every time a user can recover automatically it yields significant benefits to an IT staff."